The Vose Way

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Living guilt-free with a woman who is driven

Posted by Chuck Vose Mon, 21 Jun 2010 04:59:00 GMT

Regular life post disclaimer

All apologies for a regular life post, for those that don’t know this blog can be sorted by category and the auto-rss feeds actually do work to separate by category. So my promise is that the tags Life and Programming will be stuck to religiously. If you only want to read programming related topics, and I suspect that is the case for most of you, this is the link to do so. Like any good Rails app that link works perfectly for both RSS readers and human readers.

Living guilt-free with a woman who is driven

I live with, and am hopelessly in love with, a woman who on the absolute worst days could be described merely as ‘driven’. Those of you that know her know that this word ‘driven’ pales in comparison to the actual manifestation that is my very-soon-to-be wife. At any given time she is volunteering, working a full time job, going to school or doing another volunteer position, planning a wedding, moving all our stuff from one house to another in her car instead of a truck, and making handwarmers or clothing for our cats. She is an amazing woman and I think this quote from a close friend of ours sums it up nicely: “How does it feel for everything you touch to turn into awesome?”

I on the other hand, work a job. Granted, it’s a hard job that requires lots of strenuous thinking from my ergonomic chair in a temperature controlled environment where everyone is required by corporate mandate to leave me alone, but well, actually I’ve lost my train of thought. Oh yeah, I don’t do half the stuff she does; I think I would be lucky to consider myself as doing a tenth of the incredible things she does. I merely fill a role in her life which is to be unendingly supportive and encourage her to stop working on occasion through any of a variety of methods including tickling or telling myself jokes and giggling.

The last piece of this pending nuptial catastrophe is thus: I was raised, either by my parents or my college roommates, to feel unbearable guilt and shame if someone in the house is working and I’m playing video games. There are a lot of roots here but I don’t think they bear analyzing at the moment.

Work budgeting (Conclusion)

Luckily, in addition to being ‘driven’, my beautiful love is also a complete and utter genius. I write this document to later remind me of how wonderfully smart she is (and because my memory is about 3 minutes long). How does one strike a balance when one partner relaxes by doing things, and one partner relaxes by doing nothing? Surely, even the slightest analysis suggests that this is going to end in tears when I feel guilty or she feels put-upon or under appreciated. It has, but as with all things she has come up with the following method:

We have created a chore budget. We are both required to do a small amount of chores and after that point, if she feels like continuing to work I am absolutely not allowed to feel guilty and she can feel free to derive all sorts of satisfaction from finishing things and checking them off her mental checklist. Now I know that there is an end in sight, after my chores are done I no longer get to feel guilty (she actually got mad at me and made me play video games instead of continuing folding laundry tonight).

I know that I’m not alone in the world, so if you find this blog by some happenstance and you’ve had a similar situation please let me know. Links containing various sexual enhancement drugs will probably not be accepted but it’s worth trying, I wouldn’t want to discourage anyone, especially robots.