For all those of you contemplating marriage here is some timely advice.
Go camping!
And if you can manage it, see if you can get it to rain heavily, take a tent that leaks, and particularly make sure you take some kids along with you as well.
Years ago in another life, I was teaching overseas a University Girls Class in English as a second language and we had to come up with topics that would get the class fired up and interested in speaking so much so that they wanted to be understood so that they attached a lot of intensity to communicating.
(As an aside I had a mad English (well Manchester is in England) friend who was so aggrieved that his contract was not being extended as his students had complained he was not speaking English they understood from their lifetime exposure to American English, that he set as the exam for that year that the class had to listen along to REM's "End of The World As We Know It" and write down large chunks of missing lyrics.)
We came up with a topic that went along the lines of 'how do you get to know a guy really well before you consider marrying them?'.
So we came up with a list of ways we called 'try before you buy'.
We started out slow with safe topics like go find out their favourite movie, what type of food do they like, but then it got interesting as they started to get into it. Here are just some of what came out...
1. Get them really, really, really drunk,
2. Spill boiling coffee on them, (that's boiling boys, you heard it here first, girls are mean!),
3. Scratch/crash their car,
4. Scratch/crash their parent's car,
5. Borrow money from them and gamble it away,
6. Get them involved in a fight,
7. Embarrass them in front of their boss,
8. Go camping with them!
It was the last of these I thought of recently as we were in the middle of a camping trip.
Now happily married with 2 children I am here to say that camping brings out your true nature like nothing else.
Ever read about those endurance weekends where athletes are taken away and put through torture as a way of getting them to bond? As far as I can tell, that is basically camping with children.
Imagine day after day stuck in tent that leaks with bored children, all roads in and out flooded, a gas cooker which has run out of gas, rain so hard you think you are going to go mad, endless cold tinned food, leeches just thirsting for your blood, the indefinable smell of damp clothes and wet hair.
And you planned it, you went and bought special gear and took time off work, missed your local football match, spent God knows how much on fuel, getting the car serviced, sleeping at night on cold hard wet ground, while all the time you have a lovely dry home you are paying off somewhere.
And yet on day four, the rain cleared, the water had washed everything from the trees to the sky clean, the children were excited about watching the creeks flood into the river and the crabs were just walking into the pots.
Something magical happened that you would never have got at home watching TV.
People all around emerged from their little tents, swags and vans, just happy to see the sun.
A huge impromptu lunch was thrown together with roast crab, tinned whatever, egg salad from a local farm that had just rebuilt its bridge.
The children in that magical way of theirs seemed to find each other in the clearing by the trees and played madly, happily, joyously with 4 days of cooped up wiggles and craziness lighting up their games as rocket fuel.
The beers came out and we met people we would never have talked to otherwise as all the tensions and frustrations of the past four days were washed away, someone hooked up some outdoor speakers to their car stereo and as the afternoon sun shone gold some early John Mellancamp reminded us of how simple it is to be happy.
Ah camping, the best of times, the worst of times.
Perhaps there is some merit to considering it as a valid trial of married life after all.
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