As I am a rather “artsy-fartsy” girl and my husband is an engineer, it is not surprising that we have very different communication styles:
-he enjoys finding ways to turn everyday situations into helpful, instructive math problems; I enjoy finding ways to turn everyday situations into sarcastic, snark-laden posts for my blog which allow for the frequent use of words like “ass” and “bongjillion”, as well as the breaking of every grammar rule known to man.
-he describes his world in precise, easy to understand terms like, “My ear hurts.”; I am incapable of communicating without the assistance of exaggeration and hyperbole as in, “There is a monkey drumming through my eardrum with a nail that has been heated to the white-hot intensity of a thousand suns!”
-I view everything in life as either the best, most amazing thing EVER! or the worst possible travesty ever to be inflicted upon mankind for which someone deserves to DIE!; the most common level of emotional reaction to a situation to which he is willing to commit is, “perhaps”.
So needless to say, we’ve had to work to find some common communication ground.
Through some unfortunate trial and error my husband has learned that if I ever send him the following text message:
I HATE EVERYONE AND EVERYTHING!
that he must drop whatever he is doing and perform an immediate intervention, so as to prevent me from sending a piece of our electronic equipment to its fiery doom.
However we have managed to find one area of mutual understanding and that area is, of course, the scale by which we determine The Urgency Of Our Need To Pee, as measured in Units Of Riley.
Riley is my in-laws’ little Cairn Terrier, and he is famous in the family both for the amount of pee he can contain within his tiny, canine body, as well as the intensity with which he can release it. And so being the kind of people that we are, people who notice the random, goofy crap that most people miss, people who like to bring up private, bodily functions in everyday conversation so as to horrify our mothers, we naturally took advantage of Riley’s urinary prowess and coined the phrase, “peeing like Riley”.
And so, while we may differ on which is the preferred political party, and we may disagree on whether or not women should be allowed to be priests, and we may be worlds apart when it comes to deciding whether a given song should be classified as “country” or “Southern rock”, when one or the other of us proclaims,
“Dude! I’ve gotta pee like 5 Rileys!”
Our minds are one.
Sounds like you may have more in common than you realize with psychic medium Alison Dubois. She is the real-life woman on whom the American tv program Medium is based. Her tv story husband is an aerospace engineer, who slowly comes to believe what his wife tells him just might be true. The couple may not always see eye-to-eye, but one is certainly more traditionally ‘scientific’ than the other…