Not Joined At The Hip!
Literally my favorite beach photo I've taken here. Playa Grande back in December or January.
The photo is a great one because it illustrates an important marriage principle that I think religious people get so so wrong. That' people who are married are not sinning if they don't think alike, don't stay joined together at the hip or agree on things. I took this photo on one of our beach walks. Jim walks due north, I head south. He walks to the developed areas with houses and friends, I walk to the wild area with shells and wildlife. Differing needs. Each happy the other is doing what they love.
Jim is a good foot taller than I. His legs are longer. When he beach walks he pounds down the beach up from the water in the dry sand. I walk at constantly shifting speeds barefoot in the surf, leaving a looping trail like that left on the cartoon "The Family Circus" by a child. I look at the sunning crabs, scamper over to where the large shells wash up, go over that way to where the big monkey troop lives. I'm all over the place.
We went to the new lawyer's office today, moving all of our business, from business to real estate to investments, to incorporation, through threatened lawsuits from idiots to one firm. Instead of the spread we had with different specialists. Our first meeting today to hand off the legal book on our stuff and pay the retainer. Ask questions.
And of course our questions were all different. The lawyer wanted to make sure we'd told the U.S. government about our foreign investments. Jim wanted to know about buying our buddies car. I wanted to know all the ins and outs of our corporation and what happens if Crabby McJoylesspants spends that literal buttload of money and tries to sue me here for libel. Yes I did tell the government. Buying the car will be nearly impossible without our friend here and a power of attorney, plus that mythical lawsuit will cost a ton and yes, everything is owned by the corporation, not I. According to the government here my personal worth is seventy five bucks, some clothing and physical possession of that sad clattering piece of junk Jim keeps trying to buy.
Jim and I couldn't even agree at first if we should have this new firm take over the payment of all taxes and incorporation paperwork, disagreeing on that and even the need to finish up the residency package. We did eventually come to an agreement to proceed on the residency, and to let the lawyers deal with everything else instead of spending long hours dealing with this. Pay them, let them do it. It's simpler.
Once I pointed out to Jim that I thought our time was too valuable to waste keeping track of the paperwork and I'd rather write a yearly check and have it done at once he agreed. But not at first. First he thought he'd rather save that money until I started pointing out because of the culture here everything is a giant pile of red tape. Better to have a native navigate that tape and pay him.
We do that with a number of things here we'd never do in the States. We have a gardener. Someone comes in to sweep, mop, dust and do the windows weekly. Another guy washes the car. We have people in to do plumbing, painting and the like that I always did in the States. There's a team of guys that come clean and maintain the pool.
It's pretty cheap here. We're helping the local economy by hiring locals. We're both getting older. Even if I took apart and cleaned the drain pipe to the main ac unit yesterday and I cleaned the filters. In the States I did a lot of the house maintenance and repair.
Then this afternoon I was surprised to have a sea of Christians telling me off on a friend's blog because I'd said something about how my husband and I handled COVID 19 quite differently. Jim went out to church the other day, but he stayed masked and social distanced the entire time. I have an entire fleet of folks telling me I should be 'in agreement' with everything to do with my husband, follow his ass to church, mask or not mask as he decreed. Not a lick of independent thought, or anything else required or allowed, to be that shiftless smiling doormat that I'd thought was only required in Fundy town.
I listened to them verklempt and banging on awhile about this before I just turned it off. Marriage does not work like that. When you say a husband and wife become one it does not mean that a wife parks her brain, her personality, her requirements and ideas and turns into a smiling robot "yes" woman.
That entire idea of being married to a mirror image of yourself in every way sounds unbelievably boring to me. Jim would go mad if he had to live my life and I would his. We're designed to be halves, halves that make a whole when joined with the correct half for us. A sort of human yin and yang, partners, different but equal.
The idea of gender roles they were positing was even more ludicrous. I didn't need a penis to fix the drain pipe or filter clean yesterday. Jim didn't need a vagina to wash dishes this afternoon.
When you decide that only one partner's ideas matter and only certain tasks can be done by certain folks you limit everyone terribly. Fewer necessary things get done if people aren't allowed to flow in their natural giftings. If we cannot exchange ideas it limits our solutions to those problems. Isn't there a verse in the Bible about iron sharpening iron? We're supposed to challenge each other to think, to aspire to more, not put limits on everyone based on the luck of the draw on your gender.
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