Many many many things have changed since I first walked down the aisle. Hell... many things have changed since I met this man I call "Petal". But focusing purely on married life... So many things are better. I can't think of a single thing that is worse... apart from my relationship with his mother, but hey! I think we all saw that one coming.
The thing about marriage is, you always THINK you know what it'll be like... who you'll be inside of a marriage. I for one, was SURE that I would be a "cool" wife. I wouldn't nag, I'd be understanding, I'd sit through football games and video games, and say "Yes" more than I said no. I wouldn't nag or care if he left the toilet seat up, or where he squeezed the toothpaste tube.
And for the most part, I think I am a cool wife.
But I am also a nag. I HATE being a nag. But you just eventually get to this place where it's either, "Ask him to do this, do it yourself, or live with it the way it is." And all three pretty much suck, so the least I can do is spread the suck-age and make his life suck a little too. Hahaha! I am sorry, I don't actually want to make his life suck. I just wonder sometimes why women have this caregiving instinct and guys don't.
My sister just got married. And for a long time I didn't really like the guy. I didn't know him, and I lived faraway and it felt like everyone else in my family was moving forward in this awesome new life and I was left behind, alone with my husband on an island as they all fell in love with this new guy. I was also jealous, because they never fell in love with Petal the same way. Possibly because we met and a month later he moved to Guam, so our whole relationship was via skype messages. But still. It hurt. I went home and spent a month helping fix up our farm to the Shabby-Chic wedding, and along the way, I drank that damned kool-aid and fell in love with her husband to be too. ^_^ The truly amazing thing about my sister finding the man of her dreams, is that he was the man of our dreams for her too! And I am so happy to call him BIL.
And the other awesome thing about them getting married... well, you need a little backstory.
My sister is the head-in-the-clouds, ooey-gooey, freaky-deaky type... the type of person to fall in love so completely that she forgets there are other people in the world... the type of person (and this is a literal conversation that we had) that even if she found out he was her half-brother... she would still commit to him and love him and stay with him forever.
I am not that kind of person. Not at all. For me, love was always a choice. A choice I had control over. A commitment wasn't something I did because I couldn't help myself, it wasn't something I was so overcome with FEEEEEEELings, I had to do... it was a conscious choice to be with someone I understood wasn't perfect. And I'm not saying there's anything wrong with the way my older sister loves. It just wasn't the way I fell in love.
And over the course of my marriage, I have had to do a lot of scary things... I had to commit to someone I knew I loved, but had had very little actually physical contact with. I had to leave everyone and everything I knew to go be with this one person I had gotten to know through a computer screen. I had to quit my job, stop going to school, leave my community. I had to go live with a man (one of the strangest things a girl will ever have to do), and say goodbye to everyone. My family. My friends. My pets. And suddenly he became my whole world. I ate, slept, spoke to only him for the most part. My whole support system was 6,000 miles away. Everything familiar was very very faraway.
So needless to say, there was a lot of anxiety, a lot of fear, a lot of issues, a lot of adjustment. There were a lot of happy things too, but I could only really report the strange things, the foreign, the upsettingly different... Back to my family. Because I wanted them to know how different it was. But it came out very complain-y... to the point where it was too upsetting to my mother for me to even talk about. And my sister was completely convinced that I made a mistake, that he was a ruiner, and that I would never be happy again.
As a disclaimer, my family is very understanding, but the whole situation was so stressful, and they didn't know him, and I got into the bad habit of taking every little thing that was unexpected or different or discouraging and making every conversation I had with my family about that. All in all, it added up to a lot of hurt and confusion.
Anyway. My sister started comparing her starry-eyed version of her boyfriend, to my bad-habit-complainy version of my husband, and it turned into a mess. She hated my hubby, my hubby and I hated her boyfriend, her boyfriend hated me and my hubby, and I was at a total loss because out of everyone in the world, my sister understood me best. And she didn't understand. It really hurt.
I kept wondering why she didn't get it? Why didn't she understand that I was just venting, that I loved him. That he made me happy. That he could be both things... annoying and slobby and inconsiderate, but also my heart and soul, the happiest thing in my life, and my true love?
My sister is married now. And suddenly all these things that she had no idea how I could possibly put up with... are a reality for her as well. And it's so much better now.
There are these difference between how a man and a woman work. A woman will see the socks on the ground. A man will not. A woman will know if she wants to eat the leftovers, she will have to wrap them in plastic wrap and stick them in the fridge before they go bad on the counter. A man will just be annoyed that it's gone bad. A woman will know that comfort is found in clean sheets (both a top and a bottom!!), room to sit on a couch, and food on the table. A man will nuzzle down in his laundry covered bed and be confused why his back hurts from sleeping on the lumps.
When I came home from my month of helping with the wedding, my house was a mess. I have dogs, and there was pee all over the floor. The child we had left in charge of our fur-babies had an emergency surgery and didn't let us know, so they were left in the hands of a stranger (her boyfriend) that didn't know his head from his ass. This was without our knowledge of course. I walk in the door and immediately get to work. I take the dogs out, I give them baths, I scrub dried urine off the floor, mop up fresh puddles, scrub dried diarrhea from the cracks in the laminate... I then sweep a month's worth of dog hair up (that's a lot of dog hair with my short-haired dog, it's a nightmare) and go to work with a bottle of bleach and my Shark, which has randomly decided to stop working, so it's a pretty pointless process which leaves my floor stickier than it started, so I have to go over it again with just water. The whole process took me two hours. I also had to change the sheets on the bed and start a month's worth of laundry (pee soaked towels from 2 weeks ago, when my husband was home. It smelled AWFUL), plus get dinner started, strip the couch which may or may not have been peed on, bring in ALL of the luggage from our trips, and unpack it.
In this time, I have to ask my husband to do the little things... sweep the bathroom, clean out the kennel, take the dogs out a second time, take out the trash, sweep the dog hair that my dog as ALREADY spread over my swept floor. And every time I turn around, he's disappeared. He finishes a chore and thinks he's done. I find him sprawled out on a sheet-less bed, sitting on the toilet clipping his toenails, on the stripped couch, checking his fantasy football. It doesn't occur to him to pitch in. He doesn't see the mess. He smells it, I know that. But he doesn't actually know what to do.
How?? How do I know, and he doesn't? How is he blind to it and I have to tell him every single time. I asked him later, "Why do you think you have to be asked to do stuff?" He shrugged and said, "I don't know." I said, "I mean, if you think about it, how much do you have to ask me to do? Like, how many times have I asked you to take the dogs out, versus how many times you've asked me? Why do I know to do stuff, and you have to be asked?" And he laughed and said, "I don't know. You're right though. You keep my on track. I know I've asked you to take the dogs out though." And he's right. But he's also missing the point.
I'm not telling this story to bitch about my husband. Even with the 4 hours of work I put in after a 20 car trip, I was in a brilliant mood. I am so happy to be reunited with my husband (I was in Cali for 3 weeks before he joined me, and then we stayed for another 2.), so happy to be home, so happy to be with my pets. I am joyful. I am back in my element, back in my comfort zone, away from drama (from visiting his family). He's jovial, understanding, willing to talk about anything, willing to listen.
After everything, I was putting away a load of laundry, he comes up and hugs me so tight and says, "You are amazing. You could have come home and thrown a hissy fit, you could have gotten really foul and mean and mad, but instead you just worked your butt off and fixed it." I laughed and kissed him and said, "Don't get me wrong, I'm definitely mad, but that wouldn't have solved anything. There still would have been pee everywhere." And he just hugs me. And it's all better.
Earlier this evening, my heart went through a roller coaster of emotions... there was this big pile of clean laundry on the bed and Petal came in and said "I can't lie on the bed because of all the stuff." So I apologized and said I would get to it after I finished dinner. A little while later, I went into the bedroom and it was gone. I was astonished and started to say, "Whaaat!! You're so Ama-" and then I walked around the bed and there it was dumped on the floor. I teased him and he teased me back and we put it all away together.
My sister is going through similar things right now with her new husband... She's 7 months pregnant, a teensy bit lazy, and not exactly a fanatic of cleaning, so moving into his house is a little stressful to begin with... Add in the fact that he is an artist who works with clay and stone in his living room, doesn't know how to clean anything up, and is slightly lazy himself, it puts her into a position of feeling very unwelcome in this new place that's supposed to be her home. Plus his family doesn't want her to live there (her in-laws are worse than mine!), so she just feels like she doesn't belong. There's no room for her. She has to convince him to get rid of every tiny insignificant thing to make a little bit of space for her to fit. Add in asking for room for the baby... She's more than a little overwhelmed! And I think some of the shiny-rose tint has gone away for her a little and the love is a little more... well... real. Because love when you see someone as they are, faults and errors and issues and all... That is true love. And I cannot be more happy for her.
She said something that really tickled me in regards to her husband that I want to share: "I love you more than earth and sky and I would brave time wormholes to find you... but if you leave your toenail clippings on the couch ONE MORE TIME I'm going to punch you in the balls. So what I'm learning is that me on my slobbiest, laziest, lay-in-my-own-filth day, that's your average man every single day."
There is nothing quite like having sisters.
These things that you think you'd never put up with... the feeling of you love him just a little bit more than he loves you because you just instinctively know how to take care of him. And when he doesn't seem to know how to reciprocate, it feels inconsiderate. You love him more than anything in all the world, but you still want to bash him in the face a little bit.
I think my sister and I were spoiled... because we were surrounded by women who knew how to pitch in and make our lives easier, and noticed when we did stuff for them, and talked and listened, and thought we were funny and clever and amazing, and now, being alone with this one man-type-person... it's just a little bit less wonderful. Don't get me wrong! It's still wonderful... It's a different kind of wonderful!!
Ain't love odd?
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