Going The Distance

Before we disappear into the gargantuan task of going through all the footage we have filmed (around 200 hours in total), we just wanted to say a huge thank you to everyone out there who took the time to be part of our journey. Both, of course, the people who gave us their time, their thoughts and their intimate and cherished love stories, but also a huge thank you to you folk out there who have taken the time to read about what we have done.

I think I said from the very beginning that I’m not a particular believer in blogs – I read a statistic that suggested that over a million blogs are written worldwide and less that 1% of them are read. By anyone. Which is why I started this mad adventure with a couple of bulletpoints a day. But slowly, inevitably, I was beguiled by the heady lure of daily self-expression, and the entries got longer and longer… So thank you so much to everyone who took the time to wade through my ramblings (often written from the sidecar, or a few days after the event – I never once watched back the footage so they were done from my memory rather than cold hard quotations – which the book will be)

Which brings me to my final farewell. We had the experience of our lives, and now, we have the pressure of trying to make something of it… I’m taking 5 months to write a book, and Mike is going to work through the footage. We will be trying to pitch the documentary idea out to try and get funding (normally this happens at the start of the process, but we will be pitching for post-production funding) so we’ll be working our butts off to try and get this thing on television.

If that does happen, it would be likely to  be at the start of next year, 2011. If we’re lucky… I’ll post any developments on this site, but nothing in between, so if you’d like to know how we’re getting on, sign up to an RSS feed from this site and you’ll be updated when I finally have news. If not, please do just drop us a line at mikeandalanna@gmail.com.

We have loved hearing from you guys with your thoughts on love and your endless encouragement for the two of us. Thank you so much, and with that, I sign out.

Gone the Distance. xx

Well, I can’t believe this is finally it. Yesterday was a whirlwind (after 7 hours of sitting on the plane/waiting for luggage to be unloaded/elbowing other passengers in the bunfight for hotel vouchers, we finally got to sleep at 3.55am), and it has somewhat shifted the focus from the enormity (in my head) of our return to simple relief. I’m really looking forward to getting home. I have moments when this really disappoints me – the wishing away of the last month on the road, which now pains me to recall – but I also am just bursting with a childish excitement to see all the faces which I have missed so much over the last 8 months.

One change that I feel, and that I hope I can retain, is finally a sense that London is my home. I kicked and screamed my way through my early 20s, desperately wanting to live in seemingly more exciting or different global metropolises (metropoli?!) believing that somehow I’d feel more fulfilled, more challenged, more interesting, abroad. I fixated specifically on New York because I had my handful of very close friends there and every time I went, I threw myself into its captivating energy.

I believed myself to be bigger than London, wanted to feel more international, less normal. But now I know, with a certain pride and a strong sense of contentment, that London is my home. The wanderlust, the desire to be somewhere else, the sense that everywhere was more interesting, which gnawed away at the better part of my first decade of professsional life is now sated, I hope for good. It’s almost as though (she says, self indulgently, sleep starved) it’s taken me these 8 months of being away, working my guts off with Mike, meeting people from such amazingly different backgrounds and hearing such personal details of their lives, to realise that really people are pretty similar wherever you go. And the people I know best happen to be in London.

I’ve been blown away by the people that we have met on this journey. In a way that no other travelling experience has let me understand before. This project has been an amazing way of opening the lid on people’s lives – people from so many backgrounds, so many ways of life. I honestly feel privileged and blessed to have had this experience, and I hope that it has enriched me in a way that no amount of real life could have. The subject of love has allowed us into people’s hearts, and my own heart has swollen with the love that we have felt from people at every step of the way.

I realise I’m descending into a cheese fest here, but my faith in and love for humanity has grown beyond anything I could ever have expected. People are, by and large, wonderful and I feel blessed to have been able to go out and experience that. Every country has overwhelmed us with its warmth and generosity, and going home, I feel a certain obligation to express that in what we do with all that we have filmed, but that said, I’m so proud to have met every single person that we have found (and who has found us) along the way. There’s lots of love out there, and it’s really made me feel good about the world.

So, going home. Friends and family are what make home, and God, I’ve been reminded how much I love my lot. Going back for Mike’s mum’s 60th means that the whole of his family will be together for the weekend, we’ll meet baby Eva for the first time – Mike’s brother’s daughter, born in October. Not to mention friends who are now married, other friends with new babies, friends who have suffered loss, my younger brother getting engaged! Time to get back to real life now with its highs and lows, its mundanity and routines, and the nest of friends and family.

New York has been a perfect quarantine for us before we head back to the wonderful madness of the UK. I have friends who I love in New York, one of whom gave us her sumptuous flat near Union Square, and we have spent time catching up with old friends, laughing and generally behaving like we have never been away. After 8 months of living with virtually nothing, feeling like I was becoming less materialistic (”All my crap can fit into two small bags. What more could I possibly need when I get home?”), there really is nothing like New York for restoring a rampant consumerism.

After the relative mental difficulty of Buenos Aires, New York has been a breeze. One week here and it feels like nothing has changed, like we never left here to set off on our self-indulgent odyssey.

Except of course that I got a cold the minute we landed.

That’ll happen after returning from 8 months of summer to piles of snow on the pavement. But I have basically been a snot fountain and felt shit for our entire time here. Hey ho.

We’re now in the plane. Sitting here. At the stand. After initial delay, we taxied out to the runway, then just as we got to the front of the queue, the captain came on and said that we had to go back to the stand because there was an issue with the de-icer. Now, an hour and a half later, the snow is inches thick on the wing and gathering at the base of the windows like some cheesy Christmas scene. It’s difficult to make any shapes out beyond the wing. We’re not going anywhere.

We’re leaving New York today on a flight out of Newark at 9.25pm.

We wake up to heavy heavy snowfall. Not cool.

The real curveball today was devised entirely by me: I have organised an interview with an economics professor at Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. It’s a last minute plan – like everything on this trip – a friend of mine forwarded us a link to a New York Times Article on the evolving state of marriage, with contribution from our much loved Dr Helen Fisher.

Professor Betsey Stevenson, PhD, is a professor of business and public policy. She’s written a number of papers on the economics of marriage and has created a Marriage Calculator based on US census data over the last 50 years which gives individuals their percentage likelihood of divorce.

The statistic that 50% of marriages in the UK (and pretty much the Western world) end in divorce has been the driving force for this entire journey – we wanted to find out what makes marriage last. The opportunity to interview a US economist who could talk about that statistic, why it’s not entirely reliable, the changing dynamics of marriage – all without subjectivity, simply by analysing the numbers – was an opportunity not to be missed. Which is why we found ourselves hauling every single item we owned from New York to Philadelphia in the heavy heavy snow. Only to be there for 2 hours before returning to Newark to catch a plane.

But she was worth it. 100%. Our last interview on the road for Going the Distance was an absolute cracker. She was fascinating, talking about the evolution of marriage from one of shared production to one of shared consumption. In essence, that a couple 50 years ago chose each other on the basis that they would be establishing a small factory (he goes out into the market, she has to run the home and raise the children) and now, the model has changed so that it makes more sense economically for both partners to be earning (it costs less now to buy clothes from Walmart than to make them at home) and with both partners financially independent, marriage now is about sharing the fruits of the work. ie people chose each other now based on shared goals, opinions and leisure activities, whereas it boiled down more to choosing a business partner in this game of life.

I’m not doing her justice with this garbling, but needless to say, she was superb. Thoroughly worth the schlep out of state!

It’s all about us today! Poor Sue and John and the sound guy Frank are going to have to spend a day listening to our inane ramblings. Yippee!

They arrive at the flat at 10 and set up around us. For our interview, they are doing green screen – they haven’t yet decided what they want the background of the couples to be.

Though I’m looking forward to the interview – someone will actually be asking us questions! And hopefully not just the same old questions we got all the way down (which we got good at answering in Spanish) but new ones – I’m actually a little nervous about having to come up with decent answers. This ain’t no Bolivian children’s TV.

Mike has been great at calming me on this front. Every interview we have done, someone will ask “well, what IS the secret of lasting love?” and I haven’t got a clue. There are things that we have seen – like every couple has a unique love, no relationship dynamic is the same, there are no templates – but I have no soundbite answers. Mike just said to me that I should think of the journey as our ‘data gathering’ and now we need to go back and start on ‘data analysis’. What a job that’s going to be.

As ever, with this blog, I’m writing this more than a week after the interview so details which were so important and felt so powerful at the time are now hazy. That’s what the book’s going to be for, I suppose, when I’ll actually have watched all the footage again and had a chance to think about it properly.

That said, the interview with Sue was one of the most affirming moments for me in the entire trip. All the fears which I had harboured for so long about whether what we have done is worth it (or rather, how we are going to be able to do it justice) seemed to lighten: she asked us questions about how we feel about each other, what has changed, what we have seen, what we have learnt, why we married in the first place… all of which we answered with a candour and detail which I found totally surprising, given that for the rest of the trip, we have been so busy ‘doing’ that ‘thinking’ has not been an option.

I think the most extraordinary moment was at the end of the interview when Sue leant forward and said, “I just have to say one thing – you do realise that you two are not normal?” (we have heard that before) I laughed. She said, “no, I mean, that everything that you have said about your relationship, how you said that you both really thought about what marriage meant before you tied the knot – that is very unusual” We had spoken at length about why we had decided to get married (which is the main thrust of her documentary) and about our thought-processes that got us there (I confessed that I never even questioned that I would marry – I know that I would never have been strong enough not to marry, in the face of convention) She finished off by saying that the two of us have done more thinking in 8 months about our relationship than most couples do in a lifetime and that the two of us evidently have something very special. Which was uplifting to hear. Like everything, you can never know if your ‘normal’ is like other people’s ‘normal’…

After about 3 hours of the interview, we headed out to get shots of the two of us around New York. It was very cold, but it was great fun in many ways. These poor people had listened to so much of us warbling on that it felt like we were spending the day with old friends…

We head back to my friend’s flat to do the interviews. The first will be Helen and Lucy talking us through the results of the previous scan, the second an interview with just Helen by Sue. We’re set to spend all day with Sue and John, with them filming just us. So this is just the start.

It’s difficult to write about the first interview because the aforementioned fellow who I feel real attachment to won’t let me ‘fess up the results of the first set of tests, housed in the famous envelope. So you’ll just have to wait for the book/the documentary for that one.

But the interview with Helen is totally fascinating. Not least because Sue, the Canadian documentary producer, is fantastic, drawing the extremely good Helen on questions about why marriage as an institution still exists at all if divorce is at an all time high, and if general confidence in the institution should appear to be fading. Helen, the biological anthropologists, talks to humans’ need to couple up. It lasts about an hour, and (given that it is 1am and we have been sitting in a plane waiting in vain to take off in heavy snow for 4 hours) I can’t remember much of it. But I’m delighted to say that we have every single minute on tape so I don’t need to feel guilty about dodgy grey matter. Again, it’ll make the book…

It’s around now that I start to feel rubbish. Really rubbish. Like little-kid-gets-flu rubbish. This feeling with last for the next 5 days.

Once again, Dr Lucy Brown has given us 2 lengthy questionnaires to fill in before we meet. It’s curiously wonderful to fill in these questionnaires, which delve into how the two of us feel about each other, how we feel about ourselves, how we react to everyday situations, and what we treasure in our relationship.

The brainscan is scheduled to start at 9.45am at NYU’s Center for Neural Science. We have two hours and every minute of the session costs $15. Which means that there can be no arsing about. At all. Last time, Mike’s little claustrophobia attack gave everyone the willies because it ate into valuable time. Not so this time, we’re pros.

The CBC documentary crew set up all their equipment, and I’m up first. The fMRI scanner is a beast of a machine, located behind heavy locked doors at the NYU neurology department. It’s a huge block of metal with a hole in the middle, with a gurney which slides into the centre. It is basically a massive magnet.

For this reason, absolutely no metal is allowed near the scanner – earrings out, belts off, coins out, underwire bra off. I lie on the gurney, familiar with the process this time. Dr Helen Fisher is the hand holder at this point, getting a prop for under my knees, a blanket for warmth. Keith, the guru of the fMRI – he runs the machines and knows the brain well- gives me earplugs because the machine is violently loud. Foam is then put either side of my head to protect my ears further, then a Hannibal Lectur cage is lowered onto my head to hold it in position. Above my eyes is a small mirror which is angled so that I can see a screen at the back of the tube.

As I’m being slowly moved into the central hole, there’s a clunk. Disaster is only nearly averted as a quarter leaps from my pocket to the inside of the tube, slowed by the blanket. No blanket and I could have cost us all thousands…

Once the quarter is retrieved, I slowly glide into the tunnel. For the first ten minutes, they are just trying to get images of the brain without any stimulus. I lie fairly contentedly for a few minutes until I’m seized by the need to scratch my nose. Not cool. I breathe through it, trying not to move my head. I then panic that no images have appeared on the rear screen yet, so I wave my hand which is protruding from the base of the tunnel. No worries, I’m told. They are about to start.

The scientists are looking for neural activity in reaction to three sets of stimulus. Mike and I have provided three photos of each other to the NYU team in advance (of our first brainscan all those months ago). The basic idea is that there are three types of love in our brain: romance, attachment and sex.

We have to provide photos of the other one’s face which inspires those feelings. For romance, I have a black and white photo of Mike’s face smiling during our first dance. For attachment (the feeling of comfort and security with a partner), I have a photo of him smiling on a holiday in Beirut which I really love and inspires happy memories (I have to confess, I found this a hard sentiment to capture in a photo) and finally, of sex, a photo of his head on a pillow (also a very difficult one to do – “make a sexy face Mike!” “erm…”).

The brainscan works in blocks of about ten minutes. First romance, then attachment, then finally sex. The image of Mike in our first dance appears. I haven’t seen it for a while (well, 8 months since we were last here) and I smile hard then get tears in my eyes. Probably a good reaction, but you just never know if what’s happening in the old walnut during this thing is right. But generally, with the romance, I throw myself into memories of how I felt at the wedding, some of Mike’s most romantic gestures (he was surprisingly good at them in the early days – romance is, as you’d expect, very linked with the feelings of the early days. Dr Fisher later says that it is unusually to see strong feelings of romance last longer than around 3 years in a couple. Of course, there are wonderful exceptions) That said, there were moments on our trip which were magically romantic – as I lie on that gurney, I think of lying on a Scottish tartan rug in the deserted southwest of Oregon, with Mike beside me, staring up at the inky black sky alive with glittering stars, during one of the few summer nights of meteor showers when the sky seems to be striking matches, and feeling like my heart was swollen with love for this man as we talked for hours into the night before crawling into our own little world of the tent by our bike. Our little daily signal to tell the other that we loved them, whilst in the shared solitude of the bike’s long journeys, was something we learnt from a couple in Fairbanks: 4 squeezes which say I love you (2 for love – so, forgive the dodgy Morse code: 1 – 11 – 1). They taught it to us because they said that they liked to be able to ’say’ I love you without other people knowing, and Mike and I have embraced it wholeheartedly. I squeezed my own leg in the formation (I would put my hand up onto Mike’s thigh as he drove, and he’d reach across and do it to my hand).

We were asked to provide a photo of someone who we felt totally indifferent about. This is a tough one (how do you ask someone if you can take a photo of them because you feel totally indifferent about them?) – I used a security guard at my clients’ building. I happened to remember him from ten years earlier when he was security during a brief stint I did at Warner Music so occasionally I chat to him. He’s a perfectly nice guy, but I feel nothing about him.

Romance: Mike’s face for around 10 seconds, then the ‘nothing’ face, then we are presented with a fairly large number (like 2035) on a white screen and, beforehand, told to count down from it in increments of 7. This desperate concentration basically flushes out the feelings of anything at all. Mike’s face again. ‘Nothing’ face. Number. Alternated a bit, but repeated 4 or 5 times.

All the while, the machine is punching the air around me in loud blasts as it ploughs through my brain taking images slice by slice. Particularly creepy when the eyeballs are in shot.

Romance over, onto attachment – same process with ‘nothing’ face and numbers but with the attachment photo this time. Attachment is a harder one to evoke. I feel it more strongly than ever now that we have finished this trip. A feeling of complete trust and contentment with one person. What swirls in my head during this time is a happy cocktail of shared jokes, laughter in good and bad times on the road, the peace that I felt in the sidecar when I looked up to his face and watched him driving, the thought of having children with him, the life we are building with each other, my love of being around him generally. I smile everytime the picture comes up.

As the scan goes on, I get sleepier and I worry that I’m not giving them the brainjuice that they need. Then I worry that this worry is going to throw the results out totally. Then I try and think of nothing and get back to the job in hand.

I’m mad.

Finally, sex. Now, this one is a bit different from the other two because it’s so physical. The first time we had our brains scanned all those months ago, I had terrible jetlag and was suffering from the aftereffects of the yellow fever jab was so feeling wretched and was very worried after the scan about the first two. But when it was time to think sexy thoughts, I really had no problem. I’m not quite so randomly horny this time, but I don’t have a problem. Apparently, that’s fairly normal and is why they leave this one until last.

After the sex block is over, they put on a DVD (of Planet Earth this time, of The Simpsons last time) for 10 minutes to get more of the control pictures of the brain. I fall asleep and only wake up when my hand falls off the gurney. Since the last time that we did the scan, they have got a new device which allows them to see where we look during the images. This new technology has opened the door to whole new studies where individuals are shown films and researchers monitor what part of the screen their eyes are looking at during certain frames – this could well dramatically change the way that we are presented images (surely if they know that we are concentrating on one corner of the screen in, say, a scary bit, they’ll make that corner more interesting? etc). In our case, however, they use it to make sure that we’re not asleep during the study. They are fine with me falling asleep at the end – otherwise they would have woken old koala bear here up.

I’m motored out of the tunnel, all good. I go into the study area on the other side of the glass, and Mike heads in. He seems much calmer than last time, and sure enough, he has no problems. In the hour or so that he is in the scanner, I chat to Helen about my feelingsduring the scan, which she documents. This time, she is keen to know how they compare to last time too. I tell her that attachment was easier to evoke this time. She is surprised – her hypothesis with us too is that we would return having fuelled our romantic feelings towards each other with the whirlwind and magic of travel.

The reality, I tell her, in my experience, is that travel is far from romantic. Yes, it’s about sharing experience and creating memories together but most of the day to day reality is not romantic at all – it’s practical even. It’s about learning to get a strong instinct for each other’s moods, about sharing the highs and, more importantly, the lows. Especially when Mike and I are sharing a professional dream here too, an all consuming project which we have both invested ourselves entirely in. The stress is daily and follows waves which are relatively unpredictable. My pride and my happiness in what we have achieved lies much more in the attachment area than the romance: what I now feel for Mike is a love much deeper than I could ever have anticipated. When we started, neither of us could understand how we could love each other more, but somehow we both do, and it’s because of the fact that we have shared EVERYTHING – from the random panic attacks, the desperate frustration at trying to get interviews or great shots, to the same thoughts.

And I say to her that I actually value attachment much more than romance. Romance, to me, feels like the cheap flirt of the family. The butterflies in the tummy at the start of the love affair, the fire that burns bright but not for long, the reaction that has people blind to faults, has people seeing only what they want to see. Attachment is the truth laid bare, it’s the eyes wide open, the acceptance, the feeling of total completion by another human being. It’s happiness and it’s my whole world.

She says she’s never thought of it like that before. The truth is that all three are important in a relationship, she says. And I say yes, but that I like the Big A the best. The other two are great but they are cheap.

The reason that we’re back here in New York is to have our brains scanned once again with Dr Helen Fisher and Dr Lucy Brown to see what has changed in the way that we feel about each other after all this time on the road.

In addition, we are being filmed by a Canadian documentary crew doing a programme on marriage. Specifically, ‘why do people still get married?’. They are talking to experts, and focusing on 3 young couples with different ideas about marriage. One of whom is little old us.

We land in New York, after a hideous 20 hour flight marathon from BA via Santiago and Toronto (?!), crash out then head out to meet Sue, the documentary producer and John, the cameraman, for dinner.

The dinner was exactly what my neurotic head needed. Having been very concerned in Buenos Aires that what we had done was of little interest to the outside world, Sue and John asked lots of questions, and listened to us chat and basically vent our concerns about what we are making as a documentary. Having both being in the documentary field for over 20 years, they soothed our troubled minds. Sue reassured us that noone really knows what they are doing (and anyone who pretends they do is not to be trusted…); that it’s vital – even though very very hard – to watch over every second of footage that you have shot because what you remember is always different from what you captured and you’ll be surprised (though it will take you ages); that we should give ourselves a break – and celebrate what we have, rather than berate ourselves for what we don’t. They listened, seemingly focused (thank you Sue and John) not to only our worries, but our naive methodology, and all in all, the dinner was the most useful and soothing that could have welcomed us to the city. After winging it throughout the trip, finally, we could have a heart to heart with the professionals.