I didn’t marry my neighbor, but my neighbor is my wife. Here’s how it happened. Annie and I married and like most folks who marry or make what they hope is a lifetime commitment, we lived together. Notice I didn’t say we decided to live together. It was just a given. You get married, you live together. End of story.

Or just the beginning. We decided to live in my place, 1200 square feet of my place. I’d lived alone for so long; I’d forgotten how much I liked living alone. I’d lived here longer than any place after a lifetime of moving, sometimes before the boxes had been unpacked. I felt at home. I wanted her to feel at home here too. So, I had the bright idea of allowing her to decorate. Have those folks at the human genome project found the gene that demands a domesticated human hang worthless pieces of tangled branches on a wall? 

I quickly decided to renegotiate how our place would look. So like most folks of reason, we worked out compromises. I haven’t looked up compromise in a while, but I bet it says, “Take turns being grumpy.” After a while, my testosterone readjusted and we found out what our real issues would be.

I was 46 and she was, shall we say younger, when we married. It was, as I like to say, my only marriage. Annie says I’m her favorite husband. Look up “set in your ways” and you’ll see our pictures. We were exactly alike in one area – the need for personal space. Try finding that in 1200 square feet when a good chunk of it is my office, I mean the office we shared.

We were different in one area though. Can you say Felix and Oscar? Of course we knew all this before living together, but knowledge doesn’t do you much good when you decide to plan a wedding, especially when it’s my first and her last. It didn’t take long for the fog of lust hormones to wear off when I’d turn on the kitchen light and find peanut butter on the light switch. Turning on the light only allowed me to find more peanut butter in places I didn’t know the kitchen had.

Believe me; we compromised as hard as any two highly evolved people could. We healed childhood issues that caused us to approach house keeping from opposite ends of the universe. With about 30 years of therapy between us by then, we knew the drill. There were actually times when we believed we could live peacefully together, mostly when one of us was out of town.

I did become more forgiving. She did learn to put things away. We learned to be a little more like the other. When Annie was diagnosed with ovarian cancer, much of our irritation subsided. I learned to clean up after her in gratitude. I would vacuum the crumbs off the couch and be thankful they were there. Those messes meant Annie was still with me.

Almost three years of cancer treatment changed much of who we normally were. Marriage changes people anyway. Being newly married and living with cancer, speeds up the process. We became who we had to be - survivors. We came through it well. I think big events make us more of who we really are. We saw the good and bad in us, but mostly we loved.

When her treatments ended, we had changed. What didn’t change is our approach to what makes us feel comfortable in our home. I never felt one ounce of resentment cleaning up after her when the messes happened while she was feeling sick or tired from the treatments. I’m a good nurse, more than willing to be there for her. When the messes happened when Annie was healthy again, it wasn’t so easy for me to practice gratitude. 

I think there is only so much one can change about certain characteristics. We had changed all we could. Still believing that married people lived together our differences finally led to an all or nothing stance. If we couldn’t live together, we had to divorce. Just as I was about to take that stance, a new idea emerged. 

When Annie was diagnosed with cancer, we bought the condo upstairs from the one we lived in so her daughter Meghan could be close to her mom. It also gave us more space, which we really needed to satisfy our desire for personal space. After Meghan left to live with her husband to be, Annie began to make the upstairs condo a bit more of her own. Little by little, she was moving out, though we didn’t see it that way. If she were moving out, wouldn’t that mean something was wrong with our marriage?

Little things like nights when our sleep schedules didn’t coincide, she slept upstairs. I got tired of doing her laundry and didn’t like how she did mine, so she started doing her laundry upstairs. She already had made an office for herself upstairs, so it was beginning to feel like her space. She spent less time in what I called my office.

When the moment of divorce came, I thought it’d be a good idea to talk to my wife about it. Could you believe she wasn’t so happy living with me? Somehow we came up with the idea of her living full time upstairs. I was ready for her to move out anyway. It only took her about 15 minutes to think it was a good idea. By the end of the day, she had her stuff moved out. My wife, became my neighbor. The enormous release of tension in our marriage was immediate. She declared me her boyfriend and we made dates to see each other. 

She’s comfortable making messes and not hearing me complain. I’m comfortable cleaning a counter in the evening and seeing it clean again the next day. As we shared our story, the reactions were entertaining. We got every type of response from, “What a great idea!” to, “Are you guys okay? Are you getting a divorce?” There are a few people who still, after a number of months of Annie and I being neighbors, wonder if our marriage is okay, though we assure them it’s not only okay, it’s better now.

I came to realize how brainwashed we’d been about what marriage means. I’ve been quite surprised to find beliefs about relationships that can only be explained by blindly accepting cultural norms. Who says you have to live together? Who says you can’t take separate vacations? Who says you have to see each other every day, or sleep together every night?

What I’ve come to say is, “We’re grown ups. We can do whatever we want and have whatever kind of relationship we want.” I’ve come to believe much of the trouble couples have is due to belief systems dictating couples have certain ways and types of relationships. Of course this isn’t news to me, but I didn’t realize how deeply ingrained some of these beliefs are and that I’d never really questioned them. 

In working with couples who were exploring whether or not they wanted to marry, I’d always ask about their desire to have children. I used to think that was the one area where there was no room to compromise. If one partner wanted children and the other didn’t, they certainly couldn’t marry. Now I think they actually could. It would be odd in this culture to have such an arrangement. I think it’s way past time for some oddness to happen. 

Our world is becoming polarized as people more deeply conform. This country is quickly becoming those on the right, those on the left and the left outs. 

Annie and I learned the lesson that e. e. cummings once spoke of: "To be nobody...but yourself in a world which is doing its best night and day to make you everyone else...means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting." I want our culture to be more accepting of differences. I want couples to form relationships based on who they are, not who they think they should be or how they think they should live. I hope that others can find the freedom to be grown ups and live life being yourself before they’re fifty and furthermore.

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