Les moitiés

- The Halves -

Sometimes I wonder if being in a couple for so long has not somehow hindered Hubby and I's capacity to properly function in a social context.

It's like we've been two halves of a whole for such a long time that the stitches that keep his half stuck to my half seem to have eroded with time and blended back into the skin until the part where he ends and where I begin is now kind of blurry. I know this sounds really romantic and all but for this particular blog post let's pretend it's not.

Because sometimes not being able to remember how to act as an individual can get pretty frustrating.

For ages, a friend of mine has been texting me every other week to get together and go for drinks. Although she's met Hubby and likes him well, the underlying message is clear: the invitation is for a girly get together, without the boys, to talk gossip and diets and fashion and Kate Middleton and all other vomit-inducing-topics for the male species.

I am ashamed to admit that I've been ducking her texts.

Not because I don't like her or the prospect of talking gossip and fashion. I do, both. But I don't trust that half of our whole going out there into the world by herself and embarrassing us both. Or worse yet. Being unable to hide what she most obviously is: only a half.

Because I know what will happen when I go meet my friend. Undoubtedly after all the easy fun chatting about shoes and celebrities is up and done away with and we're down to the nitty gritty of catching up, at some point I will flip into "half" mode. I'll either say something completely irrelevant or stupid or incomprehensible (or all three) assuming that my listener will understand what I mean because I'm used to him knowing how to decipher my scrambled mind. But she wont, and sooner or later she'll give me the look you give someone crazy... or pathetic. Or else I'll spend the evening starting every other sentence with the words "when Hubby and I..." or "Hubby says...." or "I told Hubby the other day..." until it is clear to my friend that the bubble that Hubby and I live in is painfully boring and hermetic and it basically involves no one else but us two.

And that's the thing. She'll be probably right.

Hubby also seems to suffer from this condition although in a different manner. He'll be out with the guys but will always be the first to leave. The one to be way less drunk than the rest. The one to always talk about his wife while the others roll their eyes and try to drop the subject of significant others. It's like his half can function by itself, but his heart is not really into it.

I had never really thought about the implications of this "isolation" while we were living in France. Maybe because social encounters were mainly with other friends in couples. Or maybe because they often implied meeting up at home so the presence of the other didn't raise any issues since you are entitled to hang out in the apartment you pay half the rent of.

But living in London is different. People here meet up for drinks all the time, catch up at the pub or after work for a "quick one before going home" and finding yourself in one-on-one meet-ups is much more common than in Paris.

The scary thing is that our inability to function naturally on our own doesn't only apply when we go out there on our separate ways. It happens to us as well when we are together while we are among others.

Take traveling for example. Hubby and I are so used to each other, so in sync with each other's traveling habits that we don't even have to map out what we want to do or see on a trip or how we want to do it. My steps will automatically follow his to the highest point in any city without me even noticing and he will absentmindedly point me towards the history and art museums before I even having to ask which way we need to turn.

Recently we took a long weekend trip to Scotland with our good friends Kyle and Seba. And for the first time since I can remember we were confronted with the reality of having to consider someone else's opinion. Where both of us would have silently and automatically turned left without a second thought, suddenly we had to stop and make sure that left worked for them as well. We suddenly had to consider someone else's wants and needs. And voice our own out loud. It was a strange realization.

And that's when it hit me, how amazingly selfish our little bubble had become. That's where I truly began worrying that Hubby and I being too close might be irreparably damaging us from being able to function naturally as individuals in the world outside of the bubble.

Luckily for us Kyle and Seba are awesome (both individually and as a couple) and are just in sync and in their own little bubble like us. So funny enough, it felt like it was only two individuals instead of four that were having to negotiate "terms and conditions" during the trip and thankfully "those two" got along well, so in the end we all had a fabulous time.

But I do still worry as a general matter. What if we've lost that connection with the world on an individual level? What if we are too far gone to be Fned, period. Hubby, period. ever again? What if I can never go back to that level of comfortableness with people without having to have Hubby holding my hand and vice versa?

Photo: "The Whole" by Kyle Hepp

Fned.