HOW FRIENDS WHO PROVIDE THINGS A PARTNER DOESN’T WON’T THREATEN A RELATIONSHIP.
My High School Japanese Teacher was married to an engineer. I asked her if he could speak Japanese and she said no and that he wasn’t interested in learning it. She, by the same token, found his career equally boring.
When I lived in a small seaside town, I knew a Japanese man who was married to an Australian woman, and both were Japanese language teachers.
Throughout my time at school, I knew many teachers who were married to other teachers, even if they taught at different levels (my Modern History Teacher was married to a Primary School Teacher) and some High School Teachers who married other High School Teachers didn’t teach the same subjects as each other. (In Queensland, most high school teachers teach two subjects. I remember a student teacher whose subject combinations, as unusual as they might sound, were Drama and Math. Still, she might have said, “I like Drama for the creative side of my brain and Math for the logical side,” and there’s nothing wrong with that, either.)
No two people who get married will share all the same interests, regardless of their ethnicity, sex, neurotype or any other variable. I remember a woman jokingly saying on a dance competition show that her male dance partner, at competition time, saw more of her than her husband did. Now, if we took the ridiculous doctor’s beliefs, he would have said, “You might have to tell your dance partner that you can’t see as much of him.” And to that I say, “Wrong answer.” Why? Well, three reasons. One, two people may have brilliant dancing chemistry, but that doesn’t mean that they have romantic chemistry. Two, let’s take Roxette. The late Marie Fredrikksen and Per Gessle were male and female, Marie was married with a daughter, Josefin, and Per married his girlfriend. As a musical duo, they had brilliant chemistry, but neither of their marriages were threatened by them going on tour together. And three, what sometimes happens, is couples who spend all their time together break up because they get sick of each other. It’s not uncommon for retirees to break up, because if say the man has been the breadwinner, and he left home at 7:30am and didn’t arrive home until 6:30pm and his wife provided him his meal and they watched TV and went to bed at 10pm, and he then went to full-time retirement and he got in the way, it can be troublesome. So, I would say to any couple going into retirement, you need to have your separate interests. I would even say to them, if you want to travel, rather than just living on the road, travel in bits, so have three weeks or months doing this, come home, one partner does their thing, the other theirs and have time together and time apart. And that doesn’t mean, for heterosexual couples, the man can only go to the Men’s Shed, and the women to the CWA, it means, they can have their interests.
This ridiculous doctor also claimed that you should keep it professional and to that, I say, if two people who are in the same company are on different levels, there is a potential for a power imbalance if it becomes sexual (for example, a senior ranking man and a lower ranking woman) but if two people are on the same ranking and they have a shared interest, just make sure you don’t cross any boundaries.
And, the other ridiculous claim that he made that if a man has a fight with his partner over the weekend and confides in a female colleague, or vice versa, is just that. To suggest that a man who confides in a female colleague will end up leaving his partner for his colleague as sure as Wednesday follows Tuesday is akin to adding two and two and coming up with five. And, something else that this ridiculous doctor forgets when he says that women are becoming more like men is this, if a male goes up to male friends and says, “Hey, Guys, I had a fight with my partner over the weekend and she’s gone to see her Mum for a few days,” many males would say, “Oh, she’ll be back,” or, “Come down to the boozer and we’ll have a jug!” whereas women will tend to turn to their female friends, and suggest a block of chocolate, a sad movie and a box of tissues. Okay, in this respect, my father and I are exceptions and I remember a good friend of my father’s having a son with leukaemia and when he was diagnosed, Dad sat with him for half an hour. The female friend with the racist husband would not have done what Dad did.
The true answer is, it’s not a person who provides something that a partner doesn’t that threatens a relationship, rather it’s either an incompatibility of the partners or a crossing of the boundaries that can threaten a relationship. And hey, let’s not forget that not everybody lives in a monogamous relationship and it’s not for society to judge.