I met a new couple the other week through friends of friends and I’ve been hanging out with them and getting to know them. Both of the people in the couple are user experience designers/technologists/product managers and they are both incredibly analytical system thinkers.
I just learned the other day that, when they have fights with each other, at some point the whiteboards come out so they can start documenting the various sub fights as it pertains to the main fight. Also, after the fight, they conduct fight post-mortems to determine what in the fight went well and what learnings they could use to improve future fights. Apparently it works well for them and they seem in a very happy and committed relationship (although they were also prepared to give me a detailed pros & cons list of how their approach compares to other, more standard approach of having a fight).
That was by far the best example of “Holy shit, I’m so glad you guys found each other because your individual quirks mesh so seamlessly together” examples I’ve found thus far. What are some of your favorite stories of people who would have a hard time coupled with anybody else but managed to find the EXACT right person to be in a relationship with?
I work with a guy who, at one point, was someone I’d have to call up at 2am when I was alerted to problems at the plant, to work out a solution to implement. He’d make fun of me for making up charts to summarize everything, and I’d make fun of him for pulling up process trends tracking ~100 data tags. So we worked well together.
One late, late night I had to call him up at ~3am and we’re going over the problem, when suddenly he says:
“Hey, pull up that trend from yesterday!” me: I already have that one up.
“No, not you; my wife. Pull up that trend!” me: … are you telling me you just woke up your wife at 3am to run computer trends while you’re on the phone with me?
“Yeah. Don’t worry, she knows how; I had a couple of training sessions for her and the kids.”
I’ve only met his wife on a few occasions. She seemed a lovely woman. I had no idea she was as barking mad as he is.
In my wife’s home town, everyone says it’s a good thing her aunt and uncle married each other instead of fucking up two families but I’m not sure that’s what you had in mind.
I grew up in a university neighborhood surrounded by lots of highly-educated but not always practical people. I’ll call this couple Tom and Sue. Tom, a Physics professor, wanted to teach his wife, Sue, a Linguistics professor, how to ride a bicycle. Sue was not even remotely athletically inclined and the acquisition of the bike riding skill was a slow and laborious process. When Tom finally felt Sue could stay upright long enough, they went for a ride, Tom in front and Sue following. After a while, it occured to Tom he couldn’t hear Sue behind him anymore. He stopped and turned around and couldn’t see her anywhere. About a block back, Sue had wobbled off into a drainage ditch along the side of the road. Most folks would have yelled for help. But not Sue. She lay in the ditch under her bicycle, quietly engaged in thinking through a solution for extricating herself, discarding one theory after another until she arrived at something workable. Tom, in the meantime, rather than calling out for Sue, simply waited quietly for her to reappear. In all, the extrication process and Sue making her wobbly way forward to find Tom took about 45 mins.
Upon their return home, my father saw Sue looking much worse for the wear and asked if anything had gone wrong. Tom told him that no, everything was fine, that they had experienced a small logistics issue.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge once said that it was very good of the Almighty to have two people he knew marry each other, because that made two people miserable, instead of four.
I knew a couple where they were both right around 90 pounds and 5 feet tall. I think they were happy to find someone their own size. They even had their house altered to suit them.
My family says the same about several of the couples involved, but yeah… and I’m reasonably sure my great-grandmother didn’t steal it from Coleridge, she was bitch enough to come up with it on her own. Also, Coleridge’s version doesn’t take descendants into account.
Two of my classmates were known to occasionally speak to each other in flowcharts. They didn’t even need to finish the flowchart, you know those couples who can finish each other’s sentences correctly? The same but with pics. We used to kid them saying that their children would most likely be Humanities types, and Emma would sigh and say “yeah, I’m sure any daughters will be Pink Princesses…” (like most of the girls in our class, she was of the “clothes are for being warm” variety).
My girlfriend’s brother was bestowed, at birth, the same name I was. He goes by a nickname, but it’s well that I didn’t take up with a high school classmate I later befriended on Facebook, as I have the same name as her brother and she has the same name as my ex-girlfriend.