More musings from 'Oldest Living Blogger'....

Once again, I fell asleep with the headphones on, and woke up just in time for the middle-of-the-night bathroom trip. When I awoke, there was some show on the tube about some surprisingly intuitive rock star and his tactless manager and their variously perceived conflicts. The sound track was no hell, but their dialogue proved quite interesting, not so much for its fly-on-the-wall aspects, but rather because it somehow got me thinking back to my last marriage, and how both participants seemed to assume certain things, and then jump to erroneous conclusions, frequently missing where the other was 'coming from' or trying to go.

My youngest son reads this blog, and likes my writing, and he also has a curiosity for the story behind all this, and I'm still struggling with how and what to say, really. His mother also sometimes reads my babblings here, so maybe I ought to begin by saying that sharing a few years with her has been the highlight of my life so far. Even though it didn't work out for us, for various reasons, I'm still very glad we tried. From that, I learned a lot about myself, and about others, and about what to expect to be able to accomplish, and what not to try. One valuable lesson of all that was that a workable marriage doesn't have a 'boss'. It has a partnership of equally-ranked managers, for want of a better way of describing it, and unfortunately, I saw myself as 'the boss'.

I was older, and that made me think I was also wiser, and I really wasn't. While younger than I by quite a few years, my wife had her own valuable experiences to contribute, and her own kinds of expertise that differed from mine, and she was much more skilled in the arts of interpersonal relationships than I was. That whole thing might have gone much better had I been listening more often instead of talking so much. Isn't hindsight wonderful?

She recently told me that she's once again planning marriage, and I really admire her for that. She's much braver than I am. After crashing and burning twice, I prefer to leave the battle of the sexes to someone else to resolve. The concept is beautiful, but the theory just didn't work out all that well in practice
for me. But as I said earlier, I'm glad we tried. It was both a learning experience and a lot of fun during its better times.