Radio and TV shrink Dr. Joy Browne has a new book out and a basic tenet is this: the animal aspects of a man 25 to 55 nowdays manifests itself in his work.
Browne, to her credit and to which I agree, has always preached effectiveness over perfection. So effective spouses understand the male's need for comfort and do some accomodating when the hunter-gatherer comes home from a long day.
I bring this up because all couples face adjustments as their time together increases. It goes by different names -- giving somebody space -- but it boils down to realizing you don't have to spend every minute doing the exact same thing, that a man deserves a life past a honey-do list, that a woman can have a completely separate recreational life (shopping versus football).
I have long contended, and have in fact lived, the theory that the strength of a couple is directly proportional to the amount of time they spend apart at parties.
All of which leads me to my premise. If the day-to-day adds stress, why day-to-day it?
Think of romance as orange juice. Do you need the fresh daily squeeze or do you prefer it concentrated?
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I believe making a sharp distinction between work and play makes me a better man. Instead of putting a woman through my work-related grumpiness, I do my work while she's nowhere around and then forget my work entirely when I'm around her. I get to be a better male warrior animal when I have to be, and I'm a more caring companion when I'm supposed to be.
The concentration aspects of an out-of-towner makes the impossible (shopping over football) possible. Note to world: there is no greater pleasure than watching a good-looking woman try on good-looking clothes; there is no greater agony than a wife dragging you around asking "does this make my butt look big?"
Truthfully, not everyone is cut out for a commuter relationship, both for emotional and financial reasons. In a lot of ways, it's like being a mistress (or a mister) without the significant other to hurt. By it's very part-time nature, the relationship becomes secondary. Work and life are the wife; the fun is on the weekends.
Many women can't accept the love of their life being secondary unless, of course, they have kids, in which case they have plenty of experience in the life-changing notion that there is something in your life more important than yourself. For many single moms, such arrangements make perfect sense. The male animal gets to plunder and thunder out of sight and she gets her rest and her hugs and her need for someone to take care of her after she's been taking care of everybody else.
The second type of woman who seems adaptable to an out of towner is the career-driven workaholic who has to spend so much of her life acting like those stupid hunter-gatherer males. Men, unless they are wimpish, needy clingers, can generally adapt to out of towners because we are better compartmentalizers -- we can flip the mental switch (and explaining a man's switch to a woman is like explaining to man if a lady is a winter or a summer).
The inevitable tug for any weekend warrior couple is to want to move the occasional bliss to the day-to-day. Wise couples know this is surekill, the guardedly optimistic couple will take such things very very slowly, and couples living some Hollywood script will wind up catastrohpic failures.
Intimacy, true great touching intimacy, is about adjusting to and loving with your partner. Some adjustments -- I'm just back from Vegas and here's your new daddy -- create enough tension to be worthy of total avoidance. The first rule of a successful out-of-town relationship is to not fix what is not broken.
Many people see relationships as having momentum, that if it's not moving forward, not progressing, then it's stagnating. Weekend warriors tend to not have such lofty interpretations; that life is about living, and that at some point, you move from regretting things you have done to regretting things you didn't do.
Just obey the posted speed limits and you'll be fine.
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If you're looking for G.L. Marshall on weekends, odds are he's out of town .
