mandarine

To the day.

As with whiskey, balsamic vinegar or Bordeaux, 12 years is probably how long it takes to reveal the full palette of flavours and the heart of the aroma (especially considering we were only 22 on October 5th, 1996).

This is the fourth installment of the till death do us part series, to mark my ten years of marriage (only three weeks before the eleventh anniversary).

There is no autopilot

When one drives a car, when one pilots an airplane, when one rides a bike, one finds that even on the straightest road, in the stillest air, or on the smoothest track, one still has to make constant tiny adjustments. If one stops adjusting for a couple of seconds, one has an emergency situation. And if one misses this last opportunity to alter course, one crashes.

I am under the impression that lots of couples believe that their relationship is on autopilot. [more]

‘For as long as we both shall live’: how long might this be? To back up Litlove’s recent illustration of this question, let me point out that a couple of centuries ago, people who had survived to the age of marriage could reasonably expect to live until 40. This means that roughly half the people died before that age. Therefore, the probability that someone would stay married to the same person for more than 20 years was at most one in four. Nowadays, the probability that both husband and wife
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Life looks like the course of a marble on a sloping nail board: the trajectory is generally straight, as the marble follows the slope, until it hits a nail. Then it bounces to the right or to the left, depending on exactly how it hit. Such repeated bifurcations can significantly alter the course of the marble, and tiny deviations in the initial trajectory and bounce conditions can result in considerable changes further down the board. [more]

I have been married ten years today.

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