Tolerance

I can hear the TV in the kitchen. Not enough to understand the words but well enough to know my wife is watching or was watching the morning news and commentary. 

For years we have been locked into an old couple ritual of watching the morning news together as we sip coffee from favorite cups, take our ever increasing regimen of pills, and decide whether or not the significant other is worthy of conversation this AM. 

Most days we agree the worth is there. So we'll discuss the madness that makes up the back ground noise in our lives. It will usually be a hot topic currently on the tube being swatted around a table by talking heads. If it is football season, we more often gravitate to talking about the New England Patriots and their prospects to make the play offs. Or we might share some local gossip, but that would be rare. Neither of us are inclined towards gossip mining nor are we regular purveyors of the unseemly and unlucky events in our town. Morning is when my wife and I talk the most. 

Yet, there have been some silent mornings in the last forty one years. Neither of us allowed them to go nuclear. Seldom any heated rhetoric. At worst, usually just snark and nasty inflection. And if one of us was really pissed, absenting the room in a huff would end it.

For my part, I treat disagreement with BA in a passive aggressive way I guess. My childhood was spent watching parents who would drop civility in an instant, cue up their nastiest rhetoric and try to beat the other into submission. I was eight when I decided they had to resolve their issues this way. It almost became bearable after that. I vowed to never do that in my own family. And I haven't.

I am not so naive I would say that the way we argue is responsible for our marriage lasting so long. I cannot even say our way of resolving conflict has been good for our marriage. It is how it has settled out. 

I will say though, sharing my life with someone for so long has been wonderful in spite of all the dumassery I inflicted on it.  I have come to a conclusion at just shy of forty one years with the same woman, a major cornerstone of our long marriage has been Tolerance, with my wife bearing the brunt of it. 

And that is what I was thinking about this morning.

Keep it 'tween the ditches ...................................