One of my weirdnesses – apart from making up words like weirdnesses – is my ability to hear patterns in speech, I listen to rhythm as much as I listen to content, so sometimes even if something isn’t a direct quote, the shape of the sentence will remind me of a song lyric.
It’s one of the reasons I love poetry … and puns.
I also love movies, so when it came to choosing a name for this blog about our marriage and my crazy theories that it is possible to live happily ever after with someone, then only one answer presented itself to me.
The question is “How does a Trumbley love their spouse?”
The answer is, of course “Trumbley, Madly, Deeply”.
The tag line has been trickier and for a while it was a bit of a kitchen sink (you know everything dragged in there) because this blog is about love, immigration, cooking, DIY and peanut butter, the essential elements that make a marriage and a home. But it always felt messy.
Eventually I realised the rhythm was wrong and it was bothering me. The best lists have three items:
“Life, the universe and everything”.
The classically American:
“Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”.
So I realised I was going to have to hone it down, reduce it like a good stock, until it was the essence of everything I wanted to say about us. Easy peasey yes?
So start with a classic, the best lists begin with “Life” and conveniently as a word it covers subjects like love, cooking, DIY. (Edited note: A quick glance at the top of the screen will show you that in the end I changed my mind and for now it reads immigration – at least until I am finished with the green card process.)
Then it gets harder, which word out of my list, sums up what I love most about the Land of the Free other than my husband? What would convey humour and perhaps quirkiness while also reflecting what I like to do. What will I have the liberty to do in America that I lacked in England? Immediately “peanut butter” and the American obsession with cooking with it and better yet, coating it in chocolate springs to mind. This is so not an English thing, this is a thing I will be doing in my new life, one of the ways in which I will be embracing a new culture. So “peanut butter” it is.
Finally, the piece de resistance, what is this blog really about? How are we pursuing our happiness? Well for this we have to delve a little more deeply into my beliefs about love and romance. Because I believe in “happy-ever-after” still. I know it is possible, I watched my parents manage it. For various reasons I have been less successful, but I have always thought it could be possible with a person who believed the same and was willing to put in the effort. And now I am married to such a person.
There is a movie quote that is used to describe this belief, which I have always identified with. It is the famous line from Sleepless in Seattle:
Annie Reed: Now that was when people KNEW how to be in love. They knew it! Time, distance… nothing could separate them because they knew. It was right. It was real. It was…
Becky: A movie! That’s your problem! You don’t want to be in love. You want to be in love in a movie.
Time, distance nothing could separate them because they knew it was right, if that is being in love in the movies then yes I want it. And lucky me I am married to someone who wants it too.
So that’s what we are going to do, we are going to be in love in a movie.
Wikipedia says What’s My Line? is a panel game show which originally ran in the United States on the CBS Television Network from 1950 to 1967, with several international versions and subsequent U.S. revivals.
Trumbley, Madly, Deeply 