Many couples fear the day they become the same person.
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Like waiting for the appeal of British TV detective shows to kick in, we all know it will happen, it's just a matter of when.
Perhaps in your marriage, as if infected by some nightmarish creature, the telltale signs are already there but you're living in a state of denial; furtively concealing bite marks behind collars or the march of necrotic wounds under suspiciously long summer sleeves ... you don't have an insatiable appetite for virginal blood, you're not wearing matching Sunday flannelette shirts, you don't finish each other's sentences or commandeer each other's stories, you're not becoming a drooling, monosyllabic, dead-eyed shadow of your former self, or a zombie ...
This inexorable spousal melding was never so apparent for my wife and I than when our Year 7 student brought home blank forms to be populated by each parent so more of our personal information could be added to yet another accreting database of mobile phone numbers, DNA sequences and average incomes.
Although of different years, our birthdays are one day apart and we have the same occupation. And while my wife declined to write "good thrower", as I did, in the "additional comments" section (she could have, she has a great arm), when the completed questionnaires lay side by side on the kitchen table waiting for morning rush-hour collection, it was hard to deny there might have been a little dilution of identity over the past couple of decades.
But as challenging as it is to realise we've become a bland portmanteau of cloistered domesticity (Wusband? Hife? ... Husk?), it shouldn't be surprising because our small-town backgrounds - albeit rooted in separate states - are disturbingly similar, especially when it came to affairs of the young heart.
In our adolescence, we'd both been smitten with schoolmates who lived in even smaller circumstances many kilometres from our homes and each of us mounted clandestine sorties to scout the details of these unwitting objects of desire.
Back then, our bush high schools - as many still do, thank goodness - received morning busloads of kids from outlying satellite communities and released these same incipient super commuters a few minutes early each afternoon, so their fleet of coaches could ferry them across hill and dale all over again; back to their hippy yurts or indigent slab huts or helicopter-round-up cattle stations or to whatever existence was surely so very foreign and unrecognisable from our own vanilla upbringings.
This collision of country kids with even countrier kids was one of the many wonderful elements to the shock beginnings of our secondary schooling and over the months, slowly but surely, robust primary alliances annexed new tribe members to create super cells or their flimsier equivalents born of proximity and convenience would unravel when stress-tested by the undeniable attraction of exotic upgrades.
The downside to all this was when you did form a relationship (even an unrequited one) with a fringe dweller, the tyranny of distance ensured seeing them out of school hours was virtually impossible.
Unless, that is, you had a good bike, preferably one with gears.
It was in the saddle of brand new 10-speeds that my wife and I both mounted our Fowlesian fact-finding missions to the hamlets of our unsuspecting beau and belle. These being pre-internet days, genuine BBC-style sleuthing (OK, the phone book) was required to unearth addresses and once secured the operation could begin.
In both cases, as unsavoury as the motive behind each excursion was, the trips themselves were undeniably wholesome, sort of like if the Famous Five had embarked on a trek through the woods to defile a church.
Without speaking a word of our plan, we'd risen early, packed lunches (bags and bags of lettuce) and made the kind of stops along the way - sunshine, birdsong, babbling brooks - we wouldn't appreciate again for another 30 years. They were examples of those days of teenage contemplation and solitude, when pieces of the jagged world assembled ever so slightly and by tea time we'd returned home just that little more grown up, dreamily offering "nothing much" when probed as to what we'd managed to "get up to" with our Saturdays.
And, pathetically enough, "nothing much" was accurate.
MORE B. R. DOHERTY:
Having reached the fabled dwellings of our respective obsessions - the very places where they yawned awake behind a Vaseline lens, tender arms uncoiling towards the ceiling - neither my wife nor I had had the courage to actually knock on the front door, throw pebbles at bedroom windows like the Americans did or even lob a speculative and more Australian "Oi!" over the fence. We'd both just rolled past the house a few times then headed home (pulses racing at the audacity of our incursion).
Until meeting each other, we'd never revealed to anyone (certainly not to our precious stalkees) how we'd used our bikes for evil but when the confessions did flow, it wasn't so much the act itself we found remarkable but the miles involved.
By the time our trusty mechanical steeds were back in the corral, we'd both covered close to 40 kilometres and while nothing compared to today's standard of Lycra-enhanced bitumen-gobbling, it was still a fair effort for a couple of 14-year-olds sans-support crew, however dangerously boosted by a nitrousesque injection of pressurised hormones their journeys might have been.
As with mums and dads accepting they've become interchangeable vending machines of goods and services, another getting of middle-aged wisdom seems to be understanding what kind of family you've created.
Along these lines, we're at peace with the fact we're one of those odd clans with kids cut off from much of what their schoolmates enjoy, but with guilt being yet another charming gnaw of parenthood, we've recently found ourselves in vast hangars of chrome and rubber staffed by hipsters helping us fork out what stings like sufficient cash to secure new cars for each child, let alone entry-level mountain bikes.
We can't offer our children the same semi-suburban existence we had but we can provide an endless network of safe country roads and we're hoping the new bikes will give the kids a good set of calves and an early taste of freedom that may just set them on the path to resourcefulness and resilience, even a little introspection.
They certainly can't do any worse than their parents.
- B. R. Doherty is a regular columnist.