Friday means not only the weekend, but also it’s time for

Inspired by the Weekend Soiree over at Wifely Steps (and pretty much using her idea, to be honest, but you can go over there and play on her site as well!), we’re going to have a bit of conversation here on site. I’ll be responding when and where I can, but it would be great for the readers to respond to each other as well.

If you make a comment and it doesn’t show up, let me know using the ‘contact me’ button under the site description on the right. That way, as soon as I see the email I can rescue it from the depths of the spam filter. But, seeing as the spam filter is no longer regarding me as spam, I’m hoping none of you will have any problem.

The way the game works is this:

I pick a theme that we’ll be talking about and will start off things with a question. The first person to come along will then answer that question and ask another question still relating to the theme.

Eg. The theme is peanut butter. I ask, “Do you like peanut butter?” Someone answers and at the end of the comment asks, “When was the first time you tried peanut butter?” So on and so forth.

Easy? Yes, I thought so. Which brings me to the theme and the question for this week:

Theme: Family

Question: Do you get along with your family?

Why don’t we take a break from discussing ages and answer this week’s Love Question from Short Sweet Love Poems?

As always, feel free to discuss in the comments and/or link to your blog where you have answered the question.

In a relationship, there are bound to be areas that are sore points for both people. For instance, your partner may not take your views on his family too kindly and on the other hand, you may not like him bringing up a past incident in your life.

For Love Q #19: Do you think avoiding a touchy topic helps or hinders a relationship?

This is another one of those where the line is drawn in different places for different couples. In general, though, I think it depends on the topic, how it got to be a touchy topic and how direct of an influence it has on a relationship.

For instance, take the topic of having children. That can have a huge influence on the relationship and could severely hinder things if left alone for the sake of keeping the peace. However, if you both agree on the having/not having children but it got to be a pushy topic because one partner natters on about it endlessly, then the partner in question would be doing the relationship a favor by stepping off it for a while.

I hope I’m making sense.

In the end, it all depends on the circumstances. In the past I would have said that you need to talk about as much as you can, but I have since learned the value of leaving well enough alone to keep the peace when discussion doesn’t solve anything.

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As a friend to my husband, he would have had suspicions anyway, but I think he had even more doubts because of how much younger I am than my husband.

That is well and truly behind us now and he has no doubts about me now that he has gotten to know me. All the other people who have gotten to know me also don’t have any problems with my relationship with my husband. Sometimes newer people stop and blink for a moment, but they are always polite and the moment is forgotten later.

However, my husband and I – and Alex and Jenny – can’t get to know and become friends with everyone. Some people will simply never accept such relationships and others, well, there just isn’t time to make friends with the rest of the world.

Thus, we continue to face some scrutiny and sometimes even outright disgust. But such is life and such is the price we pay for our love for each other.

Most of us say that ‘as long as you love each other, that’s what matters’, but is it? Would it begin to matter to you if a couple had ten years difference between them? How about twenty? Thirty? More?

When does it start to matter? Does it ever reach the point of being ‘wrong’? Who, if anyone, gets the authority to decide?

But Alex and Jenny have endured the glances and stares as well, perhaps even more so as an age gap couple of a slightly different kind – a younger man with an older woman. Either way, they both knew exactly what my husband was talking about when he asked them if they received ‘the look’ very much.

We pondered the strangeness of it, given that there are still traditional age gap marriages and that it wasn’t so long ago (in the grand scheme of things) that a ‘healthy’ gap between the two people together was considered the norm. While none of us condone minors being forced into marriages they don’t want, we all agreed that as long as both partners are both legal adults, there shouldn’t be a problem.

And yet, there seems to be for some people. The stereotypical images of the gold-digging trophy wife and the ‘cougar’ going for a young man with more stamina come to mind.

Alex wondered if, perhaps, so many celebrity couples breaching age gaps would help generate more acceptance among the general population for age gap couples.

Sadly, my husband and I didn’t (and don’t) think so. While others attempt to emulate celebrity life, age gap relationships probably won’t come ‘in fashion’. At least not for a while yet.

The subject? Having a significant age gap in your relationship.

He revealed that he has a girlfriend – ‘Jenny’ – and they are like any other couple except for one thing: She is sixteen years older than he is.

He couldn’t write about his own relationship for the project, so he decided to interview the next significant age gap couple he knew. Fortunately for us, that was my husband and me.

My husband and I were aware of the difference in our ages when we first began falling in love. My husband was a bit hesitant at first, but I showed him that it didn’t matter to me and that it shouldn’t matter to him.

However, no matter how much we are in love, we always have the niggling fear that some people will criticize our relationship just for the fact that we weren’t born closer together in time. We have been pleasantly surprised by the number of people who accept us as we are, but that doesn’t mean we haven’t had some strange looks from people.

Talking about it is one thing, but living the reality is an entirely different matter. While celebrities have the ‘oh, they are just celebrities’ buffers, the everyday people who live in age gap relationships face a different kind of celebrity – and not a good kind.

As a former barman, my husband knows what it’s like to spend hours on your feet – both on the busy nights and the boring ones. He likes to make friends among the staff of our local pub and teach them a thing or two about bar work – and about life when he gets the chance.

One friend of ours – I’ll call him Alex to give him a bit of privacy – came to work at the pub and quickly struck up a good, fun friendship with us. Alex is my age, studying to be a journalist and has a writing style I’m fascinated by. But for all the months we knew him, we had another thing in common with him that came as a complete – and pleasant – surprise.

Alex is one half of a happy relationship. He and his girlfriend, ‘Jenny’, met at a work Christmas party. Not long after that – after a very nervous text message from Jenny – they sat down for ‘the relationship chat’ and have been together ever since. Both a bit shy but with great smiles, they make an excellent couple.

My husband and I are in a happy relationship as well, but that’s not what we have in common with Alex and Jenny. We share a somewhat unique relationship trait:

A significant relationship age gap.

While we may think of Anna Nicole Smith or Demi Moor and Ashton Kutcher when we think of age gaps in relationships, those kind of relationships certainly aren’t limited to the celebrity world. In today’s world, people don’t often look their age and you might be surprised to find out that some couples have a bigger age gap than you realized…

Inspired by the Weekend Soiree over at Wifely Steps (and pretty much using her idea, to be honest, but you can go over there and play on her site as well!), we’re going to have a bit of conversation here on site. I’ll be responding when and where I can, but it would be great for the readers to respond to each other as well.

If you make a comment and it doesn’t show up, let me know using the ‘contact me’ button under the site description on the right. That way, as soon as I see the email I can rescue it from the depths of the spam filter. But, seeing as the spam filter is no longer regarding me as spam, I’m hoping none of you will have any problem.

The way the game works is this:

I pick a theme that we’ll be talking about and will start off things with a question. The first person to come along will then answer that question and ask another question still relating to the theme.

Eg. The theme is peanut butter. I ask, “Do you like peanut butter?” Someone answers and at the end of the comment asks, “When was the first time you tried peanut butter?” So on and so forth.

Easy? Yes, I thought so. Which brings me to the theme and the question for this week:

Theme: Best Friends

Question: Do you have a best friend?

It’s that time again and we have another interesting question from Short Sweet Love Poems. Given the answers to the previous questions, I’m curious to see what people have to say about this one.

If you answered on your blog, leave a link in the comments here. If you don’t have a blog, then join in the discussion here and check out the main page (linked above) for comments from other participants.

This week’s question:

In many relationships, it comes a point when the thought of marriage will creep into the picture for the woman. She longs for the commitment and security of a married life with the one she loves but unfortunately, the man may not have the same thought yet.

So for Love Q #18: How do you feel about a woman proposing to a man? For those women out there, would you be comfortable doing so if you truly feel you are ready for marriage?

I don’t feel much of anything, to be honest. If she wants to do it, then why not?

I suppose I’m old fashioned in many ways, but in this, I don’t think it’s a big deal or particularly scandalous if the woman wants to ask the man to marry her.

The only thing about this would be, for me, that you know your man well before deciding to pop the question. (Yes, you should know him well for marriage sake, but bear with me…) If you’re with the kind of guy who likes to be ‘the man’ then he might not take you proposing very well.

But had my husband not asked first, I would have asked. No drama.

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But, like all couples, we have bills, goals and trips to take (for work and for pleasure).

Early this year, after noticing all the change that built up in what we used as the laundry change bowl before we got a washing machine, I thought we could keep on doing the same thing with all our coins. (Australian has $1 and $2 coins as well as five cents, ten cents, etc.) So I left the bowl for the silver change (coins under $1) and set up a jar for the gold coins ($1 and $2).

I have to say, it’s probably one of the better things I have done to help us save money.

For the first half of the year, we saved up money to help pay off the $500+ car registration fee in July. We didn’t expect to save the full amount, but we were very pleasantly surprised to have saved more than half the fee. That really helped us get out of the tight mid-winter financial squeeze we usually go through.

Then I went to the doctor and have since been having such good results that we decided it would be a good idea for my husband to go as well. The first appointment costs $100, so we decided to save up for that. Once again combining the silver and gold coins saved, we already have $100 and the appointment isn’t for another two weeks.

It may not seem like a lot when you’re putting the change in the jar, but it sure can add up fast. Having the spare change jar and bowl has helped us save for important things so we don’t always have to be thinking in terms of money and can think more in terms of what we really need. It’s also getting us easily into the habit of saving more.

Do you find it easy or hard to save money? Do you have any simple saving tricks to help things along?

Ahem. Let’s try that again.

With so many restrictions on what I can and can’t eat and basically losing nearly all my comfort food (both unhealthy and healthy), my recent way of dealing with stress is talking to my husband more. (The poor man.)

We were out having Greek the other night (thankfully I can still eat most of the yummy food they have on offer) and I was talking about how everything was going.

After telling him how much weight I’ve lost so far, etc, I said, “The most difficult part of this whole thing is the eating every three hours. Sometimes I just plain don’t want to eat.”

He thought about it a moment. “Well, you could always eat smaller things. Even a half or a quarter of a banana is still eating.”

“I already make my portions smaller. Sometimes I’m just not hungry anyway and sometimes it’s a mental thing – I don’t want to see, smell or even think about food.”

“You could skip a meal. Spread the rest out a bit.”

“No, I can’t, really,” I said, picking at my food with a bit of irritation. “I need to stick with what she says, at least for the six weeks. The whole point of eating so often is to steady out my blood sugar.”

At that point he opened his mouth to make another suggestion but stopped and just grinned. “This is another one of those Mars and Venus things. I want to fix the problem and – ”

“And I just want to complain a bit,” I said and then laughed.

There is a lot to be said for seeing something for what it is rather than simply reacting based on emotions.