Scribbling Women & the Real-Life Romance Heroes Who Love Them
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We fall in love with each other’s flaws.
I read this somewhere. No relationship is perfect, and here I have to refer to another one of my Persian grandmother’s sayings. “He who wants a rose must respect the thorn.”
The notion of changing our partner to what we want them to be has never worked for us. Change must come from within. Of course, we’re both probably too stubborn to be changed by someone else, anyway. But, luckily, I love Jim exactly as he is, and he loves me the same way. We accept both the great and sometimes annoying qualities and tendencies we each have.
This doesn’t mean that we don’t complain about those things. It doesn’t mean that we don’t occasionally tease each other about them. We just would never complain publicly about the fact that I take my seat belt off as soon as we turn on to our street, which starts the car beeping immediately. Or that Jim has to check the traffic report on his iPhone before going to the convenience store a block from the house. Or that I love to spread my clothes on the chair, on top of the dressers, anywhere there is an available space. Or that Jim has everything in the house, from the closets (his closet) to the dishes, to the dog’s toys, categorized by size, color, texture… And he’s anal about it.
And the list goes on. But who wants to live with someone who is absolutely perfect, anyway? Or flawless?
We continue to build shared interests.
Responding to a question about how it was that we started writing together after being married thirteen years, Jim told a reporter, “All our married life we wanted to find something we could do together. So writing was a very natural evolution. I don’t know why it took so long.”
I know why…because before writing, there was rowing, quilting, baseball, Pac-Man, golf, chess, tennis, skiing, backgammon, restoring an old sailboat, and renovating houses. Since then, we’ve added yoga, furniture upholstering, Words with Friends, and a few other hobbies. Some of them stick, some of them don’t. But that’s okay. Finding things that we could do together has been our goal.
There’s a dark side to this. Jim burned the chess game in the fireplace because I was winning too many games. After the third hole of golf, I choose to drive the cart only and take pictures, and I complain for the rest of the round that “I’m really hungry.” I learned to row on the Charles River when I was four months pregnant with our firstborn because that was when (and apparently the only time) they were offering lessons. Jim’s quilting stitches are much better than mine, but I won’t admit it. We are both die-hard Red Sox fans (I joined the nation in 1985), and in 1986 we ate chicken on every game day (because Wade Boggs did) and spent our October mortgage payment buying playoff tickets. Incidentally, we’re happy to say that this past decade has been much kinder to us (not in mortgage payments, but in being Sox fans).
We’ve come to the conclusion that as far as activities go, everything is better when we do it together.
We are not just friends.
We believe our friendship is the foundation of our marriage. But there’s more. Physical contact, intimacy, passion are also key parts of it. It’s important to cultivate romance. We’ve written thirty romance novels about it, so we won’t explain it here.
Romance also means dating, but dating doesn’t have to have a large price tag associated with it. An afternoon hike. An ice-cream cone. A drive to the beach. Okay, Jim might even think our weekly trip to Costco is romantic, but we also have our trips to the Caribbean. Next year, Europe. But whether it’s a quiet dinner for two or a run to some fast-food place, we look for opportunities to spend time with each other.
We hug.
It’s sort of fitting that we end this ramble with some praise for the unsung hero of affection. We believe in hugs. Long hugs. Every morning before the day starts…we hug. We read somewhere a long time ago that most couples cannot hug each other for more than a minute. We can. In holding on tight to each other, we acknowledge the essential presence of our partner and we close out the world.
It’s just the two of us. Two cosmic travelers who have found their way home.
That’s how we love.
Nikoo and Jim McGoldrick are storytellers, teachers, and partners in the truest sense. Together, they write historical romance as May McGoldrick and contemporary suspense thrillers as Jan Coffey. These prolific and popular authors have been the recipients of numerous awards for their work. They now reside in Litchfield County, Connecticut. Visit their website at www.nikooandjim.com.