How to Survive Marital Whiplash

What Does Love Look Like after Almost Three Decades?

“So I’m off to the gym,” my husband says, yanking on a T-shirt. “I’ll start dinner when I get back.”

“Thanks,” I say, but I can’t help staring at the guy like he’s some random FedEx driver who’s wandered into my office.

In the nearly 30 years Dan and I have been married, this is the first time I’ve heard those particular words tumble out of his mouth. Not the part about cooking dinner—it’s a given in our family that Dan’s the family cook. Whether you want homemade Ramen or paella, he’s your guy. A tuna melt? Call me.

No, it’s the idea of him going to the gym. In all my days with this man—and there have been many—he has never once voluntarily signed up for his own gym membership, much less actually gone. Now he’s doing CrossFit, no less.

I’m suffering from Marital Whiplash this Valentine’s Day. If you’ve been partnered for any length of time, you probably know what that is: a situation where the person you are most intimate with suddenly adopts a whole new identity. It might be a small change, like suddenly wearing hip Blundtstone boots instead of sneakers, or playing electronic music instead of Taylor Swift.

I suffered my most serious case of Marital Whiplash last year when Dan took a job in California while I held down the fort in Massachusetts. For seven months we did the bicoastal marriage thing and learned a lot. He started talking to random strangers in bars because he ate a lot of dinners out. I learned how to fix the thermostat and did the snow shoveling.

Whenever Dan came home, we’d have little bicker sessions about things like, “Why are the spatulas on the right side of the stove?” And, whenever I visited him, I’d wonder how he kept his glassware so neatly spaced.

Then the tech job ended and Dan came home. Instead of commanding every horizontal space in the house for my editing, gift-wrapping, and newspaper-reading sessions, I had to pick up after myself, and there were no more slumber parties with my girlfriends. Dan had to learn how to share the covers in bed again. (Translation: Give them all to me.) I was working and he was job hunting, and then the war broke out in Israel and one of our daughters, who lives in Tel Aviv with her baby and husband, came to stay with us for three months. I went from having a house to myself to suddenly having three generations sharing a kitchen. It was a tremendous blessing, but my neck is still sore from that particular whiplash.

Then our daughter and her family returned to Israel, and Dan announced he was going to give up job hunting and retire instead.

“Retire?” I asked. “As in, you won’t go to work anymore?” My husband isn’t yet that magical Medicare age; we’d have to pony up the money to buy health insurance.

“That’s usually what the word means, yes,” Dan says.

“So what will you do instead of working?”

He gave this a little thought, then said, “I want to do house projects and make nice food for people.”

“You won’t miss having a job?” My voice was a squeak as panic set in. Not about money, or at least not yet, but about having to weather another case of Marital Whiplash.

“Not a bit.”

And he hasn’t. Dan launched right into a project he has put on hold for several years—building a new outdoor grill cabinet—and, true to his word, dinner’s on the table every night.

“Every day is a gift,” he says, then adds, “Ow, my lats. That last workout was brutal. I’d better do some yoga.”

Lats? Yoga? Who is this guy?

I’m surviving this particular Marital Whiplash by keeping my office door closed during the day. I’ve also had to wrap my mind around the idea that Dan is now free to tag along on my business trips. Oh, and sometimes I have to take a little time to find things in the closets because he’s suddenly reorganized and moved everything around.

On the other hand, we’re once again learning a new marital choreography. This is much better than being in a stagnant relationship where your routines are so cemented in place that you can’t imagine doing anything else. And, hey, Ramen’s on the menu again!

Dan’s right. Every day is a gift. Happy Valentine’s Day, everyone.