Late Night Grand Hotel

My husband and I have a long distance relationship again. It's almost like when we were dating, except that we're married now. It's amazing how easily we've reverted to old patterns: weekend travel, e-mail chatter throughout the day, text messages at odd moments, and long late night telephone conversations. Those conversations were a staple of our courtship. God knows what we talked about every night, but the phone would ring between 10:30 and 11:00, and we'd spend an hour, sometimes two, just talking.

When I moved to the small town and began traveling for my job, we never talked for more than a few minutes at a time. We always touched base at the end of the day, but our good night calls were routine -- how did your day go, what do you have on tap tomorrow, what are you doing tonight, I miss you... and that was about it. We seldom talked about big things when I was on the road, since everything could wait a couple days until I got home. Of course, for the first six months after I moved, he used my absence as an excuse to see the other woman -- it was sort of hard to have a big conversation with her in the room. But even after he broke it off, we never resumed our late night ramblings.

So it came as quite a surprise when I realized that we've been talking for an hour or more each night. Yeah, we still talk about the rudimentary things in our lives, but we also talk about intangibles like our hopes and dreams for this new place. He's looking at the move as an adventure, and he's sharing every bit of it with me. I know that there are things that scare him, but he's made it clear that he's not following me, that this was his choice. He appreciates it that I'm doing everything I know how to ease his transition. Still, no matter how much he says otherwise, I know it'll be rough when that moving van pulls away.

But we're talking. Every night, and into the wee hours. This is progress.


The Wife Who Knows