I've been thinking lately about how any relationship is a two-person discourse community, full of odd speech patterns that nobody else understands. A couple I know calls going on escalators "riding the alligator" because of something their kid said twenty years ago. That kind of thing. You know what I mean.

Maybe that's what makes relationships so much work, and yet so gratifying, this establishment of communalness. You get to set up a little country that you are both (ostensibly) in charge of. You build conventions and social mores and speech patterns. You decide what the values are. (Postmodernism? Democrats? Meat or veggies? How much green stuff is enough green stuff? Family? How much family? Copyright or Commons? Both?) You set up an economy. You establish a culture. You decide whether you're a business-day or 24-hours type of operation. (Ours is 24 hours, since we don't really have the same sleep cycles at all.)

Seems to work just fine so far, though.