Shift work: Learning to love our offbeat schedules
My fiancé is a police officer. The biggest hurdle this job presents to us as a couple is the schedule. He works afternoon shift and his “weekend” is Wednesday and Thursday. I work a regular daytime Monday through Friday job. After a few years of living together we’ve worked out a happy situation and even found positives in the shift work shuffle.
Living with my partner isn’t like living with a roommate
The other day when my boyfriend was at work, I texted him to say “I’m exhausted and I just want to warn you that the dishes aren’t done. I’ll get to them tomorrow first thing.”
His response: “I hate to tell you this, love, but you’re an adult now. You can do the dishes whenever you want!”
My reaction in my mind: “Not true. I have a responsibility to my roommate to maintain this house in the way that I would want to live in it.” Then I caught myself and thought for a minute. Does living with your partner mean that maybe, just maybe, the entire home is now under our shared dominion? And that, within reason, I can decide what gets done when, just like he can? I still wasn’t sure.
Childhood Home loss: how can I help make it better?
My fiance and I just moved into our own apartment and I am elated. We have, in our almost seven years together, never had our own place before. But my fiance is having a hard time dealing with the move, as the house we just moved out of was the one he was literally born in. Can anyone help with suggestions of how to make him feel welcome and happy in our new home, and not feel like he just lost his entire childhood?
Gamers need lovin’ too!: How to love and live with a Gamer
My husband is a gamer. Not a random “whenever I’m feelin’ it” kind of thing, but a serious GAMER. I, on the other hand, am most assuredly not. I know we can’t be the only couple out here like this. It’s inevitable in this day and age of gaming there are multitudes of gamer/non-gamer couples. Yet every single person I know has asked me at least once “How does that even work? If he’s always on [insert game here] how is your relationship not suffering?!” Well, there are some very decidedly nice perks about gamers…
My best friends are from the internet
We live in a world where online dating is becoming increasingly mainstream (Match.com recently funded a study that showed one-in-five relationships now start online) but somehow, finding friends online is still seen as abnormal. And that, to put it eloquently, is really dumb.
How I live with my crafty person
I am the husband of a crafty person. I believe there should be a support group for that.
Our house is a tornado of crafts. I’m constantly finding needles and pins with bare feet. The floor is riddled with beads and string. The cabinets are full of fabric. Her Pinterest has no cohesive theme and both Netflix and Youtube have no idea what to recommend to us.
Don’t get me wrong: my wife is a wonderful person. She is smart, eccentric, and immensely creative. She funnels most of that creativity into crafting, and that when our adventure begins.
The agony of sleeping together when you have insomnia (and my Ozzie and Harriet solution)
I’m an insomniac. The kind where I’ve occasionally laid in bed actually crying because I want to sleep so, so badly. And now I have a fiance. Being an insomniac is bad enough. Being an insomniac in love with a good sleeper is its own special kind of torture. But I might have come up with a solution…
How can I start talking to my partner about opening our relationship?
I’ve been dating my wonderful boyfriend for six years and I love him very much. Over the last year though, I’ve started to change my beliefs on monogamy and have read quite a few books on polyamory (Including Opening Up: A Guide to Creating and Sustaining Open Relationships). I really feel like it’s a lifestyle I would like to pursue in some form, but including my current boyfriend. I’ve tried to ease into the subject with my boyfriend in the least threatening way I can think of (only relationships with other women, I’ve never mentioned other men), but he gets defensive and shuts the conversation down. How can we talk about this?