I Drink Coffee Now

And Other Symptoms of Love

This cup and the matchless coffee held within exist courtesy of indie manufacturer BOB.

It had creeped up on me slowly, insidiously, like a summer cold. Then one morning, as I was imbibing my daily dose of coffee, the realization hit me: damn, it was good! I swished it around in my mouth, savouring it, then took a careful swallow. The feel of it slinking down my throat was like running a strip of satin over the soft skin of the face. It was so weird. Didn’t I use to hate coffee?

My wife sometimes jokingly reminds me of something I once told her, that ever since I was a kid, I’ve wanted to be somebody’s husband. It’s true. As a young boy, I had been certain that I’d thrive in a long-term relationship. A lothario, I’ve never been.

What I am, at last and since October 22, 2022, is married. And every morning, for over a year, I’ve been joining my wife at the breakfast table to enjoy a good cup of coffee.

Used to be, the mere sound of the word coffee was enough to make me grimace with almost painful disgust. Like cigarettes, I thought coffee tasted unholy, like something dead or, even worse, struggling to die. I only drank this devil’s beverage when I needed a burst of energy, and I accomplished that by drinking it black, with narry a hint of sugar, so its bitterness could couple with the caffeine and achieve the desired result.

These days, the smell of coffee is what gets me up and running in the morning. I have eschewed my twisted preference for the ascetic black variant, opting instead for softer, milkier offerings like cappuccinos or caffè lattes. That, because I now appreciate the taste of coffee, but also because it’s the way my wife prefers to consume it, and sharing this newfound joy with her, a lifelong coffee-ist, is probably the best part of the experience.

But enough about coffee, as it’s not really the point. That morning, as I sat reeling from the sudden realization of my transformation, a question shot to the forefront of my mind. What else has changed about me since my wife and I started living together?

It’s no secret that a long-term relationship has profound effects on its members. From emotional support and personal growth to actual physical benefits, sharing your life with a compatible partner is one of the most life-changing choices you can make.

For those who know me in real life, it isn’t hard to see that I’m not the same person I was four years ago, when she and I first became a couple. I’m more relaxed, more confident, and more mature. But in trying to answer the above question, I was surprised how many other things popped up.

What follows is a list of a few surprising tweaks the last four years have made to my person.

I can’t eat spicy food anymore. Due to a chronic condition that affects the digestive system, my wife is not allowed to consume anything with even a hint of spice. Exotic ingredients like curry, paprika, and wasabi are off the table, but so are oregano, pepper, and even cinnamon. And her dietary restrictions make it so the flavour of our meals comes mainly from salt and good quality ingredients. As it turns out, when you’ve eaten nothing spicier than a Dorito in three years, your body can no longer handle the same things it used to. Over the holidays, we visited our families in our home town, and my mother-in-law made me an omelette. Mid-meal, my stomach began to churn, and I asked if she’d used anything other than eggs. ‘A little pepper’, she said. Just enough, apparently, to send me running to the bathroom minutes later.

I know much more about Romanian celebrities than I’d like. Decades of avoiding Romanian show-biz like the bubonic plague gone down the drain. Today, my brain is filled with information, oftentimes personal and disgustingly intimate, about people I care nothing for. I know which famous talk-show hosts have had hair transplants, and can name the couples boasting the biggest age gaps. I know, too, that famous glitz-queen Ana-Maria Prodan owns a dress with her ex-husband’s face on it, and that a certain politician, nicknamed the Trash King, married the same woman five times. Information I could live without, but which, it seems, I do not.

I sleep on my side. Back when I had a whole bed to myself, I thought I could only fall asleep if lying on my back and with my hands draped over my chest, quite similarly, as you’ve probably pictured already, to a dead person. Boy, was this particular myth debunked when we moved in together. For the better part of two years, we lived in an apartment that had an industrial pallet for a bed. It wasn’t even one of those gigantic ones you see in some warehouses, but a measly regular one that could only accomodate a one-person mattress. In order to take up less space, we took to sleeping on our sides, and on a weekly basis, it seemed, we’d discover various new pains and sore spots. The apartment we left behind, but not our newly ingrained habits.

I talk about my feelings. This is perhaps the biggest change I’ve undergone in the last few years, and the hardest to come about. As a newly-minted couple, we didn’t know how to communicate. Misunderstandings abounded, frustrations accumulated, and this led to some nasty fights. I freely admit that I was in large part to blame, because I had as weak a grasp on my feelings as a first grader does on his vocabulary. Whenever, after an argument, my wife tried to talk things out, I’d withdraw into myself, arguing that it would be better to “sleep on it”. Days would go by, during which I’d do nothing but fume, and nothing would get fixed until she reattempted to commence negotiations. Eventually, I learned to open up. And not just that—a relationship, after all, is not breakdance but tango. I also learned to listen; to stop beating around the bush; to not leave things unsaid, misunderstood, or ignored. I learned that being with another person requires actually being with another person.

I have a cat. Pretty self-explanatory.

I’m filled with an abundance of useless facts. Do you, for example, know what a fractal is? Or that bananas used to have seeds? Or that (and this was particularly shocking to me) a panther is nothing more than a leopard or jaguar with too much melanin?

I can read minds (well, her mind). Studies have shown that, given enough time together, romantic partners can develop the ability to “read each other’s minds”, i.e., develop such a strong sense of each other that they can readily glean important information about the other’s state of mind, feelings, and desires. There’s also the romantic cliché of completing each other’s sentences, which, like all clichés, is rooted in ancient wisdom. It’s one thing to read about this phenomenon, however, and quite another to watch it unfold in real time. Many times, my wife and I have said the same thing at the same time. Often, said thing was a joke, which made it even more shocking, since we don’t have the same sense of humor (although, you know, maybe even this is no longer the case). We’ll often get cravings for exactly the same food, or think about the same person on the same day. What’s even curiouser is that sometimes, one of us will be thinking something very specific, something they’ve never thought before, and the other will just know what it is. The other day, we were supposed to go out on a date, and she asked me what I thought she was going to wear. Without thinking, I mentioned a hand-made red shirt she’d bought from a bookstore¹ the previous month, despite knowing she’d only worn it once or twice since, as it was pretty hard to pair with her other clothes. Her face lit up, and she asked me how I knew. ‘I just did.’ Explain that.

I can iron my own shirts. Not only that, but I can do it quickly. Have you ever woken up thirty minutes before you were supposed to leave for work and found yourself with nothing to wear? Old Me might have panicked, woken her up or gone rushing to a neighbor for help. New Me was better than that. He had completed my wife’s intensive household training regimen and become a self-sufficient man (mostly).

Turns out my childhood self was right. I’m in a long-term relationship, and I’m thriving. Things haven’t always been easy—are they ever?—but here we are, sixteen months on, happily married. We survived four years of frequent job changes, dentist appointments, awkward first fights, urine spraying, and meeting each other’s families. We’ve improved, the two of us, ourselves and each other.

And that, folks, is something I totally saw coming.

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1. Wait, bookstores sell clothes now? Dear reader, I was as surprised as you.