COMMITMENTS : Doing the Unthinkable Wasn’t So Bad After All

Big changes were in store, let me tell you. I’d groused about it for months to my girlfriend: I would make an employment change, if not an entire career change, v-e-r-y soon. I was ready for something new, even if I wasn’t sure what it was. But it would be big.

As the bearer of the world’s most sympathetic ears (not including the nearly black-hole capacity of my mother’s), my girlfriend had listened to my harangues long enough to know them by heart. When I rambled too far into the catacombs of my mind and forgot what I was complaining about, she’d gently lead me back out.

“And another thing . . . errr . . . uhhh . . .” I’d stammer. If I wasn’t careful I might end up rehashing half-remembered indignities from boyhood--”Why would I purposely eat dog food?”--instead of complaining about the matters at hand.

“You were talking about life being too darn short,” she would dangle, and I’d be off into my next soliloquy.

I was in a rut.

In her no-nonsense way, she understood the powers of her gentle ears. After listening a long, long time she decided I needed more than a confessor. I needed a guidance counselor. And she was it.

So, she up and suggested one of the worst ideas I’d ever heard, up there with two-for-one martini specials.

“Why don’t you work with me?”

There was an opening where she teaches, she explained. I was qualified. She was sure I’d love it.

As far as I was concerned, it was, of course, unthinkable, even with shorter hours, better money and meaningful work. I just couldn’t work with my girlfriend.

I was haunted by images of domestic squabbles played out in front of my new co-workers, sure to side with my much better half regardless of the situation.

Worse yet, what if under the intensity of the additional days together, we found that, well, we just didn’t like each other as much as we did part time?

I worried that our relationship, which might have retained a little of the new-car smell even after two years, could be ruined by the more pungent odors that start wafting when things hit the fan.

And I suppose the (nearly) unthinkable idea that she might find my charms less charming when forced to experience them night and day may have crossed my mind, too. Maybe. But I doubt it.

It makes sense when you think about it. You may know and like your co-workers, but it is with exquisitely rare exception that you really want to bring them home with you--every night. It was an awful idea, for us to work together. Terrible.

I said I’d do it.

And, of course, it’s been great.

She’s as much fun to work with as she is to play with. And we have wisely refrained from mixing personal business with the salary-producing kind. Our most attention-getting behavior has been that we car-pool together every morning.

The added time together, contrary to what I’d imagined, has been illuminating. Her day-shift persona has been revealed to me. That normally sweet disposition doesn’t clock in until about 9. And we have to be at work by 8:30.

All these little things you learn are wonderful and have helped me shake the funk that dogged me for so long. But perhaps best of all, it’s great to work with someone you love. The occasional irritation may arise, but it’s much easier to hash out a problem with a person you know intimately than with a person you may barely know at all.

The other night on the way home, I made a point of mentioning this to her.

“It just makes more sense to spend your day with That Special Someone, instead of, say, Fred in accounting, doesn’t it?”

“Uh huh,” she said, keeping her eyes on the road.

Somehow I suspect she knew this all along.