Our first post-wedding-vows fight occurred somewhere between Omaha and Sioux Falls, in a sagging Paseo stuffed with all the wedding gifts that Ben couldn’t force into our U-Haul. A week earlier, we had married in my Missouri hometown; now, we were moving to his home in Montana. As our car lumbered up the snowy interstate, we lovers embarked on a reckoning familiar to many couples of our generation: the duel of the iPods.

Ben was working as a farmhand and I had just finished graduate school, so neither of us had the cash to own an actual iPod. We dueled the old-fashioned way – with CDs. We took turns: he started with Garth Brooks’ Greatest Hits, and then I chose The Sundays’ Blind. Next, we listened to Chris LeDoux and then Kiri Te Kanawa. Everything was good-natured and fun until I pulled a CD from a broken case and slipped John Coltrane‘s A Love Supreme into the stereo.

“Dippity-doo music?” Ben howled. “We die in a white-out, and the last thing blaring from our car is jazz?”

“What’s wrong with jazz?”

“Only uppity people listen to jazz,” he said.

“And only hicks own the Garth Brooks Wal-Mart Special Issue Box Set,” I yelled.

The John Coltrane showdown cooled, but not without tears and absurdly harsh words. Unfortunately, the spat was a portent of things to come. We’ve spent much of our young marriage hashing out what it means to live peaceably as a woman who would rather be reading and a man who would rather be fabricating potato cannons. The differences seem comical, but in real life they can trigger the isolating fissures that make you wonder if your spouse will ever understand you and truly love you. But who is to say that perfect empathy breeds love? I think of my best friend, a writer who is married to an electronica rocker. A shared affinity for My Bloody Valentine has yet to help them win the emotional war of housekeeping in a two-career family.

To be fair, I’m too awkward to be a snob and Ben is too well rounded to be a Philistine, as he likes to call himself. During a more recent road trip, I dared him to stop hiding behind this nickname. First, I leveled with him: no Philistine studies literature for two years.

“English Ed,” he said. “I quit because I hate high schoolers.”

Philistines do not read two Steinbeck novels per week.

“Doesn’t count. Steinbeck was a journalist at heart.”

It is rare that they are fluent in German.

“The language of engineers and anal-retentive philosophers.”

But it was this stalwart Philistine who recently reminded me of the Phillips Collection’s new show, Degas to Diebenkorn, which opened earlier this month in Washington, DC. It was this same Philistine who came home early and put on a tie so that he could accompany me to a Friday night reception at the gallery. And this Philistine even walked every room of the exhibit with me, puzzling over Susan Rothenberg, remarking on William Christenberry, and nearly trampling fellow museum-goers in his eagerness to usher me into rooms where my favorite Bonnards, Rothkos, and Frankenthalers hung on the walls.

“Which one in this room is your favorite?” he liked to muse and guess. And I guessed which ones were his favorites, too. It was a playful, relaxing way to see art–through the eyes of someone who doesn’t want to impress, but is open to awe, beauty, and saying he pretty much doesn’t get Picasso.

On our way out, we bought a fancy chocolate bar in the gift shop, which we broke apart and enjoyed as we walked back through Dupont Circle. Then Ben pulled out another bag and presented me with every gift shop tchotchke decorated with Bonnard’s “Open Window” – the first Phillips Collection painting I loved.

“These are great!” I thanked him.

I heard him sigh and I watched his gait relax, his whole body exuding the macho man’s relief at a job well done.

If only I can be so generous and kind the next time he calls me at the grocery store and asks me to pick up a bushel of russets and three cans of AquaNet. That, of course, would be the loving equivalent.