I Ruined Date Night

We haven’t fallen off the face of the Earth. I promise. We haven’t run off to join the circus (is that still a thing), and we haven’t suffered any major catastrophes (knock on wood). We’ve simply, yet complicatedly, been swept up in the flow of life. For better or worse, our journey over the past several months has done nothing short of forced our authentic presence. Rather than bog you down with a detailed list of what that has entailed, as a cyberspace ice-breaker of sorts, I’m going to share a little anecdote that I would say illustrates the last seven months pretty well.

I’m going to call this story, “How I Ruined Date Night,” subtitled, “I Gave it the Good Ol’ College Try.”

Andrew and I have been in this fairly persistent state of flux. Doing our individual inner work, trying to raise the best children possible, maneuvering the day-to-day necessities, trying to be a good husband and wife to one another, and starting a business together. Because, why not. Creating a business from scratch with your spouse is the least stressful thing you could possibly do, right?

We actually work quite well together, professionally. We both enjoy “creating,” so being able to work in that zone with someone I care about deeply and have the utmost respect for, in a creative field that we both find exciting, is a win-win. In the past, we’ve connected in much the same way while working on projects around the house: renovating rooms, decorating, yard work, etc. It was invigorating to realize we could find the same connection on a professional level. Here’s the catch, though...we were finding it at a PROFESSIONAL level. While that is all well and good, Andrew and I are excellent compartmentalizers (which isn’t really a word according to spellcheck, but I’m running with it)  when it comes to our work life and our personal life. We needed to learn how to bottle up that passion when it came to our marriage, and honestly, we weren’t being very intentional about our time spent together as husband and wife.

Enter date night.

Amidst the whirlwind of activity surrounding our business, running children back and forth to extracurricular activities whilst attempting to guide them through their own social and emotional growth (with extraneous drama from a certain birth parent, the chronic can of worms), and working on ourselves, Andrew and I had let our time of connecting as a couple fall to the wayside. Our days were full of activity, by the time evenings rolled around, one or both of us were exhausted, and our weekends were equally jam packed.

Andrew resolved to plan an evening out in Chicago, complete with dinner reservations and a comedy show. Before we go any further, I need you to take a little trip back in time with me, about three decades or so, to a time when I was still a young girl. A bright and fiercely independent child, I was painfully shy. At least that’s how the adults in my life would have described my behavior. The reality was that what I was feeling ran deeper than shyness and stage fright. The truth was I was struggling in almost any social situation that involved a large-ish group of people. Even large family gatherings made me anxious. If I was under an exceptional amount of stress, the anxiety would become worse. Once I grew past the angsty, self-conscious teen years, the anxiety became less overwhelming, and as I hit my thirties, I really started pushing the boundaries of what had formerly been uncomfortable social situations. I was, dare I say, becoming fearless.

So, here I am, 40-years old, and my husband has planned a somewhat elaborate evening for the two of us. We’ve had our noses to the grindstone with work and family shenanigans, and were due for some much needed grown-up time. We arrive perfectly on time for our dinner reservations, and the restaurant is packed. It is packed, loud, and like so many city restaurants, has a communal layout where patrons are essentially sitting on top of one another. I immediately feel my throat tighten up as we check-in with the hostess whom says it will be a couple of minutes. We scoot toward a small, open area near the bar, not so patiently waiting to be seated. Twenty agonizing minutes tick by. Being the empathetic husband he is, Andrew can sense I’m becoming frazzled and suggests we head to an Italian restaurant next door. Immediately seated at the new restaurant, I try to to recover, but the damage was already done. The Italian restaurant, while not nearly as busy, was equally noisy, and it took every ounce of my being to attempt to rest in the flow of the evening. It wasn’t working.

By the time we arrived at the venue for the comedy show, I’d managed to get my bearings...or so I thought. As we made our entrance, we quickly found out that the stage, one of several within the building, was on the opposite side from which we entered. The scenic route, meant zigzagging through a maze of other stages, clusters of people, and a walk down a staircase lined with comedy revelers. Insert cliched idiom here. We were definitely swimming upstream. Saying I wanted to crawl out my skin would be a gross understatement. Ooooh another opportunity for an idiom. A deer in the headlights. A fish out of water. Did I mention that I also have an underlying fear of water? I was precisely that, a fish out of water, and I was quickly suffocating. When we finally reached the end of the line for the actual show we had tickets for, I was at the end of my line, and the look on my face must’ve said everything, because the first thing out of Andrew’s mouth was, “Do you want to leave?” After that everything blurred together and became hazy. The heaviness of it all was so...heavy...and irrational. That’s probably the worst part of it all. Through all of the anxiety I was feeling, my rational brain was telling my body it was being completely irrational. The competition between my analytical thoughts and the sympathetic system of my body were duking it out, and no one was winning. There was a stop at the theater box office, a quick refund, and we were back in our car, headed out of the city.

The car ride home was quiet. I waited for the fallout as we pulled onto the highway. The pressure of the imminent waterworks was building behind my eyes. I didn’t want to cry. I had been an ass. I flaked out, and I had no right to get upset about it. I expected my husband to feel the same, but the verbal retaliation never came. He simply said that he knew I was having a hard time, and that he was there to listen when I was ready to talk about it. True to my hard-headed, falsely stoic form, I sat the rest of the car ride in silence, fighting back the tears that wouldn’t be contained.

We silently went to bed that evening. We've been there before. I'd imagine most married couples have. Those tense endings to evenings that aren't really endings, leaving the next morning's direction up for question. However, the next morning was different. Rather than passive-aggressive silence or being overtly disappointed at how the previous evening had played out, Andrew was gentle. He reminded me that I had been there for him and shown him kindness and grace, that in my support for everyone else, I hadn't had enough space for myself, and he could understand how I would have felt overwhelmed. No shaming. No unloading of guilt. He was pure grace. I was humbled.

We learned so much about each other and ourselves over the course of that incident. Hope. Grace. Love. How to break so that we can come together again, individually and as a couple. We're learning more and more that a successful partnership means that sometimes someone will need to bend, to be able to show kindness to the other in the face of adversity. Admittedly, in the past, we've found it much easier to offer that space to those outside of our intimate circle instead of directly to one another...

So, that’s how I ruined date night. It’s how I completely lost control, yet saw that love, grace, hope, and understanding will always be the answer in a meaningful marriage. Even when one of us has lost all of her marbles.

~Stephanie