When you've been married to someone for 25 years, of course you think alike. Of course you'll finish each other's sentances. But sometimes it gets a bit weird.
I've known for years now that I can sometimes feel my husband's pain. It's a documented phenomenon that scientist's have studied with couples, where when one person of a couple is caused pain, their partner's pain receptors in their brain light up. I'm used to that. When you know it's happening, you can block it easily enough.
Yesterday, however, we noticed something new.
I'm overweight again (as heavy as I've ever been before). He always keeps pace with me- staying about 50 lbs heavier than I am. My ankle has been malfunctioning all week, and it's never done that before.
Yesterday about 3:45 pm I got up to walk to a coworker's office and pain shot through my hip, as well as my ankle. I ignored it and limped along, trying to be unobtrusive about it. As I was walking back to my desk, I suddenly realized it's all this weight putting extra stress on my joints causing the problem. I'm too darn heavy. I've got to lose weight.
When my husband came to pick me up at 4:30, he asked how I was and I said, "Grumpy!" and told him why. His jaw dropped and he asked when this happened. Then he went on to tell me how he was walking in the garden of the company he works for at about 3:30 ish and had a bad moment where pain stabbed him in the low back and shot into his hip and he had the same realization. He's too heavy, the weight is causing it, and he needed to lose weight.
It felt like my idea to me. It felt like his idea to him. We hadn't talked about being overweight or anything like that in months. We hadn't seen or talked to each other for 3 hours prior to the incident.
I'm used to feeling his pain as my pain. He was away for a business conference last month and airplane rides always cause him problems because he's so big-- but he delayed going to the chiropractor for a week afterwards for one reason and another. I had a crick in my neck the whole time. I knew it was him and not me, though, because I hadn't done anything that might have caused it. So I just waited until he went to the chiropractor and sure enough, a couple of hours after he saw her my neck pain cleared up and I've been fine since then.
But that's just pain. I've picked up pain off of my coworker once (she had a bad toothache) and I was wondering if I ought to go see a dentist when she wandered into my office complaining and I realized it was HER toothache I was feeling! So, I blocked it and all was fine.
But this new thing is different. Was it my thought or his thought? Both of us had the same *Eureka* moment at approximately the same time. It would be cool if we could control this and recognize each other's thoughts as belonging to the other person and have a built in long distance communication system- but we don't. What use is having the same thought at the same time? Or for feeling each other's pains, for that matter? It just gives us double the apparent pain in our lives. *sigh*
It's kinda confusing. If this sort of thing were useful, I'd need to be able to distinguish my thoughts from his thoughts. My pain from his pain. And it'd be darn handy to feel other gradiations of emotion beyond PAIN. But no. We get just enough weirdness to be weird but not useful. Painful not pleasant. Perhaps we are too stubborn and territorial to let each other in more than that. I dunno.
OK.
Well.
Comments, anyone?