Saturday, 20th February, New York: day with the Going the Distance documentary crew
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 for Going the Distance, 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…
