NPR Vs. NASCAR: How We Make It Work

Of all the ways we are not alike, however, the one flashpoint for me is not education or career, but that my husband does not read. I read in order to keep breathing. Frank reads the sports pages and Consumer Reports, and he even reads long involved fantasy books about bats and bots aloud with our ten year old. But I long, yes, still, after 20 years for him to really read—a novel, any novel, or a memoir, even a ghostwritten one about a quarterback. He won't. So, we don't often discuss some otherwise fulgent topics like books or politics, and at times I feel there's an entire part of me to which my husband has no access.

But, besides making terrific Cranium teammates, we do have one other huge thing in common, and pay attention because this is it: desire. We desire one another. Is there a way to explain desire? Dissect it and it seems to disintegrate. We're different, we don't make sense. But desire—for one another, and for a life together—is potent. This is what makes us work. 

Do I sometimes wish I'd married a man who went to college, who works in a more lucrative, higher profile business, who likes Springsteen, knows the difference between The Nation and The New Republic, and who has already read the book I'm in the middle of? I do. But only if that man were the man I married.