By Mary Roach, February 2008

Mary contemplates couples and compromise.

Our friends Tina and Joe have installed his-and-her basins. The last time we had dinner there, we all got up with our wineglasses and went in to admire the remodelled bathroom. We stood awhile, sipping our wine and chatting about this and that, as though having cocktails in the bathroom before sitting down to eat was the new thing. It made as much sense to me as individual bathroom washbasins did.

"What's up with that?" I said to Ed on the way home. How often does it happen that you want to brush your teeth at precisely the same moment as your spouse, and in such a grave hurry, that you can't wait 40 seconds? Me, I enjoy the goofy intimacy of brushing your teeth together, talking over the day's events in an unintelligible foamy garble. That's what marriage is all about. Isn't it?
"It would be nice to have your own basin," Ed said. "I can't say why."

I launched into one of my tiresome laments about modern life, about how couples don't live like couples anymore, what with his-and-her washbasins and separate phone mailboxes and mattress adjustments and car temperature controls. Couples don't share, because no one's willing to compromise.
Ed was quiet for a moment.
"What do we share?"
I thought about this. We share a home e-mail account that neither of us checks or uses or even remembers how to log on to. We share a movie club card, though it is Ed who manages the film queue. Not long ago, a Jack Black movie featuring the portly actor in a full-body leotard dropped through our letterbox. I ran out of the door in my sockfeet, convinced that the postman had given us a neighbour's envelope. We don't share the same shampoo or breakfast cereal or even toothpaste. I couldn't come up with an answer.

For an experiment in togetherness, I suggested that we share iTunes, the software that allows you to bleed your bank account dry in 99-US-cent increments ? oops, I mean, download songs to create an online music library. Ed already had an iPod and I had just bought one. (When I was nine or ten, I used my pocket money to buy a jack-in-the-box. The toy shop assistant, an older woman with dry, permed hair and a grim set to her mouth, not that I harbour any resentment, said, "Aren't you too old for that?" I got to relive that moment right there in the Apple store.)

Our shared music library lasted less than an hour. It was too embarrassing to have Ed know that I'd downloaded a song by, say, Al Stewart. I actually paid the 99 US cents, and then, seeing it there on the list between Frank Sinatra and acclaimed avant-garde accordion and glockenspiel trio Tin Hat, I deleted it. And while Ed could skip over my music on the playlist, I had the kind of iPod that chooses songs at random. I'd be bopping along the sidewalk, and Sweet Home Alabama would suddenly segue into a neo-klezmer band.

"How could someone not like the Klezmatics?" said Ed. There was an implied "and like Al Stewart" at the end of the question.
"I do like them," I said. "I just would always rather, you know, listen to something else."
Ed made me a separate library file for my music, which he labelled "Out-of-Date Pap", or anyway wanted to. Then he showed me how I could easily copy any of the hundreds of songs in his music library to my own. So I did that. Now there were six songs in my library.
He looked at the list. "Those are the only ones you want?"
I nodded.
"Huh," said Ed. "We're very different, you and I."
We shared that sentiment, and then we went upstairs to spit toothpaste on each other's hands in the basin that, for the moment at least, we share.