I Miss My Wife

Every day, my wife and I spend several hours sharing the things we learned that day with each other. It's a super effective way to solidify understanding and recall of complicated or nuanced concepts, see things from another perspective, and take note of angles that we may not have considered on our own.

We talk about new ways that we solved difficult problems at work. We talk about new ideas that we read about in a book, or in the news, or on a blog. We talk about the latest developments in science and technology. We talk about political and economic theory.

I listen to her work-through the best ways to statistically analyze the data she collected for her dissertation and act as a sounding board for new ideas for the sci-fi stories that she is perpetually developing. She teaches me about comparative historical linguistics and how morphosyntax is intimately linked to the development of cultures and societies and even the way we perceive the world around us.

When I go down a rabbit-hole on the internet learning about some obscure concept in math or science or history, she is there on the other side to give me an outlet for my newfound (or recently rediscovered) knowledge. She listens enthusiastically when I talk for an hour straight about gravitational waves or quantum computers and she listens dutifully when I talk for an hour straight about the boring minutia of automotive engine design.

I follow her progress as she learns new Rachmaninoff, Schubert, and Mendelssohn pieces on the piano and she follows mine as I learn how to continually tweak and improve the functionality of our media server or smart-home.

We collect and learn about rocks and minerals and fossils and meteorites and antiquities and coins and books together. We build Lego castles and temples and spaceships together. We've watched every episode of every season of every series of Star Trek ever made together. We go to the climbing gym together and we go on walks and hikes together. We go on road trips together and we fly to far away places together. I spend most of my time working from home and she's usually there, just a few feet away, grading papers, or working on her dissertation, or reading. In a typical week we might spend 20 hours apart from each other.

And now she's gone. She left for 10 days. That may not seem like a long time but we haven't been apart for 10 consecutive days since our third date more than 6 years ago. So, having finished working for the day, I sit here on the couch with my cat wondering: who the fuck can I talk to about the Fourier Transform that I learned about yesterday? tl;dr: I miss my wife.