Photography Was The Best Thing To Happen To Our Marriage
My wife and I celebrate our 27th Anniversary this year. Every year, it continues to blow my mind that two people so diametrically opposed finding ways to keep making this work. Years ago, a musician I’m very fond of coined a term for pulling off a seemingly impossible task. He looked at a large stage that would resume its primary duty as a city skyline the next day. He called the act of turning that expanse of buildings into a show the equivalent of “making a steamroller fly.”
I love that phrase.
You could argue that anything hard worth achieving is on the level of making a steamroller fly.
Still, it seems so appropriate in our case. If opposites attract, Mother Nature pulled off a miracle in our case. My wife is more thoughtful and calm, and I am a pinball made flesh. I love the ocean and will move back to the Caribbean tomorrow. My wife would love to live in a log cabin in the country with no neighbors. My wife loves Autumn. I think seasons are overrated and believe that if it’s too cold to waterski naked, it’s too cold.
There was an age before the internet, friends. Right now, you should be extremely thankful for that.
My wife and I are, in many ways, polar opposites. She cross-stitches, reads fantasy novels, and plays video games without apparent end. On the other hand, I podcast, love professional wrestling, and Cyberpunk stories. The last time I played a video game, it required a quarter.
Yet it works, and I’m glad it does.
The Week Of Fun
The Week of Fun is my cute little name for the days between the 20th and 24th of July. I generally take the week that encompasses it off. You see, the 20th is my wife’s birthday, the 21st is our Anniversary, and the 24th is my birthday.
At the time, the bank I worked for declined my request to take either birthday off due to availability. But, for some reason, they had no trouble with me taking the entire week off if I was getting married. So that’s what we did, and that’s how it started.
In 2014, I worked for a camera company, and the photography bug returned and hit me hard. I found a really great deal on a DSLR and two lenses at a pawn shop, and I was off. I was going out to different places and shooting, mainly by myself.
Up to this point in our marriage, the wife and I had never had a shared hobby. We’re very much the square peg in the round hole in many ways, and it had never occurred to me that she might like to come along.
So when she mentioned that she might want to do that, I was more than happy to oblige. I found a decent camera for her birthday, and we went shooting. That opened up a lot of doors. Soon we were driving up the Eastern Shore to Ocean City for the weekend and finding many things to shoot along the way.
Photography is part of every weekend, and it’s the best thing to ever happen to us.
Now, we find ourselves thinking of new places to go and things to shoot. Moreover, it turned out that photography was a gateway to finding ways to make our relationship stronger.
We Time
We’ve been married 27 years in July, and we’ve raised three neuro-divergent children, both of us with full-time jobs. So to say that there hasn’t been a lot of time where it’s just been Kim and I is a bit of an understatement.
Regarding photography time, it’s a scheduled time that’s just us. After raising three kids, each of us having a job, and of course, the past 15 months, in particular, it’s time for us just to go do something and be together.
On the shore, in the woods, or just long rides in the car to get where we’re going, it’s just us, and it’s an opportunity to reconnect with what it was that made this wonderful.
In situations like ours where there’s very little time or energy to do anything after kids are in bed, it’s easy to grab a book or a screen and check out.
Also, sometimes you just need to have ‘neutral corners’ if you’ve been having a disagreement. Indeed, we’ve done both those things, but what I have found is that the scheduled time on Saturday has given way to other things. Maybe one night, I’ll not bury myself in creative work. She’ll not find herself in a video game she can’t get out of, and we’ll sit in the living room and just watch more of a series we’ve found on the streaming service. Or we’ll go back and watch a movie I’ve never seen (of which there are plenty; I only just watched The Fellowship of The Ring for the first time). Or we’ll work out where the next adventure will be early in the week.
Communications Aid
Here’s one thing about me that some people find surprising: Negativity affects me profoundly. Conflict elicits an actual fight or flight response due to how I was raised, and flight is the option I choose most of the time. So I will hide from it if I can.
Now, my wife and I don’t argue much. That’s not to say we haven’t, because that’s silly. All couples have disagreements, and that’s why I embrace the concept of the neutral corner I wrote about earlier. That said, there have been times I have been hesitant to say something for fear it would start a disagreement. That’s a communication breakdown, and it’s one that was on me to fix. The problem was I didn’t know how to fix it. I didn’t have the tools.
Then, one day while we were shooting, I had a great shot of a heron and limited time to get it before it took off. My wife was in the shot, and I had a choice. Take the pic with her in it, ask her to move, or just forget about it.
This one sentence made everything else easier.
“Could you move, please? You’re in my shot.”
It doesn’t sound like much, but that was really hard for me to do. Thankfully, my wife knew this about me and understood. She graciously moved aside so I could get the picture. This was a massive breakthrough for me, and I told her this.
After that, it became much easier to talk to each other about other things and not listen to the kid in my head that was scared about bad reactions or hurt feelings.
Future Plans
Planning the weekend shoots has led to thinking of long-term projects we’d like to do. For example, I’d like to go and shoot Tangier Island, a small island in the middle of the Chesapeake Bay. It’s a unique place that is slowly sinking into the bay. I’d like to chronicle life on that island before it becomes impossible. A longer-term project is to do the same for small coastal towns along the East Coast, not unlike my hometown of Machias, Maine.
This is notable because we’ve lived paycheck to paycheck for most of the time we’ve been married. So we have resigned ourselves to the belief that future plans aren’t a luxury you can afford. However, it turns out that future plans aren’t a luxury; it’s a motivators. It’s a goal to set and then figure out the finances and logistics to make that happen. We agree that it’s complicated to travel much in our circumstances. Still, we’ve found a lot of fun and hope in the planning.
Finding a shared hobby like photography made what was already a good relationship with my wife even stronger. I’m so happy we found something to enjoy together and new reasons to enjoy each other’s company even at this point in our marriage. I’m looking forward to many more Saturday morning shoots and future adventures.
