Skip to main content

Staying Apart

 As someone who believed that sharing space with someone everyday is the thing that destroys relationships and indeed spent a good many years diving between two homes to prevent, I understand this issue of needing separate bedrooms. In many situations, this bit of space and the room to breathe undisturbed can be what it takes to keep the relationship eco-system survivable. But based on my personal experience it does not make for peace, comfort and tranquility that makes that relationship a sanctuary one craves for. That can happen when this need for separation and space dissolves - sometimes the process and slow and winding but given enough time and patience the dissolution might come about and bring great results for both. The need for private time and space is a real one but it can be accomplished in many other ways without needing be in separate bedrooms

..according to the International Housewares Association, a trade organization, 31% of surveyed couples who said they sleep apart reported that the arrangement had no impact on their relationship, and 21% said that their relationship improved because of it. (Granted, the remaining half of the respondents did not see the setup in such a positive light.)

Reading this reminds of one of my younger relatives who has recently bought her first home and does not share it full-time with her boyfriend of two years. The relationship as she describes it is strong and happy but she needs her space and does not like being crowded. So the man goes back and forth between his place and hers based on what she is in the mood for. Sometimes she visits him in his home and spends time there if he does not feel like coming over. There are two homes separated by a few miles and to my old-fashioned soul, this sounds like a woman who is not sure about who she is with.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...

Carefree Wandering

There are these lines in Paul Cohelo's Alchemist that I love about the shepherd turning a year later to sell wool and being unsure if he would meet the girl there But in his heart he knew that it did matter. And he knew that shepherds, like seamen and like traveling salesmen, always found a town where there was someone who could make them forget the joys of carefree wandering. What is true of the the power of love and making a person want to settle is also true of  finding purpose in life. If and when a person is able to connect their work to purpose they care about, the desire for change disappears. They are able to instead channel that energy into enhancing the quality of the work they are already doing. As I write this, I remember S a brand manager I used to know a couple of decades ago. He worked for a company that made products for senior citizens, I was a consultant there. S was responsible for creating awareness of their new products and building awareness of what already ex...