Paul Little and Wendyl Nissen. Photo / HOS
My marriage is on a year-long countdown to certain hell.
I'm not sure whether I should be running around making the most of every romantic moment and creating a few more for good measure, or if I should just chill out and stop crossing my fingers behind my back.
The reason for the countdown is that this time next year, Paul and I will be moving to the country.
I realise what a cliche that is as I'm writing those words. All those urban empty-nest couples who buy their dream home in the country only to find after a year they don't like the solitude and the country ways, crave a cafe society and move back to the city with their tails between their legs.
It's a common story but it won't happen to me because it's my reality. In fact it's more than a reality, it's a dream come true.
Five years ago I frightened the hell out of my family by spending an afternoon pasting photos of idyllic country residences all over a very large piece of cardboard. I then put it on the wall in the kitchen so I could see it all day, every day.
"What the hell is that?" asked a friend.
"It's my future," I replied.
I had read that if you really want something bad enough, you make a wish board and look at it every day and it will happen. The wish board lasted a month, then someone slipped it behind the couch where it remained until we moved out of that house last year.
You'll note I said to my friend "my" future because "our" future would have been getting ahead of myself. There was still work to be done on my other half.
My husband is an urban guy. We were both born and raised in Auckland but he is the one who loves the sound of traffic on a still day, a mass of office blocks in the rain and a pollution haze of an afternoon. He likes to dine in restaurants, drink in bars, have coffee in cafes and shop in High St. He's also a talkative type of person who loves nothing more than a big room of people he can make laugh. One by one, of course.
I used to love a good party, could talk to a wall if I had to and chat for hours about anything. But now I crave silence, sunsets and serenity.
I'm not sure what happened but I changed. The big drinking, big lunching, big anything magazine editor Paul fell for began to drink less, lunch less and prefer a cup of tea and a lie down to hitting the latest social function and posing for pictures in Spy.
And then we found this place in Hokianga and miraculously he walked through it once, had a beer at the pub and said those magic words I had been waiting to hear: "let's do it". He then drank quite a few more beers.
So now we own The Dream Country Home and we have been practising living there a third of our time for a year. We are lucky enough to be able to have a small townhouse in Auckland as well.
"Your voice sounds different," say my daughters when I talk to them on the phone from up north.
"You look so relaxed," say my friends who come to visit.
For a while Paul treated the country place like a romantic mini-break. Those places you go to as a couple for a bit of quiet child-free time.
He loved the sunsets, enjoyed the beach and read a few books but he didn't move any clothes in or anything like that. Like the boyfriend who stays over but won't commit.
Then we went overseas and I realised that when I got homesick it was the country place I was thinking about, while he was thinking about the townhouse.
I set up a security Wifi camera but instead of using it to protect my home I trained it on the view from our deck up north so I could use my iPhone to check in at any time of the day. I check it daily, in the morning to see what the weather is doing and in the evening to marvel at the sunset.
When I'm there I bake copious amounts of bread and cakes, I leap out of bed to get into the garden, more active than I've been in years and grateful for the city gym that got me in shape. I love the feeling of closing the gate and retreating to the privacy I realise I've been longing for.
I met a woman recently who did exactly this transition from city and career to country and dream.
"But what about your husband?" I said, thinking of my own husband. "It wasn't his dream."
"Yes, but he told me it was his dream to make my dream come true."
Brilliant! I came home and told Paul then watched for a reaction. It took a while.
"So there's two of us," he said, despondently.
With 12 months to go, things are looking hopeful. Paul has bought a pair of slippers to live under the bed up north and has left some pyjamas and jeans in the wardrobe.
And we're keeping the townhouse ... just in case.
It's said that couples who've been together long enough either start out with or develop complementary characteristics. One half will be a tidy person; the other will prioritise cleanliness. And in our case, my books are shelved in alphabetical order, Wendyl writes books about cleaning and has a business making cleaning products.
One half will come up with the great ideas for turning their lives upsi - sorry, for trying out something adventurous. The other half will stop the ideas happening. In our case this applies to everything from buying a house to a choice of dish drainer. But we always get to a decision in the end.
So now we have two complementary homes, thanks largely to the cult of Grey Lynn real estate and having stayed in the same house for 12 years until we sold it a year ago. And we divide our time between the two, more in town than in the country. At the end of next year, when our youngest daughter finishes school, the ratio will be reversed.
The one in town is a shoebox so small that I heard one of my granddaughters muttering about how her dolls wouldn't be seen dead in this. The other is a beautiful place in Hokianga where, sadly, the economy is so depressed we were able to afford it.
And the complementary syndrome is still at work. Oh, I know some people call it refusing to agree on anything but even in that respect we complement each other. One of us refuses ever to agree on anything, and I'm always perfectly reasonable.
So one of us thinks "end of next year" means November because that's when our daughter will have finished her last exams. The other thinks "end of next year" means one minute to midnight on December 31 because for goodness sake that is the end of the year.
Wendyl looks forward to glorious seclusion after years in the media combat zone. She wants to shut that gate and not see a soul. Easily arranged as our immediate neighbours' houses aren't visible from ours and we can go for days without seeing a boat in the harbour or a soul on the beach.
I see a potential tourist goldmine that with the addition of just a little infrastructure, please, Wellington, could revitalise the region.
This should be one of those places no visitor to New Zealand leaves without seeing, with a nexus formed by the Waipoua Forest, the historic townships of Rawene and Kohukohu, the dunes at Opononi and the boulders at Koutu, next to which those at Moeraki look like a nice try, and the magnificent harbour.
We agreed to get a tohunga to bless the property. Wendyl wanted it because she felt some bad spirits hovering around. I wanted to make it clear - in that wishy-washy liberal Pakeha way - I respected the fact we were here by courtesy of the tangata whenua. As an atheist I found it quite stressful, expecting at every moment the tohunga to stop and say, "There is one among us who is not a believer" but we got through it just fine.
When they run into us our friends say to Wendyl: "We'll miss you." They say to me, with a furtive glance south to see if I'm wearing gumboots: "You'll never survive." That's got to the point where I wonder if Wendyl, who may have thought she sensed a certain reluctance about me, hasn't persuaded them to do this in a reverse psychology manoeuvre.
When someone asked me what I would miss most, I took so long to think of something they started throwing suggestions at me like a demented version of charades.
"The people in town," they suggested.
"We can have them to stay. They can have quality time, not quantity time," I replied.
"Your grandchildren."
"They've moved to f-ing LA."
"You like eating out a lot."
"You can't do that forever. Besides, they haven't invented any new foods lately, so far as I'm aware."
"Opera is seldom, if ever, performed in the Hokianga."
"Probably just as well. But it's seldom performed in Auckland, either. I can easily be there when it is."
"Theatre."
"I stopped going to the theatre when I worked out every play is the same, involving a buried family secret that has created tension for years and bursts into the open with devastating results in the final act. Eg, Hamlet."
"Live music, art exhibitions, interesting festivals."
"Well, I always mean to go, but somehow it never happens."
"Movies."
"We wait and watch them on Netflix anyway. I can have the luxury armchair, bar service movie experience using my very own armchair."
"Sniffing around second-hand clothes stores."
"I can do that online."
"Your work."
"Already mostly online."
And that's the key. Wendyl sees this as a move to a simpler life.
I see it as something made possible only by the incredibly complex technology of the internet.
The things I really enjoy - reading, writing, cooking, drinking - are very portable. The thing I enjoy most is being with my wife. And she with me. That's one thing we agree on.