The Most Unlikely Couple ~ The Aftermath, Pt. II

Summer's almost here!

The Wife and I had no idea what we were doing when we got married. Not necessarily in regard to marriage, but certainly in many other respects.

I was a journalist and I worked out a lot. Those were my defining characteristics. I hoped to someday, maybe, live closer to my family in Florida and maybe work at a big paper. These are the dreams of 28-year-olds who live 2,500 miles away from their families.

The Wife didn't have a job when she moved to Utah. She worked at a naturopathic doctor's office in Duluth, but they were hesitant to open an office in Salt Lake City. She was going to take some time to figure that out.

If you're miserably busy with jobs and kids and commitments, taking a few months to watch Netflix probably sounds delightful. TW was fairly miserable after about two weeks of that. Marriage, it turns out, does not make your life better. Your life is not a RomCom starring Mila Kunis and Justin Timberlake. It turns out, even after an amazing love story, somebody has to scrub the bathroom toilet. They don't show that in the movies.

Add to the disappointment in marriage the fact that unemployed simply sucks. And TW had moved 1,300 miles from home the day after our wedding. She had no friends. She had no job. The summer of 2005 was not a happy one.

In the fall of 2005, TW was flipping through the classified ads of The Salt Lake Tribune. It's a quaint notion, I know, somebody actually using a newspaper to find a job without the help of LinkedIn or Indeed.com. TW spotted an ad that sounded appealing. It would allow her to work from home. It paid pretty well.

I had never heard of the profession when TW took a job as a part-time health coach. She thought it sounded perfect. She could work from home and not be overwhelmed by work.

Then we did something stupid. We got a second Labrador retriever. TW was stuck at home all day, five days a week, with our two jackass Labradors, Duke and Jack. They would hound her to play with them. "THROW THE TENNIS BALL FOR THE NEXT YEAR OF LIFE!" their eyes would say. Then they would start wrestling, their bodies rolling into the walls and their faux snarling overheard by TW's clients.

Jack lasted six months in our house before it became clear this arrangement was never going to work. It was like breaking up with a girlfriend, getting rid of Jack. We knew it was the right thing to do but that didn't make it any easier.

As a one-dog family, we began to thrive a bit. I got promoted a couple of times. TW got promoted a couple of times. We were loving life, in no small way because we were having career success. And the fun times just kept coming. I started doing TV and radio work. They asked me to put out the skiing page at the newspaper. TW was increasingly important to her company.

We were also increasingly rarely seeing each other. But we had Sundays together, which in the summer of 2008 was a glorious thing. We were going on dates. TW went golfing and liked it. This is no small news. We were remembering why we click as a couple.

And then TW came to me with something that was on her mind. She'd been thinking about going to graduate school to be a physician assistant. She wanted a career that she could do anywhere in the country, giving us the ability to live wherever we wanted to live. Mostly, she didn't want to look back at the end of her life and wish she gone to PA school.

When your wife says she needs to do something, you've got to have her back. You can't argue with that. But all this success we'd been having. The jobs. The privileges. All of that stuff had to go.

But I loved my job. TW loved her job. And she had years of classes to take before she could even apply to graduate school. How would we pull this off?

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