7 ways my wife’s iPhone saved our marriage

It’s tough being in a relationship.  It’s even tougher when you work separate shifts, and both of you are taking full loads of classes (at separate institutions).  Such circumstances do not facilitate seeing eye-to-eye (or seeing each other at all) and such challenges can only be compounded by one of you being highly technical and detail oriented and the other being highly social but removed from her friends and family.  All that being said, I don’t know that our marriage was ever REALLY in trouble, but since my wife got her iPhone things couldn’t be better.  Here are some of the ways that her new phone has brought us together, even when we’re apart:

1)      TEXTING.  Even though we texted a little bit when she had her old Samsung phone, it was never very reliable, and we never carried on extended conversations.  I suspect that this was due to the fact that the T9 configuration, compared to the iPhone’s well-designed software QWERTY keyboard, is downright tedious.  In fact many of my friends and coworkers noticed I became much more chatty after I dumped my HTC (which had a hardware keyboard).  Whatever the reason, we now find ourselves texting one another on a daily basis, having extended conversations about both trivial and important household matters.

2)      EMAIL.  I am an IT consultant, and as such, I pretty much live and breathe email.  I was indoctrinated early with Eudora many years ago, and in the last 20 years it has become a requisite part of my life.  I suffer the disease of not storing excess details in my head because I can always refer to the paper digital trail.  At work, I can reasonably expect that my coworkers and clients will be willing to read my (sometimes lengthy) emails, but unfortunately, I could never convince my wife of its importance so messages sent to her fell into a black hole of cyberspace.  NOT ANYMORE!  Now we are consistently emailing one another and including each other on important 3^rd party emails such as travel arrangements and family communiqués.

3)      CALENDARING.  I have been a fanatic about managing my calendar on my smartphone since I got one 5 years ago.  I get teased at work about putting all my personal appointments and even my sleep schedules into our corporate Exchange server.  I’ve always been after Lauren to update a calendar so I know what days she works, what days she has exams, and so on, and I’ve always dreamed she could see mine.  Now, we can!  Through the use of the iPhone’s easy Exchange configuration, and ability to handle multiple calendars, we now have immediate access to work and personal schedules, school assignments, and everything else.  No more double booking for this family!

4)      MEDIA.  I hated her old phone.  Every time it rang its 8-bit melodies were like fingers on the chalkboard.  Changing it didn’t help – every sound on that antique piece of electronics was terrible.  Due to the split schedules, she set her alarm to go off at all sorts of random times so it was like the equivalent of screaming children and howling cats would just show up.  The iPhone, true to its roots as an iPod designed for media consumption, has a plethora of pleasing sounds, and as an an advanced computing device, the alarms are much more configurable.  Not to mention we now share Pandora stations and watch YouTube in bed.

5)      FACEBOOK.  My wife is one of the most social people I know.  She comes from a ginormous family with many cousins her same age, who are all her best friends.  This allows me to have an abnormally inflated Facebook profile, but Lauren had never wanted to get involved.  As a result, I would often come home and let her know that someone got married, or had a baby, or what have you.  I’d been after her for years, but it took the iPhone and it’s easy, everywhere access to convert her.  Now, she is usually the first to with people a happy birthday or respond to their posts, and more importantly, she feels much more connected to her friends and family back home.  For the unmarried reader, a simple equation: Happy Wives => Happy Husbands => Happy Marriage

6)      WORDS WITH FRIENDS.  For Halloween one year, I went as the Wizard of Words.  Anyone who knows me (or has made it this far in the post) knows that I am a wordy dude.  As a result, I like wordy games, and grew up on Scrabble and Boggle.  Traditionally, this has led to an imbalance when these games would come out, but apparently Lauren was just bored.  Unbeknownst to me, my wife is some sort of lexical genius who at this very moment is probably playing 15 or more WWF games – and winning most of them (including at least half against me).  The iPhone has unleashed this sort friendly competition which has enhanced our sense of mutual respect.

7)      SHARING / OTHER APPS.  I could go on and on about different apps that have allowed us to communicate or enhanced our shared lives (among them GroceryIQ, Siri, and xx) but one the greatest things is that now that she can share in my digital indulgences (we use the same iTunes account), many of my expenses are considered acceptable.  I download mostly free or discounted games anyways, but I think that this also creates a much better tolerance from her regarding my iPad purchases.  Mostly, exposure to all these wild and wacky technology outlets has helped my wife to appreciate technology (and with it, her technologist husband) just a little bit more.