Erin is my wife and she’s great. 
The first conversation I had with her impressed upon me the people intelligence she has. We were forming a band back in the day and she remarked “The bass player is great, but might not be in the best musical shape..”
If an 8 on the enneagram like myself described him, it would have sounded like this:
“He’s terrible.”
She made it sound nice. True there were times I would be leading songs and yelling behind me “Sol!!! We’re playing in A Sol! A!!!”
He was great at rambling all over his instrument and had the added freedom one has when they don’t even attempt to play in the same key everyone else is playing in. If one is limited to certain notes in the key of A, just imagine the freedom if you randomly changed keys every thirty seconds or so?
Definitely “Out of musical shape”.
Erin is one of those people who’s just OK with life, and I needed to marry someone like that because I’m not OK with anything. Not that I’m fussy or dramatic like some (I hate drama), but if I do something and knock it out of the park I just naturally move the mental fence back another 20 feet next time because success without improvement would be boring. I like creating a better widget. Like every single day. 
Erin doesn’t care about widgets or fences, which is nice until it’s not. 
Every day we wake up with the same pattern, and every single day I have to say something like “Babe, concentrate! Don’t get distracted until after your morning routine or you’ll get stressed out later!!”
It’s 100% predictable (and anything that’s predictable and NOT a better mousetrap irritates the heck out of me), but she makes up for it by getting mad and telling me she’s not distracted while she’s clearly doing the distracted thing. 
Oh well. 
She has a gift for empathy that puts her into the emotional shoes of whomever she’s with, which is an amazing gift until whoever she’s with is an idiot, but her belief in the goodness of mankind is really admirable. 
My motto in high school was more along the lines of “People are idiots” (my actual high school motto), which if not untrue, left me a little jaded. Now I just roll my eyes when people do silly things and crack a joke, which helps when I do silly things too. 
Erin loves dogs. And cats. And rabbits. And grasshoppers. And ducks and anything else that isn’t human. 
While she believes in the good in all of us, I think mankind has disappointed her enough to know we can only ultimately trust the animals because they’re not capable of telling lies in language we’d understand. 
Animals are capable of chewing shoes, making messes in our yards, and knocking over our furniture, but well, they’re animals and that’s what animals do. 
The only animal I’m in favour of are fish because we actually have one, though I only consciously think “We have a fish!” about once a month because I literally do nothing with him. 
Fish are nice like that. 
I’m perhaps too practical to own an animal as it seems complicated and I’m ultra focused, but maybe that’s a problem too. I have trouble switching off. 
Monday a couple of the boys and I rode out to the saloon in Water Valley for a burger, and somewhere on the road I had a mini panic attack “Why am I riding today? Is it Saturday?? Am I preaching tomorrow again???”
One of the boys is the head of Venue Pre Production and was like “You preached two yesterday. And one two days ago!!”
I’m tired because I haven’t really had a moment in months where I could switch off completely with recent events. I enjoy the adrenaline of crisis but my recovery times are getting slower and slower and my brain needs to spend a week or two shut down. 
Erin has been bearing the burden as well, but she shuts down better than I do. In fact one could argue she can shut down doing anything. 
We used to be in the middle of a good marital fight and she’d roll over and fall asleep. It’s like charging out of a trench to take a hill and fainting only to wake up in the morning definitely having lost the argument.
She gets a little panicky every day about something which is cute until she gets mad because I think it’s cute and has to assert her female independence or whatever it is her mom taught her that makes it immediately not funny. But Erin didn’t have the luxury of a dad who was around at key times in her growing up and that’s hard too because there’s nothing particularly wrong with weakness until you let it embarrass you. 
Erin loves the broken pieces of the world and the broken people. If she’s in a bad mood she just needs to spend an hour helping a struggler and it energizes her. 
An hour with a struggler drains me because my brain hates weakness, but shushing people by yelling “Stop acting like an idiot and you’ll be happy!!!!” doesn’t seem to have the effect I wish it did. Of course maybe I’m on to something and could save people a lot of expensive counselling if that actually worked?
Erin is just OK with the world and the people around her. As much energy as my life takes, being around her reminds me why the struggle is worth it. There’s a naivety that has wisdom in it worth protecting and surrounding with animals if that helps. 
As long as I don’t have to clean up after them…