There are several keys to wedded bliss in a marriage where you both work on a farm or farm business. Keys like: Never go to bed angry, the family that prays together stays together, and never move cows together.
Sharing experiences with your spouse is a very important part of maintaining a healthy relationship.
Moving an 1,800-pound cow that is intent on getting back to her baby calf, or fulfilling her lifelong dream of becoming a permanent free-range cow, is a whole new level of a shared experience. If said spouse and said cow are not all that familiar with each other, and both view the experience as being potentially life-ending, there may be underperformance on both accounts.
If in this stressful experience, particular words are said that emphatically point out the lack of foundational cow-moving skills, we have turned a 10 a.m. problem into a 10 p.m. problem. If you are an individual who enjoys an evening of incredible quiet and solitude, I have great news for you. If you enjoy sleeping on the couch, I have great news for you.
Now, this is not to say that there are not spouses who work incredibly well together in highly stressful situations. The reality is most of us are not those people.
In the Faber house, we learned this early on when Mrs. Faber and I were both painting our first house together. I despise painting and went to town to get the biggest roller I could find. I got started, and it looked like I was going to get the room done in about 12 minutes, until Mrs. Faber noticed the shrapnel of paint splatter that covered everything from the ceiling to the T.V. She had arrived with a fine-point paint brush for the corners, and I had the room looking like the paint section after the 15-year-old kid didn't tighten the paint can lid or the door on the shaker machine.
This led to another important lesson in marriage and in life: If you do a job badly enough, you don’t have to do it anymore.
The other early marriage lesson was sitting down and putting the first crib together. You may already know how this is going to end, as one of us is a perfectionist and one of us doesn’t mind if we have three leftover screws, two boards and half a mattress. This led to the realization that Mrs. Faber could make a choice on the assembly of cheap foreign furniture. Either she could assemble it, or I could assemble it, but there was no "we" in assembling it. Again, there is no sense in turning a 10 a.m. problem into a 10 p.m. problem.
I love my wife dearly. In fact, with the cold weather here, I got her one of those remote start things for the car. She can sit in the house, and it will start up the car and turn on the heated seats. It’s me; I’m the remote start thing.
There have certainly been moments with the ups and downs of life and business where my wife has been the bedrock and a source of comfort and wisdom. We have learned what areas are best done independently like painting, furniture assembly and moving cows.