Jill Dillard's "More Than Sex" Post on Marriage: How to Greet Each Other!

There's something about anniversaries - specifically the ones that are multiples of five - that inspires interesting blog posts.   Jill (Duggar) Dillard has been married to Derick Dillard for five years now.   Honestly, I was a bit surprised by that.  I'm coming up on my seventh marriage anniversary and I thought she got married before me.   In honor of that milestone, Jill wrote a long post about how to love your husband. 

Her premise is that she found it highly annoying when people chalked the passion between Derick and her as a sign of being in a new relationship and thanks to a lot of work the two of them are still in love five years later.

That leads to my first comment: your mileage may vary.   I'm skeptical that Derick and Jill are still in the limerence stage of a relationship.  That's the heady first stage of a romance when your romantic partner can do no wrong.  They are the most perfect creature God ever created and you want nothing more in life than to tell everyone what an amazing person they are.   Limerence is the reason hiding a crush is far more difficult than the person with a crush thinks it is; humans tend to talk about the person they have a crush on incessantly and with weirdly upbeat takes (from the perspective of an outsider).   

Limerence is wonderful - but it is transient.  Between 18 months and three years into a relationship, couples naturally transition into cycles of stress/doubt, molding expectations, and happiness.   The ability to form a lasting partnership for a couple is based on being able to navigate this cycle together.   I suspect that there are nearly infinite ways for a happy, lasting partnership to work - and following Jill's advice would have shattered my marriage because my husband and I are not Jill and Derick.  

A clear example of how your mileage may vary is the ironclad way Jill describes how to greet a husband who arrives home.   The examples are scattered through the post so I've clumped them together in a summary:

1. Be super-excited when your husband comes home.  At the very least, sprint across your abode to meet him.  If your kids are gone, jump his bones right then and there.  If the kids are around, have everyone meet him at the door!
2. Kisses when he's coming or going should last at least 6 seconds.   It's an affair-proofing vaccination.
3. Get rid of the kids, dinner, phones or any other secondary distractions for at least 15-20 minutes of quality talking time.   Added bonus: if you point-blank tell people that you're cutting their conversation off because your spouse came home, that action counts as a public service because other women might start doing it too!
4. Listen diligently to your husband regardless of how tired you are, how agonizingly boring the topic is or how many other things need to be done.   The hardest bit is forcing yourself to enjoy his hobbies that don't fit you at all - but if you keep it up, you'll learn to fake it well enough, I suppose.

My husband and I do fine with our routine when one of us comes home.   We greet each other and exchange a very abbreviated rundown of how our days went.  This is also when we exchange those random issues that popped up during the day that you need your spouse to deal with since we're both still in working mode like "We need more Pediasure" from my husband or "Can you cover Spawn's speech appointment next Tuesday at 9am?" from me.  

Since my husband has worked on farms and in HVAC positions and my retail job is both dusty and paint-covered, the next item of business is a shower to decontaminate before settling down for the evening.   I've jumped in the shower with my husband for fun adult time before Spawn was in the picture, but I don't trust my two-year-old enough to leave him unattended for more than about 5 minutes and not without having both ears peeled for signs of trouble.   Also - and this might just be me - hopping in the shower while Spawn is awake would lead directly to an emergency room trip where I'd have to explain that I didn't see my toddler fall off the couch and smack his head on the floor because...I was in the shower with my husband.   Finally, I would be so fixated on if any sound was a sign that Spawn was standing on the couch...or found an electrical outlet...or whatever toddler mayhem was on tap...that I would not be a particularly good shower partner for adult sexy time.

I like kissing my husband.   An informal experiment to see if kissing him for six seconds improved anything was terminated, however, when I realized how distracting counting the seconds in my head was.   On a related note, being told that we should kiss for at least 6 seconds by a former Duggar is a total romance killer.  This might be because I kept saying, "Jill Dillard says this is important!" before kissing my husband.    Your millage might vary.

Did I mention my husband is a very patient man?

Anyways, we save any deep talking until we are both cleaned up and fed.   We are both the type who come home rather wound-up from work and we both appreciate having our spouse wind down a bit before talking for any extended period of time. 

There was a period where my husband wanted to discuss his job frustrations before his shower - and that was a massive stressor for me.  He was so wound up that he'd cycle on the same idea or same event for 30 minutes or more - but the same idea or event after a shower was 5-10 minutes to work out. 

I laid out how frustrated I was by our talks prior to his shower.  He listened and was ok with trying to shower before discussion time.   We adapted and our current system works for us. 

That was a great example of a small cycle of unease -> molding -> new happiness that mature relationships move through.

In terms of discussing interests and hobbies, yikes! 

Yes, part of being a good friend in general and good spouse in specific is occasionally maintaining your end of a conversational topic that your friend enjoys and you do not.   My husband enjoys sci-fi/fantasy novels much more broadly than I do.  I, on the other hand, take a simple pleasure at watching homesteaders fail miserably on various TV shows.  We both listen patiently to our spouse's most recent adventures in entertainment because we love each other even if we're just not that into the topic. 

Having said that, we have very different hobbies that do not overlap.  My husband plays the ukulele with several pick-up groups.  I swim and do water aerobics.   My husband adores crossword puzzles.  I crochet.   We each pursue these hobbies without dragging the other spouse into the hobby because being married doesn't mean losing your own self.

Equally important, I don't feel like I need to monitor and cling to my husband because he'll have an affair if he is left unattended for more than 30 seconds.   More on that in the next post.