Getting There
Marriage Will Be A Long Ride

Interviews, essential questions, Q&A, questions and answers

Interviews, Q&A, questions and answers, ethnography

interviews

We can’t do it alone! The experience of others helps us develop a new vision of marriage that encourages mutual growth through love. Here you’ll find our essential questions and one-page interviews.

Only-a-few-weeks-left-of-the-journey Reality Check: We’ve had a number of interesting conversations, and many reflections. But regular interviews didn’t happen. Read below on why we think this original goal didn’t come to be this time.

The Problem with Interviews....

While we’ve had fabulous conversations with others, inward reflections, and experiences to learn from for a life time, we haven’t done the formal interviews we expected to on this project. And that’s okay. In the spirit of learning, acceptance, and adjustment, here’s why we think reality was different than the initial idea.

  1. Lack of prior planning and preparation.

    When we first started spitballing about this project, we’d planned to engage advisors and build a network of people in Europe to interview. I’d had a similar approach when interviewing women farmers across the United States and it worked well. This time, though, life got in the way of life and we built no such network. We figured we’d rely on fortuitous meetings and introductions.

  2. Language barriers.

    Does this seem obvious? Now it is to us. It’s tough to strike up up conversation with strangers, then deep dive into sensitive things like love and marriage when you don’t speak the same language. We had the richest conversations in France, where one of us speaks the native language decently.

  3. Trepidation.

    The whole biking-across-Europe aspect always out shadowed the deeper questions of this trip, and we let that happen. We were not courageous in asking the questions we wanted to know, at every chance we could.

  4. Lack of alignment.

    Between the two of us, there was a slight misalignment in terms of prioritizing “the project,” which led to the path of least resistance, which is not really “doing” the interview portion of the project.

  5. Lightening up for once.

    One of us tends to be relentlessly driven, doing, working and producing. A couple months into this spectacular adventure, they are slowly seeing the benefit, and joy, of play. Easing up on sternly “doing” this part of the project reminds us of a big sticker we have on our fridge at home: “Oh, lighten up!”

  6. It’s not really over.

    These are questions we keep with us. They will come back in new forms as we learn in new ways. They didn’t quite come to fruition in the organized way we thought they would this time. We are still asking. Dare we say we are getting there?

James WelchComment