I’ve been writing about Before Sunrise and Before Sunset –two of my favorite films of all time — over on Rogue Cinema for the last two weeks. And each week, my husband Jared has dutifully read my posts, an act of love and friendship because he’s not really a fan. (“I like the first one O.K.,” he says, shrugging). The same could probably be said of a lot of my posts, most of the books I read, any jazz, singer-songwriter or Arcade Fire I listen to and any drama and/or French film I’ve watched in recent years. And, to be fair, I never read anything about Anglo Saxons or Math and I cheerfully head to bed with a book when he turns on most of the History Channel shows he likes, another repeat of South Park or an episode of Spartacus: Blood and Sand (his latest guilty pleasure show).
For a woman that takes her books, movies and music as seriously as I do, this has always been a tricky territory for us. We were first drawn to each other because of our shared love of music. Jared could not resist the siren call of a BYU apartment with a drum set (my roommate’s), a Bjork poster and a bunch of girls dancing to Prince. We’ve always joked that “our song” is the Dead Kennedys’ “Chickenshit Conformist,” a song whose lyrics we had both memorized. Those first few years of marriage have a lot of happy memories for me — our shared love of Rushmore, The Big Lebowski and Fight Club, hours and hours spent milling around book stores and the band we formed. However, one of the strange things about meeting your future spouse when you are 19 and then marrying just a month after you turn 20 (!) is that you are a bit raw and unformed in your tastes and habits. The core of me was there — the passion for music and movies, the feminist, the book worm, the person attracted to Eastern thought — but many of those interests have deepened, sharpened and taken unexpected turns over the last 13 years, resulting in some divergent paths. Neither of us listen to the Dead Kennedys much these days (well, I don’t — Jared says he still listens a few times a month, but they just don’t resonate with me the way they did when I was 14.) In fact, we went to see Jello Biafra, the lead singer, speak a few years after we got married and he had mellowed a lot with time, he sounded like a thoughtful old hippie, much to my husband’s disappointment.
Because I love talking about this stuff so much, I have sometimes bemoaned our increasing lack of compatibility. A few months ago — after Jared went on a tirade about hating Bright Eyes or Jeff Buckley, I declared that we were getting a music divorce because we had irreconcilable musical differences. We didn’t get back together until he made me a double-CD mix of love songs, cleverly titled, “The Importance of Loving Earnestly” and “Love in the Time of Being Earnest.” But what do you do when your spouse declares that the only music they like anymore is early 90s gansta rap or Swedish Death Metal or insists that Battlefield Earth is a really good movie (although, I suspect he is just being difficult)? If The Wire hadn’t come into our lives, we could have gone months and months not spending any time together at night.
That might be why I was fascinated when I came across an article about the dating site Allikewise.com, a cross between Goodreads and Match.com, it allows you to meet people based on literary taste. Of course, I’m not dating and haven’t been for some time, but when I first saw the site, I imagined that it would be such a relief to build a connection based on a shared love of Haruki Murakami or Zadie Smith, rather than looks or trying to match personalities. The books people love and the way they talk about them can be quite revealing about the way they view the world. Or not.
Looking at the site, I can see a lot of possible traps. For example, what could you possibly learn about those people who have picked books like Eat Pray Love or The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo — books I’ve read and enjoyed, but then so has almost everyone else in the world. On the other hand, the potential for seeming pretentious also seems high. While looking at the site, I rather bizarrely found myself most interested in people who loved books I’ve heard of, but hadn’t read because they seemed not boring and I couldn’t tell whether I would agree with their opinions. Really, I’m not sure that this is not any less superficial than having a thing for blondes or outdoorsy types, nor does it account for chemistry and the fact that you could have a lot in common with someone and have absolutely no spark between you. And, of course, my husband and I would probably never have found each other on such a site.
I know plenty of couples that have nothing in common with their partners when it comes to music or movies and they have no expectation of enjoying the same things. They go and see things with other friends and then occasionally do each other a favour by watching a show or movie together. In the end, I have tried to embrace rather than despair over the differences between Jared and I and let go of the expectation that we can be all things to each other. How about you? Do you and your partner have similar taste? Is it even important to you?
I see this with my mom and stepdad: she doesn’t really watch a lot of TV (but does love Masterpiece Theatre), while he loves SyFy Channel, especially the really cheesy made-for-TV monster movies. Generally, it means that Mom watches things like “Ice Giants III” instead of my stepdad watching “Downton Abbey”, but they have managed to find shows that they both like–and she makes sure they play music instead of talk radio in the car, so he gets exposed to the Temptations or Matisyahu or, very occasionally, Kanye (my mom’s cool).
Your mom does sound cool. :) I find I am usually more game to give my husband’s interests a try. This is why I know about muscle cars, Anglo Saxon burial mounds and have read the Dune series and the Lord of the Rings trilogy.
My husband is a fabulous and lovely man, but we have nothing in common when it comes to reading and literature. I think he has perhaps read about 25 books (fiction) in his life. I often talk to him about books I love. I read Tess of the D’Urbervilles aloud to him when we were dating and I’m currently reading 1984 to him when we go places in the car. His interests are science and nature related and he sees reading as a means to an end ie. information.
Returning to university, getting my BA and my MA and beginning to think about my PhD has been life-changing for me – I could utilize some terrible chrysalis/butterfly imagery here, but I’ll resist – I’ve made loads of friends who share my interests and I’ve never felt so happy and fulfilled.
Carys, bring the butterfly imagery on — I would love to hear more about it. I can absolutely relate to how great it is to find kindred spirits. It is interesting, my husband is also largely a facts man when it comes to reading — the only fiction genre he reads is fantasy. I find the same (admittedly, this is highly subjective and anecdotal) with my son, the three boys that I tutor and my reading groups in my children’s school. I am not a gender essentialist (and I do know men that love fiction), so I wonder what it is about our culture that turns so many boys and men off fiction. Subject for a future post?
Hmm.. Whatever happened to opposites attract?
While it’s exciting and gratifying to find someone who loves all the same things we do, it might also be a bit boring. A happy medium is good- or at least finding someone who can tolerate your interests and doesn’t see them as a competition.
Well, I can appreciate my wife’s style, but that doesn’t mean I want to dress like her. Being a dude is harder than it looks.
Colin, I happen to be a woman, but I don’t think this is an issue of gender. And we could be talking about gardening, going to the rodeo, rambling, going to antique shops — I just happen to be a book worm. This is more an issue of getting the balance between having your own interests and still having enough overlap (as Jessica says below) to keep your friendship going. Hard if you are a lady or a dude. :)
Oh, how I love your descriptions. Thanks for the laugh! My husband and I overlap just enough. I remember when we were dating, he made me a mixed CD, and it almost ruined the whole thing. I really don’t know what he was thinking. But what I really love are those things that the other person just LOVES, that you don’t know anything about, and then they bring them into your life and you realize how lucky you are not to have missed out. I feel that way about Pink Floyd and gardening – things I would barely have scratched the surface of without him. I do think it’s important to have those mutual interests, things other than the kids and the house. It doesn’t necessarily need to be music, movies or books – but some reasonable replacements. And just as important is one or the other of you ‘tagging along’ just because you know it’s important to the other. That’s probably the cornerstone of the whole thing, and you never know when you might find something you like.
Really well said. Jared and I don’t have as much overlap as we used to, but I get a kick out of his passion for life and I think he enjoys mine. I’ve enjoyed all of his phases — the iron age smelting, jewelry making, wood carving, mound hunting. There is no question that he has made my world a bigger place. And, I know that my feminism, interest in evolution, religion and art has rubbed off on him. :)
It’s always fun to read a Heidi-post, one of my soul sisters :) R and I have also been sharing a love of The Wire as of late, but we have also been converging in our music tastes too. I’m liking more jazz and he’s like more indie/emo stuff. It’s so nice!
Heidi, this is a great post. In a previous life (or at least that’s how it feels), I used to take a million pictures and put them in scrapbooks. I never really DID scrapbooking (cutesy stickers, fancy decorations, etc.), but I got the pictures in there and wrote captions for most of them. After I’d worked for a few hours, I would make Brent look at them. He had usually already seen the pictures, so sometimes he didn’t feel like looking at them. But he knew he was supposed to so he started asking whether it was “time for an obligatory viewing.” The phrase stuck. Whenever one of us wants the other to watch a movie or talk about a book or listen to a particular song that the other might not like, we call it an “obligatory viewing.”
Re: books. We don’t read the same things. Never have. Brent tends to read things like Atlantic Monthly and The New Yorker and econ magazines and stuff. One day I came home from work and he said, “Heather, I was looking at the federal budget today and I . . .” (Whah?? Casually looking at the federal budget?) He occasionally asks about what I’m reading and I’ll tell him. He usually seems mildly interested, but rarely decides to read the book. In fact, I think probably the last book we both read was The Time Traveler’s Wife. He liked it more than I did (I think it was the time travel that intrigued him, which is actually what wore me out with that book!).
I love the “obligatory viewing” phrase. I think I’m going to borrow it because my wife and I also read quite different stuff.
Also, I love that Brent casually browses through the federal budget. :)
We tag along behind each other. I have watched every Everest documentary available. As for my movies he would probably fall asleep, but I have been known to play the movie for him in super fast-forward motion narrating the events until we get to the scene that I want him to see. And sometimes, at that point, he is actually interested in watching the end. I also read him excerpts from the books I read. When we travel, I read him political books like Chalmers Johnson and Dialogue articles. Without my hubby I would have never believed in Sasquatch or that a Patagonia catalog can be read like a book. Before me he would never have believed that someone would choose a book over sleeping. I thought marriage was about being “all things to each other.” But, what a relief that it is not. I think marriage is more about making life interesting for each other.
Me and Andrew have quite different tastes, until I met Andrew (an English Literature graduate) I had probably read 2-3 novels in my life. I have read a couple more since, and really enjoyed them, but I still prefer more factual books.. lately I’ve drifted back to those, even though I had a load of books on my ‘to read’ list that are novels. For me though, it’s not so much our difference in books or films, but the fact that I LOVE to play boardgames, and Andrew will, but doesn’t enjoy it so much. Recently I found a group of gamers to play with and this has really been great for me. I think if we find others to feed our love of something our spouse doesn’t, then it’s still nice to do that something together sometimes, but I don’t resent him for not wanting to always play with me.