Love with a Chance of Drowning by Torre DeRoche

Author:Torre DeRoche
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography / General
ISBN: 9781401342913
Publisher: Hyperion
Published: 2013-05-13T21:00:00+00:00

Since we’re coexisting fulltime in a space smaller than most standard-sized bedrooms, our arguments need to resolve quickly. All our waking hours are spent in each other’s company and, at night, we crush together in a small bed, our bodies tightly pressed, intimate with each other’s sweat and breathing and heartbeats. We never fight over whose turn it is to do the dishes, make the bed, or rinse the decks with buckets of salt water. Chores get done without arguments because we’ve developed a natural rhythm for these things. When the boat arrives into a new anchorage, we begin an organized dance of securing, tidying, and coiling. Petty disagreements would only throw off our steps.

When I announced my sailing plans to friends in San Francisco, a colleague confessed that if she were stuck on a boat with her fiancé, chances are, she’d push him overboard. While insisting that she loved him dearly, she declared that being stuck on a boat with her betrothed all day was not a romantic fantasy, but her personal idea of hell. I couldn’t help but wonder why she was intending to marry a man whom she couldn’t stand to be alone with.

But perhaps her feelings were not so unusual. I once read researched statistics that found that average couples spend around two and a half waking hours together per day (including weekends). The majority of this time is spent watching TV, doing housework, and eating, meaning that even the measly one-on-one time is shared partaking in tasks either practical or distracting. One would assume that the figure for retirees would skyrocket, yet somehow these couples still avoid each other for all but four hours per day, on average.

Ivan and I spend every waking hour together: around fourteen hours per day, or thirteen if we apportion a generous amount of time to toilet breaks. Occasionally we go about our own individual tasks: I may write on my laptop inside while Ivan writes in his journal ten feet away outside, but it’s impossible for us to be more than thirty-two feet apart at any given time. In other words, for twenty-four hours per day, seven days per week, we’re close enough to hear each other’s sneezes and farts.

In six months, we’ve already clocked in more than two years of “average relationship” one-on-one time together. By the end of the year, we’ll have essentially been married for five years in “land time.”

But unlike a normal marital environment, we don’t have the luxury of escaping behind a slammed door if an argument fires up or the tension mounts. There’s no room for a private cry in the bath, a venting phone call to a friend, or a temporary escape into the world of sports. Amazing Grace doesn’t have the space to host disagreements.

Instead, our differences need to be worked through regularly, treated in the same way that one might iron the laundry: carefully tending to each problem, pushing out the wrinkles and folding it all away in a neat, resolved pile.

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