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January 13, 2004

Diametrically Opposed


di·a·met·ri·cal: Exactly opposite; contrary.
op·posed: To place opposite in contrast or counterbalance.

I'm a little things happiness finder. In any given moment, in any given circumstance or situation, or at any given time, I can find at least one thing that makes me happy. For instance, the little things that have made me happy recently:

  • The smell of Calvin's cologne lingering in the bedroom after he's left for the day.
  • Remembering about "does not need a prop", and then using it properly in a sentence.
  • Listening to my CDs while working.
  • Having an "I love you" voicemail from Calvin when I got to work this morning.
  • Downloading the "Linus and Lucy" ringtone for my new cell phone.
  • My pedometer.
  • Walking in the neighborhood at dusk with my headphones on, with Madonna's "Crazy For You" playing on the radio.
  • Our clean house.
  • Deep breathing while doing the stretching exercises my therapist assigned to me.
  • This, and this, and all these, and this, and this.
  • My dinner last night (a baked potato and a salad with red leaf lettuce, baby spinach, grape tomatoes (yeah, grape tomatoes!), cucumbers, feta cheese, and ranch dressing).
  • Snarking at "Couples Fear Factor" with Calvin and Marie.
  • Two and a Half Men
  • Laying on a blanket in the back yard and looking up at the sky.
  • Smirnoff Twisted (specifically Mandarin Orange)
  • All the pictures in my cubicle.
I could keep going, but you get the picture. It's not hard to make me happy. The things that make me happy are not vast and complicated. In fact, some of them are downright dorky. In essence, unless I have something specific to be unhappy about, I'm pretty much a happy chick.

Those things listed up there? I actively think to myself at the moment, "This makes me happy." Sometimes (and my friends and family can attest to this), I say it out loud. "This salad is making me so happy!" "These jeans make me so happy!" "Sitting here drinking a beer with you is making me so happy!" I think that's a key distinction - if ever anyone wanted to figure me out, that's a big one to understand. When something makes me happy, I acknowledge it, feel it, say it.

I could nauseate myself if I tried just a little.

In this, the acknowledgement of small happinesses, Calvin is my opposite.

Now, don't get me wrong (readers, *or* Calvin), I'm not complaining about him one bit. I'm just acknowledging (and maybe a wee bit psychoanalyzing) a fundamental difference between the two of us. Calvin is the kind of guy that is at the least neutral, unless there's something specific to be happy about.

I'm pretty sure that a lot of that has to do with our boredom thresholds. I'm rarely bored, or at least rarely bored to the extent that I feel I need to say, "I'm bored". Calvin gets bored very easily, and voices it (and nothing puts him in a bad mood quicker than boredom. It's a cycle. First he announces he's bored, then he starts teasing me, then he pushes the teasing a little more until I grump at him, then he gets sullen.). The immediate things I would do to alleviate boredom, he finds boring - take the dogs for a walk, read a book, find something to cook, write, drive around and listen to tunes, re-watch "Ferris Bueller's Day Off", work out. Which I can understand, if they were the only things we ever did for entertainment.

We can't get much more opposed than that, now can we? I'm thinking our relationship runs on the battery theory - it wouldn't work without two opposite poles.

Fortunately, our requirements for happiness in a relationship are pretty much dead on. It gives us the safety to occasionally disagree about the requirements for happiness in living life. Just because I'm writing this doesn't mean that either of us are unhappy. We're happy with each other, and we routinely express that happiness to one another. And we love our life together. Hell, everyone gets fussy at their life, good as it may be. And I know perfectly well that I'm not telling you guys anything you didn't already know.

I think at the root of it all is how we each go about defining and feeling happiness. To me, the absence of bad = happy. To him, the absence of bad = normal. It takes a bit more for Calvin to actively feel the emotion of happiness. To him, "not unhappy" doesn't automatically mean "happy". In thinking about the times that I've seen Calvin actively happy (things like our wedding and seeing The Kids and whatnot are a given): adrenaline = happy. Exciting = happy. New toys = happy. Vacations = happy. It's the fewer-and-further-between, "plan and look forward to" stuff that makes him happy. Day to day life is just "eh".

I call it contentment. He calls it a rut.

Maybe the problem lies with me. Maybe I'm forcing my definition of happiness onto Calvin. Maybe I'm waiting for him to say "I'm happy", or demonstrate it in a way that I've defined as a portrayal of happiness. Maybe it's just as frustrating to him as it is to me; that when it comes to happiness, we seem to sometimes be talking a different language.

(Speaking of language, I just realized that I've used the word "happy", or a derivation of the word, about a million times in this entry.)

I've been going around thinking that he's got it so easy, since it's not hard at all to make me happy. And I'll be all self-righteous and shit, because "my stuff" doesn't cost money, and "my stuff" can be done at any time by any little gesture, and "my stuff" and "his stuff" make me happy, while only "his stuff" makes him happy. But maybe he's just as frustrated as I am. Maybe he's frustrated that I'm so simple. Maybe he feels that if I defined happiness the way he does, I'd do more to make the things that make him happy, happen more regularly. Maybe it's intimidating to know that someone bases happiness on emotional stuff that may not be completely obvious or tangible.

Impassy goodness.

There is no impending doom to this. We butt heads about it rather infrequently. There's nothing wrong with either way of being happy. We are who we are. I can wish that he'd find demonstrable happiness in the little things in life, but it's not my job to define what that is for him.

I just want him to smile more.

This will probably make for interesting conversation at our house tonight.

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©Laura Charon 2000 - 2004.