It’s a custom we undergo nearly every evening: My husband showers while I partake in a likely too-lengthy skincare routine. We share the bathroom, in one of those under-the-radar moments that speaks to the intimacy of a relationship.
The unglamorous ones that, in hindsight, make it achingly clear that you are sharing your life with someone else.
Yet the other night, as we went through our paces, I found myself thinking that there was actually nothing intimate about this arrangement. Because as I dabbed on my lotions and potions, I had a podcast streaming through my wireless headphones, turned up to a volume desperately fighting to drown out my husband’s own podcast, which was blaring out of a Bluetooth speaker.
Sharing a space, maybe. But together, we were not.
This is not okay, I found myself thinking, increasingly aware of the ways that technology – under the veil of bringing people together – is really driving us apart.
Was it saying something that we couldn’t just be in the same room in silence?
Were we avoiding something – or more blatantly put, each other?
This, I thought, is why relationships take work.
Doubts then formed in quick succession, rushing me towards overanalyzing the strength (or lack thereof) of our bond. My mind started searching for other clues that I may be ignoring that indicated we had things to address. Within a matter of seconds, my head was crowded with a lot of “shoulds.”
Then I paused, suddenly self-assured, smirking at myself in the mirror as an idea hit me:
What if this is not ignorance, but bliss?
What if this is actually why this relationship works?
Because it is. The fact that I get to be me, lost in the darkness of true crime drama, while he gets to be him, laughing his head off at sports satire, while we both wash the day away speaks to a profound level of comfort.
And I’m not sure there’s anything more insanely intimate than functioning in a way that I would if I was alone in the room – addressing my vanity while daydreaming about being a federal agent, cracking a cold case – than doing that, without judgment, next to my best bud.
The world we live in has idealized everything and that includes love, creating standards as opaque as the filters used to disguise them, prompting us to assess if our relationships are really measuring up
We’re bombarded with quotes about vulnerability. About communication. About connecting on a level only known to our souls. But be it romantic, platonic or familial, we could all use a reminder that affection and acceptance come in many different forms.
That we should be cautious of creating problems where there likely are none.
That sometimes the best things actually don’t require any work.
Because be it a partner, sibling or friend, one universal rule applies in my book:
If I get to do me alongside you doing you, then that, my friends, is LOVE.
