I Married an Apple Mac
My husband is a geek. Not a nerd. He is a geek, but a cool one. One of those sexy geeks who you want to pop round and clean your hard drive, not one of the nerds that you look at and wonder if they are the inspiration for The 40 Year Old Virgin.
I hold my hands up and admit, that I knew he was a geek when we met him. It was half the reason I fell in love with him in the first place.
I was, however, a little young and naïve. I did not realise that if you fall in love with a young hot geek, their tendencies and obsessions grow over time. My husband is ambitious and driven, but this means he is also a workaholic. Which, when we first met was ok, because iPods had only just been released and iPhones were new. So technology was not ‘smart’ yet, at least not as smart as it is now.
We worked together, that is how we met. He worked hard in the office (which was very sexy to watch) and when we got home we would work on things together… But back then, emails did not ping every 30 seconds and you were not reachable at all hours of the morning.
As time moved on I began to realise that I was slowly losing my husband to another love. He spent less and less time talking to me, and more and more time with his shiny new gadgets. His old bulky contraptions were replaced with sleek, sexy, younger models. His phone was replaced with the shiny all-knowing smarter versions and I couldn’t help but feel like maybe I was being replaced with a younger model. I was being ‘Widowed by Steve Jobs’.
We soon had two children to think about and whilst I was on the couch feeding the newborn, or bathing or changing them, my husband would spend his time caressing the keys of his younger model. Conversations became stunted and monosyllabic as he threw himself into work at all hours of the day. The ease of technology and the ability to now contact people a million different ways meant that sleep was interrupted by the wolf whistles and cat calls from his smarter devices. Getting his attention was becoming harder.
One day I turned to him and said, “I am no longer sure who I am married to, a man or an Apple logo – because honestly, I see the Apple logo more than I see your face.”
It was a sharp move. Shocking really. It made him think.
From then on, each time he opened the lid on his laptop I would say, “well hello again bright shiny apple – have you seen my husband?”
It didn’t take long for him to realise how serious the situation had become. I started taking note of how many hours a day he would spend attached to one of his gadgets, how many hours he was missing out on playing with our children and spending quality time with his wife. He quickly realised that life had indeed been passing him by.
His work did not help. With smarter technology, and smart phones and laptops in households now being commonplace, it meant that his bosses felt justified contacting him at all hours. But that does not make it right. A relationship survives if you have a good work/life balance, and allowing technology to become the third person in your marriage is the quickest way to destroy it.
My husband still works incredibly hard, and sometimes even very long hours, but most nights he now comes to bed without his phone or his laptop. Sleep, after all, should not be interrupted. Those emails and messages can wait a few hours while you rest. Family time is now family time again and Steve Jobs no longer feels like the ‘Camilla’ in our marriage.
I was widowed by Apple for far longer than I should have been, but my God am I grateful that my husband has been resurrected. Of course, I am not naïve enough to believe this will always be the case, and my husband may need reminding again in a few months when bad habits creep back in. But for now… today… I have fallen back in love with my handsome geek of a husband and enjoy seeing his gorgeous eyes looking at me rather that staring at the screen emblazoned with an Apple logo.
