Wife Rule #120: It's Nice to Share

It's one of those lessons you learn in kindergarten. It makes snack time go so much more smoothly. It makes your mom happy because there's less fighting in the home. It helps people to like you. It even helps you win friends and influence people (just ask the lobbyists).

It's nice to share!

And tonight is one of those nights where the niceness of sharing is on the top of my mind, because I just got back from a very uplifting meeting and I'm floating a little. It's nice to come home in such a mood and grab the hand of my sweetheart and lift her up onto the cloud with me. The view is great up here tonight.

On the other end of the spectrum, we've recently had some more bad news with regard to my dad's cancer. It's nice to have someone to share that with, too. Her shoulders and neck are just the right height that when such tidings sort of drain the life right out of us, we can lean against each other and our heads kind of fit together. We can help to hold each other up when we share the downs.

And when we sat together Monday night with our little flock of five kids and watched Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone for the first time together (we recently finished the book), and little 1-year-old Charity decided that instead of watching the movie, she would dance and twirl and look over her shoulder and shrug and flirt a lot, we shared a giggle, and then we shared a laugh.

Sometimes after the kids have gone to bed, and we have diligently denied them dessert (because good parents have to do that sometimes), we share an indulgence of a dish of ice cream. Often when we share this way, we have to get seconds. But we share those too.

And last of all, before (and often after) we turn off the lamps in our bedroom, we share a final wrap-up conversation for the day. It's often the first chance we've really had to talk when the rest of the house is shrouded in silence. It's a great time to decompress, to discuss our kids, our parents, our siblings, our neighbors, and certainly not least, our marriage. We analyze, we plan, and sometimes we share a dream, just a little bit.

It doesn't matter so much what we are sharing; the important part is that we are sharing, at least a little bit, every day. We're both so much richer for it.

You can take that to the bank.