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Laura Reynolds looks at the freedoms of festive singledom
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Laura Reynolds looks at how to make your friendship survive the ups and downs of romance
Welcome to December; the time of year when you think about Christmas cards for your mates, a couple of presents, and your immediate family. Your parents can deal with aunts and uncles, and if you forget someone then never mind. You can keep your house empty of decorations or you can ram it full of tinsel and lights, and who cares? Play Christmas music on full blast for hours every day – you’re young and you can do what you like.
I was once like you. A carefree student with simple Christmas problems of “should I go home for the whole of the holiday or none of it?” or “should I start my January essay now or just hammer it out last minute after New Year?”
But now I’m married (since June; thanks for all the congratulations) and it’s suddenly different. Having a wife is great, and I wouldn’t trade it for anything (advice: pick someone good to marry), but it doesn’t half screw up Christmas plans. You might already notice a few problems sneaking in if you’re a couple or you’re living together/engaged/equivalent, but it multiplies out beyond marriage.
You see, for starters, we’ve got this crazy idea that we want to be together over Christmas. We used to spend time with our respective families, but we now spend time with them together. So trying to work out when we can see either family, and when we should be in York, has been causing us grief for over two months now – and it’s still not sorted. Probably one family before and one family after, with Christmas Day in York, but we can’t make it any easier because;
We’re financially self-sufficient or thereabouts. I need to work to pay rent, have no student loan (as a Masters student) and alongside that need to work over Christmas. My wife happens to be lucky enough to be working in schools and therefore have a Christmas break, but I’ve been working 45 hours per week and know that I won’t get much time off over Christmas. As if that weren’t enough;
We have to think about presents for more people. You might have already realised that we’re sending out more Christmas cards and have more friends – but it’s not just that. We have aunts, uncles, cousins and grandparents that we want to get gifts and cards for, that we simply didn’t before. We’re probably not getting presents for them (or for many of our friends, sadly) as we are unable to, but it’s still something we have had to work out.
As well as those problems, there are differences of opinion. We happen to be lucky; we both like Christmas music, both like having a decorated tree, both enjoy putting Christmas cards on string around the house and both enjoy feeding me vast amounts of mince pie. But what if I wanted to play music all day, put up mountains of lights and glitter, and she wanted to avoid the entire season – or vice versa? The irreconcilable differences would mean that one or the other would have to cave on each issue. Sure, we’re good at compromising (and that helps in marriage… honestly) but it would mean that we’d have to compromise en masse; no music but lots of tinsel, and neither person would be really happy with it.
There are obviously many other potential issues, including the fact that my wife is a vegetarian and therefore ruins Christmas Day’s meal, and they’re simply not things I had to think about. I knew that we’d have to reconcile differences such as number of children or town to live in, career choices and holiday destinations, but who knew that Christmas was such a big issue?
For yesterday's Advent Calendar article, click here.
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