Grasshopper New Media Presents...

Rob and I were friends for a year before we started dating. Good friends. Best friends, even. Last weekend we celebrated our 12th wedding anniversary and at dinner we resurrected a game that we began when our friendship began. Over the years it’s reared it’s head time and again. It pops up for a spell and then sleeps deeply for awhile.

We adopted it 16 years ago (gulp), because we discovered that eventually even 21 year olds run low on topics of conversation during hour 3 of the nightly phone calls. So, we started asking questions. Any questions. No passing, no refusing to answer, any topic was fair game. The topics ranged from intimate to outrageous and were only occasionally mundane.

If I’m being honest the game caused some strife. We were only friends. We were each romantically involved with people who were decidedly not each other. And we talked. About everything. All of those questions you shouldn’t ask a new love were spewed across the phone lines of friendship without any thought of censorship. When the game changed, all of that information was still out there. It was a little messy.

Fast-forward a decade and a half to Saturday night and the aforementioned anniversary celebration. One of us had just finished a long week of solo parenting while the other had just finished a long week of business travel and (cough, room service). We stared at each other across a small marble-topped table. I’m sure we had a lot to say to each other, and we could have filled the evening retelling stories of what the week dished to us. But instead, we played the question game.

We spent the night answering questions about goals and successes and plans for the near and distant future. And about whether we’d prefer to eat spiders or worms. It was nice. Rejuvenating. Refreshing. Releasing. Re-connecting.

I’m just kidding about the spiders.

by Megin Hatch

Photo graciously provided by Oberazzi, through a Creative Commons license, some rights reserved.