A Difficult Person to Live With

I admit that I’m not the easiest person to live with. I ­really need time — a lot of time — alone. I like to travel and am often heading out of the house with a carry-on bag in search of either a story or a self-imposed retreat. And when I’m in the house, I tend to sit in my chair by the fireplace with a tray in front of me that holds either an easel or a laptop. Ten feet away is a television invariably playing some bad (or definitely not good) episodic show which serves as my work’s soundtrack. Today, when I step back and review how I conduct my life, even I can see that it might be difficult to fit another person into this solitary routine.

My husband Tim is like me in many ways — he loves to travel and is also a writer who likes to work in space that he’s carved out for himself in the house. Until about five years ago, Tim went to work in an office every day, so we had very separate workspaces that, I suspect, made us both happy. I warned him that when he retired, he would discover that I spend an awful lot of time sitting in the living room with the television on and that he’d have to work around that. Because he is a pleasant and more accommodating person than me, Tim said “no problem” and figured it out.

We would love to travel together, but we have two dogs, one peregrine, a gecko, two fish, and a snail, and during the first 25 years of the marriage, we also had kids at home. The gecko and the fish tank were left behind by one daughter who moved across the country for a job, and one of the dogs was given to us by another daughter who moved to Serbia for four years. But the two problematic creatures are not ones that were left with us. We also have a goofy English setter that I can’t walk on a leash because she is prone to dragging me around and, in one unfortunate moment last autumn, broke my wrist. The other is the peregrine falcon, whom I can’t do anything with except provide food because I am not a licensed falconer. And neither of these creatures can be taken to a kennel or left with another person.

I think the tag team form of travel over the decades has worked for us because although we’d love to visit the Louvre or the Met together, we can still look at each other and say, “We’ll always have Paris” … just not at the same time. This goes for Ireland, Iceland, Italy, Scotland, and western Canada as well, places we’ve both loved and have visited multiple times, but never with each other.

As our kids frequently point out to me, particularly when I ask them for favors, “You need to be more direct. Ask for what you want! Use your words!” I don’t know if they say the same to their father, although I don’t think he ever asks them for anything. I try to explain to the girls that being raised by an extremely passive-aggressive mother who always approached a favor by engaging in a flanking maneuver was how I learned my awesome communication techniques. “Wow,” my mother would say to no one in particular. “A cup of coffee would taste really good right now.” Or “Don’t you think that chair would be better over there?” pointing to the opposite side of the living room. Or, when looking at a toddler lurching around her house, “She won’t break that will she?” as the toddler reaches for a cut-glass butter dish. The coffee would be made, the chair moved, and the cut-glass butter dish taken from the toddler’s hands.

I think the case I’m trying to make is that my husband and I are seriously attached — metaphorically — at the hip. I’m not going to get into the nitty-gritty of attachment theory and how it relates to successful, long-term marriages, but suffice it to say that Tim and I are too much alike in some basic ways to have a successful, long-term marriage, and yet, here we are, married for 34 years.

A piece in Psychology Today about marriage states, “Marriage does more than change people’s living situation and daily routine; becoming a spouse appears to change one’s personality as well, especially in the early years of marriage. Men, for example, tend to become more conscientious and introverted than they were when single, and women more emotionally stable. But both tend to become less agreeable.”

Aha! So that last line explains it. Enough of my crankiness has rubbed off on Tim to keep us in a kind of stasis. To keep us in a place where we both navigate the world and each other indirectly. However, I still believe that sometimes if I think about something long enough, Tim will intuit my desires through Vulcan mind meld, the ultimate passive-aggressive move.

Rachel Dickinson is the author of several books; her most recent is The Loneliest Places: Loss, Grief, and the Long Journey Home. Her work has appeared in numerous publications, including The Atlantic, Outside, Men’s Journal, Aeon, Salon, and Audubon.

This article is featured in the January/February 2026 issue of The Saturday Evening Post. Subscribe to the magazine for more art, inspiring stories, fiction, humor, and features from our archives.