Process

Today's the day that my husband gives his notice at work, and we no longer can change our mind about moving back to West Coast City. I'm incredibly edgy even though the decision has felt quite final for a while now. (It doesn't help that I'm fiercely premenstrual and that I ran out of zoloft two days ago and won't be able to get a refill before this afternoon.)

One positive thing that's come out of this experience for us is new insight into just how differently we go about making decisions. I come from a family that loves nothing better than to sit around the kitchen table considering all the options, from all possible angles, ad nauseum, before making even the smallest decisions. I used to be frustrated by this, even as I was as wedded to its cubist approach as my parents; because the process would rarely, if ever, end up with any clear picture of what to do. If you think about anything long and hard enough, and you have a relatively open mind, you're likely to end up with ambivalence.

My husband, however, has an extremely low tolerance for ambivalence, which I believe is inextricably linked to his equally low tolerance for endless conversations at the kitchen table. He likes conversations to move quickly, in a linear fashion from point a to point b, and is extremely good, once arriving at point b, at not looking back and wondering what might have been had he taken a different route.

This difference between us, which used to manifest itself in our lives mainly around things like choosing which restaurant to eat at or which movie to rent, has been front and center this last year, and has led to some of our worst fights. And I think that, while it seemed we were fighting about "what to do," what we were really fighting about is "how to decide what to do." Because, from the start, we both sort of felt we could go either way with this decision and be OK, individually and as a family. What got us red in the face, however, were moments when either I seemed eager to rehash already-hashed out terrain (which would drive him crazy), or he seemed too easily to rest with arbitrary conclusions (which would drive me crazy).

It took us a long time to recognize that this was going on, but I think that, now that we have, our marriage is much stronger for it. In the end, we both compromised: I accepted the ultimate degree of arbitrariness in our decision, and he allowed himself to entertain opposing points of view for uncomfortably long periods of time.

Perhaps, when we go back to our cosmopolitan life, we will now have an easier time deciding whether to eat Thai or Indian.