I bought The Husband a bottle of Prosecco to help kick off his birthday festivities last week (this may have been more of a gift to myself…) and it speaks to where we are in our lives that as of Sunday, the bottle remained unfinished. Once upon a time I wouldn’t let a night out go by without that bottle being drained.  Alas, we are settled and such, and Sunday evening he suggested that we take the still-bubbly remainder and some snacks down to our soon-to-be-former apartment complex’s pool.

With our picnic all set up, we started talking about Halloween.  In New York, October 31st is one of the biggest celebrations of the year: it is fall’s St. Patrick’s Day.  City-dwellers are always looking for a reason to get knee-walking blitzed.  Last year at this time I was hitting the trains and sidewalks in search of the accessories our costumes required.  It was our first Halloween together (ah, the romance) and we were accordingly going with a couples theme.  Because we wanted to, and because when you are a couple surrounded by single friends, you get kicked out of their group costume, if not goodwill.  We had decided to dress up as Coach Eric and Principal Tami Taylor from Friday Night Lights (arguably one of the best shows on television and a couple upon whom I wouldn’t mind modeling our relationship).  I scoured the city for just the right shade of royal blue and eventually ended up paying way too much for a Dillon Panthers anorak at the NBC store, a clothing item that remains in our closet because I refuse to toss it out after only one wear.  Which means that one day, The Husband will arrive at a Little League game inexplicably rooting for the nonexistent Panthers, much to the dismay of our child and the satisfaction of my budget-mindedness.

Anyway, we wore our high-priced costume out on Halloween night to the requisite open-bar party and, in a show of coupledom, snuck out before midnight to watch Saturday Night Live from the couch.  But the four hours of dress-up were worth it because Halloween was such an event.  Complete with a week’s lead-in, like a trip to Blood Manor (New York’s scariest haunted house, so they say) and near-sugar-coma amounts of candy corn ingestion.  So as we sat by our pool last week discussing Halloween plans, we had a precedent set and a tradition to honor.  We eschewed the costumes, because apparently only children do that around here, but we decided to pick a haunted house to visit.  And invite our friends.  Which led to a moment of awkward silence and the question, Who are our friends again? Here in Atlanta, they are mostly family.  And with a bunch of ankle-biters and poop machines filling their respective homes, none of them would likely be up for handing their weekly salaries over to a baby-sitter to spend an hour getting poked by the bogeyman.

Life is different here.

The thing is, we’ve never had a problem with it being Just Us.  Due to the combined factors of being both introverts and each other’s favorite person, The Husband and I are content to while the hours away doing everything or nothing together.  In the city, where singles and couples are smashed together in daily life, forced to frequent the same sidewalks and bars due to the lack of segregation common to suburban life, our behavior was more blatantly anomalous.  There was a forced coexistence with non-coupled people in our former life, so that we always had the option to socialize (even if, over their whispered disapproval, we chose not to take it).  But here in our gated-community-life, connecting with others is trickier.  It requires effort, which is to say, an upheaval from the couch and an actual trip in a car.  And now, there are not so many drinks at a bar as there are BBQ sundaes at a corn maze.  There’s less wild partying and throwing up, more funky diapers and spitting up.  Less paying for cabs, more paying for sitters.  We’re in that holding room reserved for people who are too coupled off to go out in Buckhead, but not saddled down with enough kids (that is to say, at least one) to hang out in playgroups.  We don’t even have a puppy yet, for crying out loud–if we showed up at the dog park we would just look creepy.

I guess you could say it’s still a transitional period.

So while we’re both loving being with family and pathetically keeping eyes peeled for friends who might want to go to the neighborhood wine bar we just discovered, we still spend a lot of time on the couch, talking about getting more connected with our new community.  And we’ve made some headway: The Husband bravely grabbed lunch last week with our new pastor (a remarkable show of being sociable, for which I gave him a gold star even as I breathed a sigh of relief that I didn’t have to go).  But we’re still happiest when it’s just the two of us.  As reflected in the Evite I sent out yesterday, to a housewarming party at our new non-apartment-numbered address on our closing day in two weeks.  So what if the guest list included only two people?  They’re our favorites, and we know they’ll both show up.  With Prosecco.