Death by Nutritional Paper Cuts

One of the stranger discoveries of a long marriage is that you can spend decades with someone and still be surprised by who they're becoming.

My husband has discovered nutrition.

I am trying to be a good person about this.

He's enthusiastic.  He's reading things.  He told me recently about apple cider vinegar with the genuine excitement of someone who has just found it.

I smiled.  I nodded.  I made an encouraging sound.

I did not mention that I'd already spent several years wandering around that particular neighbourhood of the internet and had long since moved on.

This restraint, I feel, should be formally recognised.

We've been going to the gym together recently.  This remains surprising to both of us, not the together part, the going part.  We’re not proper gym people.  Nobody is taking mirror selfies, and neither of us owns enough activewear to develop a personality around it.  Most mornings we're simply trying to remember what our trainer told us to do with the machine that looks vaguely capable of causing injury.

Still.  We keep turning up.

Same session.  Same coffee after.  Entirely different mornings.

He is present.  I'm doing logistics.  He's enjoying the conversation while I'm quietly reorganising the rest of the day around my breakfast window, because lingering coffee becomes brunch, and brunch compresses everything, and I have learned the hard way that my body doesn’t regard this as a neutral arrangement.

He suggests chicken for dinner.

Just chicken.

Not a meal, not a plan.  Chicken as a complete answer to the question of what we might eat, because he is thinking about protein, which is not the same thing as thinking about dinner.

Later he asks how much protein is in what I've cooked and I feel a small flicker of something I can only describe as uncharitable.

Not because the question is unreasonable.  It isn't.  I have spent years thinking about protein.  I believe in protein.  I have opinions about protein that most people in my life find excessive.

It's the accumulation.

The ACV.  The chicken.  The macros.  Each one small, each one completely reasonable for someone who is curious and genuinely trying.

Death by nutritional paper cuts.

I've been wondering why it bothers me, because it doesn't reflect well on me and I'd rather understand it than repeat it.

Here's what I came back to.

For years, while he was running a demanding career and had considerably bigger fish to fry, I had the freedom to wander.  I had years to become the person who reads studies for fun, disappears into nutritional rabbit holes and has strong opinions about protein.  I read the books, followed the research.  Tried things.  Adjusted.  Got some of it wrong.  Worked it out slowly.

I wanted him to be interested.

He wasn't ready yet.

And now he is.  Genuinely, enthusiastically, apple-cider-vinegar-and-all interested.

And my first response was mild irritation.

I've thought about what that says about me and I don't love the answer.

Familiarity is useful.  It's how long relationships work.

But it occasionally comes at a cost.  We stop noticing that the people we love are still changing long after we've decided who they are.

He is coming home with new questions.  He wants to talk things through.  He's engaged in something that matters.  He has the energy of someone who has recently discovered that what you eat has consequences and finds this genuinely interesting rather than burdensome.

This is exactly what I wanted.  For years.

Familiarity, it turns out, has a way of making you nearly miss the thing you've been waiting for.

I got so used to being the one who knew about this that I almost didn't notice when he arrived.

Almost.

We go to the same gym.  We drink the same coffee.  We're heading in roughly the same direction.

We are travelling different roads to get there.  His body responds to things mine doesn't.  He thinks in grams.  I think in dinner.

None of that is the point.

The point is that he's curious.  That he's becoming someone new at an age when a lot of people have decided they're finished becoming.  It’s that he's walking excitedly into rabbit holes carrying a torch and a packed lunch.

What I'm watching is not so much a man discovering nutrition as it is a man rediscovering curiosity.

The point is also that I, having spent years wishing for exactly this, nearly let irritation talk me out of appreciating it.

Long marriages, I think, require a particular kind of attention.  Not the vigilant, effortful kind.

The noticing kind, the remembering-to-look kind.

Maybe that's one of the quieter skills of a long marriage: learning to stay curious about the person walking beside you.

He keeps surprising me.

I'm trying to deserve it.