Starbucks Gold & Marriage – One Year Later

So, I started my blog a little over a year ago and one of my first posts was about getting my Starbucks Gold card. We don’t need to do the math, but let’s just say it was well worth the money. And now, they’re getting rid of the program (think it was a test, it’s always a test) and I’m suddenly a Starbucks Gold card member without paying for it with a whole new program. But the deal is not as good. It’s just a free drink every 15 stars (I think you get stars every time you use your card to make a purchase), but it still means something (free drink = free drink). Basically, this way, Starbucks has you as a registered sex offen…, um, I mean, registered coffee drinker. and that’s powerful stuff, to get all those coffee lovers and their 411. Facebook and Starbucks, we love ‘em, even as we hand our life off to them.

It’s not something I talk about a lot (well, except for here) but I do love Starbucks. I know they’re giant, evil and bad and the coffee isn’t all that good, but like Google, they started out as something good, and I still think their heart is mostly in the right place. Getting a coffee at Starbucks makes me feel slightly guilty and wasteful and bad. But it also makes me feel good and loved and yummy inside. And ultimately, it feels more good than bad.

And thus, in discussing Starbucks, we have now come down to how I define a relationship worth having. I have discovered (gasp!) that relationships are hard. Marriage is particularly hard. Harder than you think, harder than you remember. So hard that you’re like “what the hell? How did this get so hard? Why doesn’t he do anything right (aka, my way)?”

But, my yardstick for marriage is that as long as the good outweighs the bad, it’s a good relationship. So even though we fought on Saturday morning because my husband can be a pig-headed goat with no idea how to partner a fabulous person like myself (and, to be fair, on very rare occasions, I can be an emotional octopus of anger, fear, exhaustion and frustration), we had a great weekend, and that’s despite a toddler and a teenager (and our currently angelic-by-comparison tween) acting out.

When we started dating, it blew my mind and I really thought I couldn’t do it. I didn’t want to date him, because I knew that it was unlikely to work out (divorced guy, 2 kids, what??!!) and that I was risking our friendship. So it was a big decision, on my part, to date him.

My husband and I became friends over 25 years ago. We started dating eight years ago (of course, I ultimately decided it was worth the risk) and now we’ve been married for almost five. Not so long in the giant scheme of things, but a lot has happened. I love him. I’m very lucky and my life is completely different than it was eight years ago.

So I wish you all a Starbucks Gold card and way-more-good-feelings-than-bad-feelings marriage and hopefully, like us, 2010 is brining you a big sigh of relief and good news. What a long, wonderful, difficult year it’s been. It ain’t easy, living in our world of war, conflict, greed, confusion, ambivilance and imbalance, but it sure beats the alternative.

Advertisement