I love the way Home Depot smells - which I guess can be more accurately stated as I love the way freshly cut wood smells. I'm packing up my apartment already, so I went by there today to get some duct tape. Incidentally, which section would you put duct tape in? I walked in, looked at the signs - "Garden" "Hardware" "Tools" and thought "huh. It could be in anyone of those. It's duct tape." So I just asked - apparently the Home Depot people get around this difficulty by putting it in several sections. (And for anyone who feels like arguing about placing duct tape in "tools", remember MacGyver?)

Anyway, I'm on a tangent. I was trying to say just how much I like Home Depot. I just walk around and look at the paint and the garden tools and dream of vegetable gardens and a house I can redecorate. Something about that Home Depot smell just makes me feel happy. As Rob put it "It's the smell of productivity." But a nice kind of productivity - the fixing up your own little spot of land type.

And that got me thinking about Rob and I. For all the things we don't have in common, on a not-so-basic level our dreams are very similar. We both like Home Depot because we're both the type of people who dream about a place of our own, with some space and some privacy, that we can fix up, mow the grass around, and just generally do all those nice home-owner-y type things. In some respects it might be a little surprising that such an image is appealing to me, because all growing up I dreamed of traveling the world. At graduation my sister said something about being surprised, because she hadn't seen me as the settling down type, but when she saw me with Rob it just seemed to fit. The thing is traveling is a lot nicer when you know that eventually there's somewhere familiar and comfortable and happy to return to and feel you belong.

And so I was thinking about relationships in general, and I thought about how everybody focuses on "oh, I want to be with someone that shares my interests" but that it's actually pretty important to be with someone who shares your dreams. I think that's something most people realize sooner or later, but because it's not the thing we tend to focus on, sometimes people get blindsided by it. I think sometimes, when relationships just aren't working out, and people are saying "Why?? What's wrong? We seem to fit so well!" it's just that their dreams don't line up, even if their interests do. Someone who is most interested in being a social climber, for instance, will eventually feel held back by someone who doesn't share their taste for society; someone devoted to putting family first can get burned if their partner is someone who wants a career most of all. And someone who's just in it for fun can really hurt someone who wants something serious.

And when I'm talking about Rob and I having the same dream of a house, I guess it goes w/o saying that I'm talking about the large, general concept here more than the specifics. Because I might want a bright yellow kitchen like the one I grew up with, and Rob might hate yellow with a vengeance, and obviously that's something we'll have to work out. But the point is that on a more fundamental level we're looking for the same things out of life: someone to settle down and make a life with forever, a place to call our own that involves a decent # of trees between us and the road and a nice chunk of land, friends that we can chill with over a fire and a drink, careers that challenge us and have some personal meaning to us but which don't consume our lives, and a basement to pursue hobbies like building models and making pottery.

And that, I think, is more key to our relationship succeeding than having common interests. I mean I suppose if you define "interests" in a broad way it encompasses what I said above, but I meant more specific interests. Like, Rob always gets a laugh out of a good Adult Swim show, while I'm more inclined to feel West Wing's intelligently witty barbs are a dependable source of amusement. Rob can take really artistic, fantastic pictures with his digital camera while I'm lucky if I take one decent picture out of 50. He likes golf, which I find kind of boring, and I like basketball, which he finds quite boring. We can sort of meet in the middle on football, although I will always be more of a sports fan than he is.

I'm focusing here on the differences, and of course there are interests we can share. But there are few interests in which we both are equally enthusiastic. Swing dancing is about the only one I can think of, and even there there's differences in our approach to it. But it doesn't really matter, because our interests overlap enough that we can find things we both enjoy doing, and we each try new things because of the other person. At the same time we each have room to be our own person, and to sustain lives outside each other. If we shared all the same interests we might be constantly together, forgetting that we had other friends or people we cared about, but instead we can maintain this healthy balance. Ahh, there it is - balance, CC's favorite life philosophy. ^_~ You knew it was coming, right?

In everything from our height to our approach to life, we balance each other.

I've kind of strayed from the point of dreams being more important than interests, but I guess what I've just been trying to say is that loving someone isn't just about finding that person who likes all the same things as you and thinks just like you.

It isn't as simple as simply "sharing the same dreams" either, of course. It's a mix of these things and more. But when talking about long-term relationships, having a shared dream of what you want from life goes a lot farther than liking the same TV shows.

So I'm really glad I'm with someone who knows exactly how I feel when I walk into a Home Depot.