I started this post several months ago and forget whose post or comment inspired me to write this.
I’ve read a few posts on going green and its effects on marriage (or other romantic union) . Often one person in the union is spearheading the effort with the partner going along in varying degrees of support. In my household I’ve been the main spearheader with my husband acting as the tag-along. It was’t always this way however.
When we first met, my husband was the biker and I thought biking was a messy activity. I was saving up to buy a car someday (I got around by walking or taking the bus). I wasn’t against biking per say, I rode my bike alot but didn’t see it as a long term solution to my transportation needs. I slowly changed.
Growing up, my family never owned a car. Occasionally my parents would rent a car for a day trip or a weekend trip and hire a driver.
In the U.S. however, entire living areas are designed so as to make it hell for pedestrians. Plus it was some sort of status symbol that I wanted to acquire when I was living in a suburb. The public transit in the suburbs were not reliable, and I didn’t like standing around in the cold waiting for a bus that often wouldn’t show up for more than an hour.
My transition into a treehugger was very gradual. I can’t pin point any specific movie or book that made a dramatic difference. But I think the first time I took notice was several summers ago, when I noticed a fire hydrant leaking fresh, clean water all over the place. It really, really bugged me.
Or maybe it was seeing car owning friends and family turn from normal, likable people into raving lunatics that shaped my views on the car culture. It was in an automobile that the driver would be quickly driven to anger at a slow pedestrian, or a slow changing light or another rude driver.
Or it could have been my attempt to save money by purchasing cloth sanitary napkins which reduced the amount of garbage our bathroom generated. I think the cloth napkin website mentioned some number about how much landfill waste was caused by the usage of tampons and non-reusable napkins.
Or it could have been the fact that I found the food quality in the U.S. to be a bit off. And when I eventually learned about the Food Bill, a light went off on my head explaining all things food related to me.
Whatever the impetus was, in early 2006 I set our microwave out on the curb and made a promise to myself to quit buying and eating microwavable food. I didn’t find any conclusive information on microwaves being bad for one’s health, but I did realize that cooking from scratch eliminated a lot of garbage.
From then on, I spent several hours every day reading up about…the planet. About the garbage we’re generating, about the pollution we’re creating, about the animals we’re killing, etc, etc. And I’d send dozens and dozens of emails to my husband and we often stayed up long past our bedtimes discussing my latest findings. This was all a huge change for me, someone who liked living in a concrete jungle and hated trees because it contained birds that loved pooping on my head.
Eventually we got to a point in our relationship where, I was more informed about various topics than my husband. Once I learned about the food bill and about the growth of the suburbs, I began wondering what else was a bit off about the idealized lifestyle. He just hated cars because they were noisy and polluted the air, I introduced him to how the car culture was created and legislated into today’s necessity. When I read about the Farm Bill, we both realized that we wanted to support our local economy and not some random person several thousdand miles away. I like to think that we’re both very logical people and living the way we do now is just the most logical way to do it. Any other way is just idiotic. And wrong.
I’ve read that sometimes people have conflicts when one partner is reluctant to make a move toward a more environmentally friendly way of doing something. So how do I deal with it? I just inundate my husband with information. I talk about it incessantly and take all his arguments and make counter points. The usual rules of communication apply here: don’t threaten, coerce or mock. My trump card is almost always peak oil: at some point ___ is going to get really expensive, so we may as well do it this way when its painless and we have some time to get used to the idea. This is how I’ve gotten him to use our clothesline, to help with my compost bin, to save our bath water.
Another thing to consider is our actual relationship. My husband is my best friend. There are few relationships that I’ve read about that are like ours where we’re both on the same page on pretty much every single issue. And we have a lot in common, from our hobbies to our way of thinking. Which could be one reason why I don’t get much static when I suggest new experiments.
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I was looking at my draft posts and found that this one was almost done. I fixed whatever grammar errors I could find and now here it is.
