Wednesday, October 10, 2018

Marital Meetings: My Brilliant Idea



Dear George,

Katja and I seem to be in a state of lethargy.  We’ve started our OLLI courses at the university, but, aside from that, we haven’t managed to go anywhere or do anything for some time.  I’m worried that this time is going to slip by and we won’t have done anything.  

Given that we have been married for 58 years, this inaction probably isn’t too surprising.  For my senior paper at Antioch as a Psychology major, I wrote about research on interpersonal communication.  I don’t remember too much about my paper, but one study has stood out in my mind all these years.  Researchers somewhere — I think in the northeast — placed microphones in every room in middle class married couples homes that were activated every time that anyone talked.  They discovered that, on average, married couples talked to one another about six minutes a day.  I can’t remember for sure whether they used years of marriage as a variable or not, but my vague sense is that, the longer the marriage, the less the talk.  (I did run across a recent British study that found that couples married fifty years or more only talked three minutes per hour while dining together at a restaurant.)   

I’d like to believe that Katja and I talk more than five minutes a day, but I wouldn’t be willing to bet money on it.  We’ve pretty much staked out different parts of the house as our territories.  Katja owns the kitchen, the living room, the dining room, the den, and the bedroom, where she’s busy either doing tasks, watching TV, or napping.  I spend most of my time in our two rooms that have computers — our son J’s former bedroom and what I affectionately refer to as my junk room.  We do get together for one or two meals a day, but Katja usually does a Jumble while I work on a Sudoku puzzle or read the depressing New York Times editorials.  

The other day I came up with an idea that marriages can be rejuvenated by having “Marital Meetings”.  I got this idea while watching a trailer for a TV sitcom where the mother told the kids to get ready for the family meeting.  I guess family meetings are pretty common.  I don’t know if anybody’s ever thought of a marital meeting before, but it seems like a logical extension.  I haven’t told Katja about this yet, but I have been mentally working on this idea.  The mission would be to improve our marriage by actually talking to one another.  Marital meetings could be done more frequently or less, of course, but I think a weekly meeting would be about right.  It would be good to have it for a fixed time.  Right now I’m thinking of 7:30 on Sunday night.  We’ll have had dinner and a glass of wine.  We’d be excited because it’s just before The Durrells on Corfu on PBS.  That means we would need to stop by 8:00.  I think that should be plenty.  

All committee meetings have to have a leader, and this would be true of marital meetings too.  Perhaps we’ll have an election.  Katja’s much more talkative than I, so perhaps she should be the leader.  On the other hand, it might be sensible for the quieter partner to have that job.  In any case, we’ll work that out.  The leader, of course, is responsible for compiling an agenda.  Both persons can contribute, and this should be done in advance of the meeting and publicly announced, perhaps by posting it on the refrigerator.  Some agenda items that I already have in mind: going over the local recycling rules; agreeing that the thermostat ought to be set at 73 for air conditioning; discussing of why we aren’t going camping any more; cancelling all the store catalogs that come in the mail; not watching the shopping channel on TV, etc.  I’m sure these topics would all be of mutual interest, and Katja is likely to have some other ideas of her own.  

The only time that I’ve ever done anything close to a marital meeting was when I was a teenager and my father ordered my mother to hold weekly meetings with my brother Steven and I to discuss how we could get along without killing each other.  Actually I hated these meetings, and I tried to say as little as I possibly could.  My mother said that if we kept fighting all the time (or maybe she said if I kept torturing my brother all the time) we would never like one another as adults.  This, of course, did not prove to be true.  But, even though these youthful family meetings were a bust, I’m still hopeful about the prospects of marital meetings.  We are, after all, more mature (or at least I think we are).   I plan to mention this idea to Katja next week.  I think she’ll be enthusiastic.  If it works out, I will get back to you with a report.

Love,
Dave




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