There once was a day when Ron and I made some serious vows, vows that surpassed the “in sickness and in health” ones—at least at the time anyway. They were vows meant to secure our individuality and protect us from becoming bland and predictable. We pledged to never call each other “mom” or “dad,” and to never, ever wear matching outfits.
It’s difficult to admit now, but when I was in my early 20s and freshly married, I had a tendency to make snap judgments about the more experienced couples I’d see around me.
With that fleeting wisdom and knowledge that I only had in my 20s—and maybe briefly in my mid-teens—I would pose rhetorical questions like, “Would it hurt her to put on some makeup?” and, “He was so hot when he was younger, what happened?”
I thought I knew the answers; they simply no longer cared, of course. Obviously, it wasn’t because she was too busy with a job, kids, and running a household or that age and hormone fluctuations just play mean tricks on your body’s metabolic systems.
Yes, it’s painful to recall I ever thought that way, but I can be thankful that wisdom comes with age and not the other way around. However, at the time, in my mind, Ron and I had it going on, and I couldn’t fathom the things (both positive and negative) that time, experience, and age could do to a couple.
I specifically remember one couple. We called them “The Walkers.” We’d see them strolling the neighborhood hand-in-hand at dusk, night after night. They wore similar warm-up suits with headbands, favoring the color purple.
“That must be some kind of marital counseling thing, ya think?” Ron asked me.
“Oh totally. I’m sure, the hand-holding. The big smiles,” I replied.
Oh the naiveté.
There is a transformation that happens at a certain point in marriage. To put it simply, you start to look like each other, and then you become the “oh, they are so cute” couple.
I don’t understand why this happens—probably because I’m in my 40s now, and that whole ability to know everything that I once had is now gone.
And let’s talk about this “knowledge of everything” for a second. I know it was a phenomenon that happened to me when I was younger, and Ron admits this as well. But maybe everyone didn’t have the know-it-all ability in their 20s. I know a lot of 20-somethings these days who are super smart, well-adjusted, and would never presume to know why others do what they do, let alone judge a couple on the frequency of their walks and the attire in which they complete them.
And while I no longer possess my omniscient abilities, I do know enough to know now that I didn’t know anything back then.
It will be funny to look back a couple of decades from now and see all of the things I really didn’t know now but thought I did.
Right now, what I think I know is that what I’m going to call “The Mirror Effect” (just to sound all science-y) actually happens. It starts innocently enough with the mundane requests that come with familiarity—“Can you help me pluck this?” “Adjust this?” “Dye that?” Then it’s things like, “No honey, it’s not pink it’s coral, and GQ says that shirt is the new thing.” And “new research came out that says if we eat pumpkins/drink grape juice/walk every night, then we will have clear skin/shiny teeth/telepathic abilities.”
Then suddenly you are walking hand in hand wearing pastel plastic jumpsuits and smiling like one of the Stepford Wives.
I know this because we are now “The Walkers.” Oh, we still bike, run, and hit the gym, but walking—we now know—clears the mind and helps us connect. And occasionally we wear the same outfits.
It’s just something you can’t escape. One minute you are sitting in a café drinking flat whites and listening to Etta James and the next, well, purple jumpsuits.
We’ve noticed the matching outfits thing happens a lot, and we try to avoid it. Ron will come out of the bedroom, I’ll walk out of the bathroom and we announce, “How does this look?” and then one or the other will notice and argue, “You can’t wear those colors, I’m wearing the same colors!” and one of us will change.
Sometimes, we don’t notice.
It was a hot day with nothing better to do, so we took our dog Finn along with us on our walk. A couple pulled up next to us as we were waiting to cross the street. “Good looking dog,” the woman said smiling and looking at the three of us.
“We’re The Walkers,” Ron said to me.
“Yeah, a lot of people we know see us walking often,” I said.
“No, look at us. I mean we even match our dog,” he said.
We were happily taking a walk wearing matching black pants and gray tanks, and we were walking our gray and black speckled dog, and we hadn’t even noticed. Looking at the three of us all I could think was, “Oh, how cute.” Although that wasn’t the look I was striving for.
I don’t know if the woman in the car, or any of the passing cars for that matter, thought about how cute we looked or wondered if we were in some sort of marriage counseling or assumed that we were just some boring couple that had been married so long our identities merged into one gray blur.
But I do know, or rather I suspect, that we’re pretty lucky to walk out the door perfectly in sync with our minds and actions. Maybe that makes us cute. And if that’s the case, it’s definitely something to grin about.
Shelly Cone likes to wear pink just to see it end up in Ron’s wardrobe. Reach her through Executive Editor Ryan Miller at rmiller@newtimesslo.com.
This article appears in Mar 19-26, 2015.