Where's Weirdo?

Can you find Steve in this picture?

No? Look harder.

Still no? I'll tell you where he is at the end of this.

When Steve and I were shopping for a new house we spent our weekends driving randomly around the Twin Cities looking at towns and neighborhoods and city blocks; peering around for For Sale signs when we were inspired to do so and, incidentally, enjoying the hell out of the process. Every now and then we would call our realtor (who grew to hate us, as you can imagine) and ask him to set up a showing for house x or y. But none of them really spoke to us and we continued in this manner for, I kid you not, about two years (you can see why our realtor hated us) until one day Steve fell truly madly deeply in love with an intersection. A "T" stop, really, where a dirt road ended in a slightly larger paved one.

"THIS," he announced dramatically, "is where we need to live."

You can probably see the problem with this, as I did. For starters, there were only, like, three houses in view and none of them were for sale. It seemed unlikely that one of these handful of houses would miraculously appear on the market and suit us. I, tactfully of course, told Steve what a stupid idea it was to focus on an area the size of a smallish shopping mall but he disregarded my nay-saying.

And, since he is sort of spoiled, it all came together as he had predicted.

Several months after his announcement that he would live at Intersection or nowhere at all! a house came on the market. A perfect house that was perfectly perfect and we loved it and it was a mere three driveways up from the very stop sign upon which Steve had declared his Alamo.

The only draw-back, the only fly in the margarita mix, was that the house did not and could not get high-speed internet access. This didn't matter to me, but considering the fact that Steve works from home and is constantly uploading and downloading zillions of files it seemed like it would be a big deal to him.

"No, " he swore.

"I'll be fine," he promised.

"I will be so deliriously happy living at the junction of Dirt-and-Barely-Paved that time will distort itself and I will THINK the download speeds are comparable to those of cable when in fact satellite service barely surpasses dial-up," he vowed. 

"Really?" I asked.

"Really really. But I will look into ways to get a faster connection." A-ha.

So we bought the house and we moved in and we unpacked a few boxes and Steve started bitching about the internet, a refrain that has continued ever since. Steve, however and unlike myself, is not one to content himself with mere bitchery. Steve is a Fixer by nature so not a month has gone by in the past three years in which Steve has not actively pursued some scheme or another to increase our connection speeds.

Which brings us to the photograph. Do you want to know where Steve is in this picture? He is that little bump seventy feet above the ground at the fork of the tree in the top center of the picture. And he is trying to put up an antennae that will connect to a cable that will connect to a box in our attic that will bring us high-speed internet via cell signals. 

Which in turn brings us to today's observation: I lived with Steve for two years before we got married and then another two after that and it took all that time before I realized that he is an abnormally obsessive personality. I met him and I thought he was a total slacker. Fun, sure, but so lazy and easy-going that I was not expecting much from him in terms of measurable life goals. Four years later and I was, like, huh, it's three-thirty in the morning and Steve is still painting the bathroom, how odd. Seven years and I discovered that if he gets up in the middle of the night to pee he then has to brush his teeth again, because he cannot go to bed (even back to bed) without brushing his teeth. Nine years and I found myself eating dinner alone on a regular basis because Steve was finishing up a work project and could not bring himself to stop... thirty feet away in his home office. We'll have been together eleven years in July and I now know that when he says he'll look into something I should expect him to be unbearable until he has solved it to his satisfaction. So apart from telling him not to fall and break his stupid neck I just took the picture and wished him well in his obsessive pursuit of speedier ITunes downloads.

Some slacker. Which is a pity because I really AM that lazy. No hidden layers here. Sometimes I feel a little tricked, a little mislead by bar-pickup Steve who morphed into the workaholic kitchen-destroyer-and-rebuilder tree-climbing lunatic to whom I find myself married.

Has your partner/spouse/significant other surprised you with personality traits as you got to know them better?    

PS New IVF post up at ¡REDBOOK!

I think I will have a new post there every day this week as the cycle progresses so check back there for updates. Link at the side. Thanks!   

Comments

[Erica]

Well he looks so handsome up there in the tree! I just stared at that photo until my eyes hurt. He got down OK, right?

I too once had a slacker boyfriend who morphed into an obsessive worker, with "business cards" and "wheeling and dealing" and "conventions." What the heck happened to my lumpen, football-watching, get-me-a-beer boyfriend? It could have something to do with my becoming a stay-at-home mom and not doing anything to pay the mortgage... plus there are the RE bills...

[jenn]

Yeah, I was surprised, but only because I didn't pay enough attention! The warning signs were always there! 5 years ago I thought it was cute that he collected a couple of things. I even helped a little! Now I know it is OCD and my house is totally full of shit that he is absolutely devoted to! Uhg!! I am trying to think of an example. Here is one: I am not supposed to throw away beer bottles until he has soaked off the labels to put in his beer journal! Oh my god how embarassing! Ha!

[Lisa B]

Well, he looks cute from this angle, I'll say that for him.

[liz s]

Totally opposite. Mine seemed energetic and would now rather spend Saturday laying around reading. But he has a good job and is a nice person. I wouldn't mind a weekend project however......

[JuliaKB]

That's impressive determination there.
My husband occasionally becomes a neat freak, and goes on a cleaning rampage. It's ironic really because most of the time his office resembles nothing so much as one of those huge floating garbage patches in the ocean that I didn't know existed until NPR introduced them to me just today.

On a separate note, is it just me who can't see anyone else's comments on redbook?

[Lisa]

My boyfriend of three years (living together for two) is the same way. He works from home, and I'll go in and tell him dinner will be ready in ten minutes, and he'll emerge like five hours later. And he's single-minded about things like that as well. Like, for example, two tiles fell off our kitchen counter recently, and he actually went out and bought grout etc and FIXED it like two days later. Shocking!

[Tan]

I'm the one with the quirks my husband has learned to live with...he's way too easy going that I feel guilty sometimes, but then I go right back to freaking out if he walks around the house in bare feet then tries to put those same bare feet under the covers without washing them first...he's slowly de-quirkifying me though :)

[Denise]

Mine was Mr. Man-About-Town, natty dresser, social butterfly when I met him. Now he has to be reminded to change his shirt and leave the house periodically. He says he was only doing it to meet women. I'm still crazy about him, though.

[eliza]

mine is the calmest man alive. he is calm in the face of so much. however, he is also prone to waking me up in the middle of the night to tell me a joke he's just thought of (yes, really) and odd bouts of hysterics (sometimes in public. once in the supermarket, about dog food.) we both have our quirks, though, so the other's quirks are still sweet. give it another couple of years, who knows if they still will be! hope so.

[Lisa]

My obsessive high-bandwidth-needer actually paid to have a T-1 put up to our house (we live in EBF central Maryland) then figured how to share it with the rest of the neighborhood to defray our costs, since none of those suckers had cable either. Yes, that means he spends many weekend afternoons in other people's attics fussing with routers and other things I don't understand. Or helping neighbors figure what their teenagers put on their PCs to slow their processors to a crawl so they realize the internet service is slow. Girl, I feel your pain.

[Pam L]

Well, let's see, does marrying a layed back easy going let-it-be kind of guy, who later turns into your father in-law count? My husbands father was super strict with his kids and did not feel the guilt parents would feel now for striking a child. He had a heavy hand and my husband did not have a relationship with him as an adult until he was 35. Imagine my surprise when we became parents and as time went by his strictness bloomed. He does not hit, but he has rules, and rules and rules and they are all followed by some sort of punishment if broken. He's a good man, and does balance out my tendancies to be the softee in all of this, but it was a shock. Also, he has, in the last 5 years or so, become an undeclared republican/comservative with very different views than he had politically when we met. They say it happens when you have more money to lose, but it was also a surprise. But, he's a lovable, reliable stnad up kind of guy, whom I love, when he's not driving me crazy. We do not talk politics.

[Lisa]

But do you have faster internet now???????

[swimmermom]

My DH was sharing an apartment with two other guys when I met him. The place was so neat and tidy -- all the time! DH made his bed every morning, picked up his clothes, put all his things away where they belonged, wiped down the counter when he made toast . . . was I impressed! Only when it was too late did I find out that one of the roommates (also a very close longtime friend of DH's) was the neat freak and set the rules for the apartment. We've been together 20 years this summer and I can say for a fact that DH is a s-l-o-b. I just wish I could figure out what the friend did to make him toe the line, because nothing I've tried has worked.

Oh well, DH has many redeeming qualities and in many ways our life together has been better than I bargained for. Guess I'll keep him in spite of the long-ago false advertising!

[Arwen]

I actually figured out where he was in the picture without reading ahead. For some reason I am unduly proud of this.

I married my husband with a sigh of relief that his personality was much more like his mother's than his father's. Five years later he is becoming progressively more like - ta-da! - his father. I should have known.

[Erin]

I married a laid-back, always relaxed, never worried guy. His friends actually called him the "so be it boy" because he was famous for saying "well, so be it" and not giving a shit.

Two children, five cars, three years, two mortgages, three jobs, and two significant remodeling projects later, I realized that he's a compulsive problem-seeker. If there's something to worry about, he's on it. If there's even the remote possibility of a problem, he's right there turning that molehill into a giant lava-spewing volcano of Krakatoan proportions. If you fix one bathroom, you have to fix the others. If you fix the other bathroom, you should also fix the hallway leading to it. If you tear off the roof, you should also tear out all the ductwork and heat pumps. If you already have the dumpster, you should rip out everything in the house that can possibly go. If you apply for one job, you should apply for eight jobs, in three different states. If plan A doesn't work, that's okay, because he's got plans B-Z plus five. There's always a Next Thing with him. He can't ever leave well enough alone. There has to be something else to worry about, beyond the present issue.

He needs some Valium. Or I do.

[CharmingDriver]

I have been well and truly shocked by how much of a talker Deels really can be; not that I don't use 100 words when 10 will suffice at times but sometimes the Talky McTalkerson in him truly surprises me. And by surprises I mean to say, ''annoys the living hell out of me''.

[Lady Fushia]

After four and a half years with my darling man I thought I knew all his little quirks, as he believed he knew most of mine (I admit, I have a few!). We bought a house together and moved in, a relief for me after living in my little damp and cold flat and not much different for him as he still lives on the base during the week (he's in the forces). With him being Australian I'd come to accept the fact that he is very laid back, as he had come to realise that being brought up by my mother I will clean obsessively if I know we are having guests. We had a small "discussion" last week (after a few glasses of wine) about the fact that I find it slightly annoying when I have been cleaning all week/scrubbing stains out of the carpets from the last people who lived there/trimming all the hedges in the garden/etc etc and then he comes home and moves some receipts that have been sitting on the side since the week before - to me it seems like all my hard work was for nothing. Equally he finds it irritating that I will clean the whole house before I move said receipts. At times the Australian part of him simply disappears!!! Between us we should have a spotless house though with one neat freak and one clean freak living together!!!! But hey, we've just discovered the joys of DIY so I'm sure we will come across plenty more quirks we never knew we had! I still love him anyway and for some reason he still loves me! ;)

[thalia]

Julia, is all your infertility stuff going to be over at redbook now? I'm not sure I understood that you were really splitting your blog in two. Did you do that consciously or is that just the way things are panning out with this redbook deal? Because the blog feels pretty incomplete without hearing about this aspect of your life.

[Abby]

I started going out w/my husband when we were both 17, and now we're 39, so maybe it's not fair of me to pick on him but...he started out as a very easy going guy, and is now a total worrier, especially about moneyIt doesn't make life any easier. that's for sure.

[Flippy]

But thalia, if you read both blogs (bah, what's another link to go to?), then it's all complete again...with more posting. I'm happy with more posting, even if it's split up.

And yes, is your connection any faster? When we moved into our new house, in a new neighborhood, in the cable company's opinion, our address exist. I called them twice a day for 2-3 weeks to make sure we got our 3 Mbps (which is now 5 Mbps) connection at the soonest possible minute. I work from home and thought I was going to die with dialup.

Am I the only one to not find a single personality trait a surprise? We'll have been together 10 years in October and everything is still the same as when we met. I just went and asked her and she said she couldn't think of anything about me either.

[elsimom]

I married a vegetarian, non-profit working, grad school bound bike rider who could only be described as a liberal. I now have a fully carnivorous, fortune 50 working, grad school loan laden minivan driver who has become shockingly conservative. But he still makes me laugh. . . .

[Liza]

I fell in love with a slightly butch corporate executive who, after the non-legal wedding, turned out to be hiding dreams of becoming a professional stage actress and who was really about 90% femme and wanted to be a WAHM.

But she's still one of the kindest, most responsible people I've ever met. And both of us believe in those "until death do us part" vows we made, even if our relationship isn't recognized by the government.

[e]

Nope. Still can't see him. I did, I promise. Must be the short sight.

I must confess that I had suspected him to be somewhere in a tree, if only based on the somewhat feline behaviour of my own other half.

I am beginning to see where Patrick's slightly determined personality traits come from...

[Another BT Wife]

Oh my gosh! Maybe it's a bt thing. Mine swore he had no interest in any form of manual labor but once I mentioned getting a new floor in the kitchen of my townhouse...and all of a sudden the old floor was ripped up and a new floor was a must. Same when I decided I didn't like the wallpaper in our guest bath...it was attacked with passion while I slept (of course the wall required serious texturing by me to make up for the lack of finesse in the removal...). Totally obsessive about it till it's done.

Anyway - I seem to want to talk to you continuously since the REDBOOK thing started! Glad there will be posts daily b/c I am hanging on every update, hoping & praying for you guys. When we were doing IVF / PGD I remember those unbelievable moments of "wow! this COULD work. we COULD get a baby out of it. wow!" All the best to you!

[Meredith]

The only thing that stands out with my hubby is that he is even more militant about his vegetarianism than when we first met 13 years ago. He even tried to preach/harrass me out of eating meat recently!

Ha!

Dead animals all the way baby...just like 13 years ago :]

[Libby]

Why can't I see Steve??? Am I that blind, really?

[Natalee]

Ok, I'm going to post my answer before I read the rest of your post or any of the above answers....

He's in the trees. I'm assuming in his cammo for hunting?

[Natalee]

Yes!!! I was right!!! I rock!!

Well, except the cammo and hunting part, but I remember he hunts deer, and know that he'd mostly likely be used to climbing up into a tree stand for such business.

[Justin]

Why won't a satellite dish work? Do you live that far from civilazation?

[mm]

So does this mean that you'll only be posting about IF/your ivf cycle on the Redbook site?

[tgsdmom]

Me and my husband lived 3 years together after knowing each other 3 years prior to that. There were no real surprises, until after we had children. We are TOTALLY different when coming to raising kids and setting rules. And we are probably both wrong... BTW, as is usually the case, I am the softee and he is the harsh one.

[Sylvie]

Nope, do not see any Steve in that picture. Which for some reason is driving me crazy... like the answer to a puzzle is in front of me, and I can't figure it out. Any other hints to offer?

[Emily]

I still don't see Steve...couldn't you like use paint and like make a big circle around Steve or like a huge arrow saying here's Steve.

[Nearlydawn]

I realize this post is really old and all, but I thought it worth mentioning that I think I married your hubby's long-lost brother. I soooo understand your man... Ugh - but you have to love how much they get done!

Oh, does yours look up everything where the answer is questionable? When we discuss things, even with strangers, and hubby doesn't know for sure if something he or the other person says is right he will look it up. It might be 3 days later, but hubby will stroll in and say, very proudly that "I looked up the director of "Buggydoodles" and it's actually Ken Whatzit, not Joe Blow like I thought." It really kinda creeps me out sometimes. :)