The Dry Spell

Listening To: Metallica

Mood: Mellow

Disclaimer: This post is about sex. While there’s nothing all that graphic, if you are easily offended or related to me, it’s probably best if you skip this one.

The husband and I have been married for 8.5 years now. We have run the spectrum from making jackrabbits jealous to the Sahara desert, which is totally normal from what I hear.  Through it all, we’ve always had either a mental connection or a sexual one and most of the time both. My brother came to stay at our house recently. It was rather unexpected and he stayed for quite a while. While it was wonderful for me to spend time with him, for the first time in almost 12 years, my relationship with my husband went completely to pot. I don’t think we’ve ever had all conversation stop and sex become impersonal before at the same time. The connection just wasn’t there. At all. There are multiple reasons why this happened but I really don’t want to get into it in this entry. 

For the first time in my life, I found myself barely holding on to my marriage by my teeth, fighting for something broken that I had no idea how to fix. I had no idea really who or what I was supposed to be fighting against either. Something was not right, but it was completely unclear to me what it even was. We weren’t really mad at each other from what I can figure out. Unfortunately, neither my husband nor I really know how to fight fair when we’re upset. We do try and usually act like adults, but this time we just couldn’t figure it out. My husband’s tactic is to clam up tighter than the Federal Reserve. It didn’t’ matter how much I asked/begged/nagged, the door was shut except for the occasional snarky salvo fired before he quickly retreated back into another room. This of course led me to fire my own snarky comments, and generally act childish too. I may have skin like a rhinoceros, but I am still a girl. I love sex, and I love my husband, but if we’re not clicking, I don’t feel like having sex. At one point I had this brilliant idea that having sex would bring us a bit closer because that has worked in the past when we’ve both drifted a bit. Unfortunately, this time it completely backfired. Not only were we completely awkward and mechanical with each other, it made things worse. It really throws you for a loop when you feel cheap and lonely with the one person in the world who you shouldn’t ever have to feel that way with. I don’t think I’ve ever felt that numb about my husband before. He could have been a stranger and a one night stand at that moment. I was so desperate for the connection and it didn’t just magically reappear. I think the next day was even worse. I felt like I had traded my body for approval and connection that never appeared.  The ice was not ready to thaw yet. 

Unfortunately, we had the extra pressure of outside family with us too, making things impossible to solve at the time. As is usually the case, I did eventually find out what was eating at my husband.  We got out of the house for a walk and the ice cracked a tiny bit.  We eventually have worked through the problem that was there, but it took a long, long time for things to be normal with us again. It took a long time for sex to be spontaneous and encouraged again. I’m actually terrified of this happening again because I seriously thought that my marriage was going down in flames and I had no idea how to save it. It’s rather hard to put out a fire by yourself. So how do you deal with the problems in your marriage that just seem to be impossible? How do you deal with a spouse who would rather just pretend they’re not there?

Becky

If You Don't Know Me By Now

Mood: Calm

Listening to: BBC talk about George Bush

The other day, my husband told me that he is smoking. Again. Over the almost 8 years that the husband and I have been married, this has been one hot button issue that never seems to go away. He smoked heavily in college, but quit long before he met me. The agreement after we got married was that if hubby wanted to smoke when we had guests from out of town (it often goes hand in hand with alcohol) then I wasn’t going to be the wife to nag him endlessly about it. Just not my style. Over our marriage, he has had a very difficult time keeping his end of this bargain. Much to my chagrin and worry, the smoking has been happening on and off since then. Stress seems to trigger it, and he works in a pretty high-pressure environment. 

So the question I’m left pondering is how I didn’t know.  I like to think I know my husband pretty well. I can read his mood just by looking at him. I can always tell when his mind is 1,000 miles away, even if he is nodding and doing the usual “uh huhs” when I’m talking to him. I can tell when he’s been out to a happy hour with colleagues before he even gets 3 steps in the door. I always know when he’s feeling guilty. A more troubling idea to me is what steps he took and how many to keep it from me. He doesn’t stink like a smoker (thank god!) and I never smell it on his hair or clothes. I never find cigarettes around the house either.  

I hate playing the insecure wife. I’ve never been one to see an affair around every corner. This being said, I can’t help but wonder what else my husband would be able to hide. We’ve had this discussion before. I claim I’d know if he ever had an affair and he claims that if he really wanted to hide it from me I’d never know.  Which, I admit, is probably true.  I don’t pry into every detail of his life. Again, just not my style. There’s a big 10 hour black hole when he’s at work that remains a mystery to me aside from the fact that he’s at work. I have to admit there are things about me that my husband doesn’t know, and probably never will, although nothing as extreme as smoking. I value my privacy quite a bit, as I’m sure he does too. What really gets my goat is that smoking is pretty much the only thing I ever raise a stink about, and that’s only because it’s so bad for his health.  I’m not too tolerant of self indulgent destructive behavior. 

All of this leads to this question: How long, if ever, will it be before people don’t get blindsided by things like this in their relationships?  Do we every really know our spouses well enough to know when they conceal stuff from us? I think a great deal of trust has to go into a successful marriage, and that includes trusting the other person not to keep important stuff like this hidden.  A person can’t live his or her life constantly looking over the spouse’s shoulder wonder what they are hiding. On the same token not trusting everything is rosy all of the time is a good self-preservation strategy, even in the best marriage. 

Now if you’ll excuse me, my other half needs his ass kicked back into quitting.

Becky

Things They are a Changin

Mood: Calm

Listening to: Dora. Ugh.

Recently, my husband and I had a grown up play date (think lots of food, wine, and drunken laughing) with some friends.  They are very good friends of ours that we have known for quite some time, and overall it was a very nice weekend.  After they left, my husband and I got to talking about how people change when they add an addition to their family because we had noticed that our friends had indeed changed after an addition to their family. I’m not necessarily talking about a bad change per se, but something about adding another person or animal to a family can definitely change the dynamics of interactions with others.

When our family was young (read when I was young and we had just gotten married and then knocked up), we moved about quite a bit, so we didn’t have many friends that we had known for a long time. While my husband had his fair share of partying in his youth, I was never really into that.  I’m sure some of our rather new found friends noticed a little bit of a change after my first daughter came along, but you never seem to notice these things yourself. I tried very, very hard to not let this totally take over our lives, as I'm sure it did to a degree. Babies just do that, it's not really optional. As our kids got a little older, we got more into entertaining and having people over, but I still feel that we try to keep things pretty consistent.

I guess it just comes down to what you like and are comfortable about in the group dynamic. Attention shifts, what is important changes, and things just feel different.  You obviously can’t dump good friends for a stupid reason like normal life progression, so how exactly do you deal with the change? True, some friends do drift apart when they are different places in life and can’t relate anymore. This happened to my best friend and I when she went to college and I got married and had a baby, but we’ve since caught up with each other since we both now have multiple little beings in our houses. That is one of the ways to deal with it – giving it a little time for things to even out. Any time you have something so new and important and new, attention will shift, as it should.

I think the best option though, is changing your expectations of the people and interactions that you will have with them. If you both get back to the dynamic you once had, great. If not, you can always hang on to them as friends for a different purpose. Almost everyone has friends for different occasions (the party friends, the other couples with kids, the couple you go out with just to get out of the house,  the people you’ve known for just about forever, etc.), there’s no reasons why the type of friendship can’t change if it becomes obvious the dynamics won’t revert to what they were – and chances are good they won’t. Life goes one direction, and if one or both of you grows out of a situation (partying together for example) chances are you aren’t going to revert back to previous behavior.

So I guess we just treasure our friends for what they are and gracefully accept where they are in life. Friends are a blessing even if things do change.

Becky

Evolving Thoughts on "The Big D"

Mood: Thoughtful and pensive

Listening to: Wonderwall Live (Oasis) and the beautiful silence that is one child in school and the other asleep.

I was reading Cosmo last night (ever notice how many of my posts start with “So I was reading _______ last night and …”? Almost all of them.) and found out that divorce rates have fall to about 40 percent, contrary to the popular believe that divorce is holding strong at about 55% of the married population. In fact, it has been falling for the past 15 years. Wait, what? So all of the fear mongering about marriages being destined to fail was all false? That’s it, I’m having an affair. Kidding, kidding. I was really heartened to see this as marriage has been portrayed as a dying institution ever since I can remember. Apparently, members of my generation (late 70’s – early 80’s kids) took a lesson from many of our miserable upbringings and have decided that marriage should be thought through before entrance and that once you do get shackled, you better make an effort to make it work or you will be paying for your kid’s therapy when they get older. I like it. Not only that, but our generation has much more information at our fingertips (Google, I am looking at you and thanking the stars) to help us through the inevitable rocky times that come with spending your life with another person.

Up until just very recently, I believed that my husband and I are rather unusual in our views of marriage. (Then again, I love being unique, but am constantly reminded that no one is all that unique. It’s all been done before.) We are both rather old fashioned about both marriage and divorce. My husband comes from a wonderful, stable family. I come from a very dysfunctional divorced family. Being of the old school Indian mind, my husband finds divorce a very unpalatable solution in all but the most awful situations. Me, having multiple issues and hang-ups from my home life growing up feel the same way. Just about the only situation that I find divorce acceptable for myself would be if my husband lost his mind and was beating me or my kids. Now, my husband is so nonviolent that he has difficulty killing cockroaches, so I think we probably won’t be dealing with that anytime soon, thank god. And really, my aversion to divorce isn’t really about myself that much, even though I love him and that would put the icing on the cake of my insanity, it’s more about not watching my kids having go through some of the more awful fallout of divorce. This also gives me a lot of hope for my group of friends. As previously mentioned, I occasionally think of the odds of me or my friends getting a divorce solely based on data facts (like parental divorce). I’m sure I will encounter a friend or two that will get divorced in the future, but it gives me hope that people my age are giving serious thought to ending a marriage, rather than just jumping off the train because it’s occasionally uncomfortable.

So here’s to long, happy, worked at marriages.

Becky

The Big D

Listening to: Backyardigans. Again. Yuck.
Mood: dreading the chicken fry that needs to be, well, fried.

So I’ve been on hiatus lately. It’s been a busy time at the G house. I’ve finally got a job, so it’s been quite psychotic.

As of late, I’ve been contemplating the big D. That’s right. Divorce. I’m 27, so this isn’t a midlife issue in any way. Recently, 2 of my highschool friends got divorced. Of course this sets my brain exploding playing around with the divorce statistics of my friends and I. One marriage was ill fated and kind of ridiculous from the beginning, and the other is, well, mostly my friend looking for a grand passion in life instead of appreciating what she has. Of course this is just my speculation/exposure to the situation, but I know her pretty well, and that is definitely something she’d do.

So out of 9 or so close friends, including myself, 2 are now divorced. I always wondered, out of myself and my close friends who would end up divorced. I always figured it would be my best friend and I that ended up getting divorced from our respective spouses (not quite so early in life). Both of us came from families that went through a divorce, and as statistics will tell you, that makes you about 75% likely to go through a divorce yourself, rather than just 50% for the general population. You never really know what’s going on in someone else’s marriage. Though I’d read about this before, I wasn’t really prepared for the sucker punch that comes when someone close to you tells you they are getting a divorce out of the blue. It really makes you question your own marriage and whether or not you will ever have to walk that road yourself, especially if you had no idea it was coming.. Of course I have a preoccupation with divorce and am always paranoid that my kids will have to face some of the difficult, painful situations that I did. Ah issues. They’re so much fun.

I truly hope I don’t have to think about this issue again in relation to someone close to me. I wouldn’t wish divorce on any of my friends and hope they’ll be successful in their marriages.

Becky

Different Strokes

Mood: freakin cold!
Listening To: my daughter playing a video game

I was laying in bed this morning dreading getting up when I noticed that my husband had gotten up early today. Now, for my husband, this is almost akin to a miracle - getting out of bed early is just not something he will do. Anyhow, I was thrilled. Perhaps he would get out the door on time this morning and drop my eldest daughter at preschool on time. 45 minutes later, he and my daughter ran out the door, late again. Now really, this is his problem because he has to bring her in and face her preschool teacher as to why she is late. He then has to catch his bus, and I don’t drive him if he’s late and misses it. As someone who has mastered the 10 minute shower, I really have had a hard time accepting that I married someone who spends SO much time in the bathroom. That combined with a horrible sense of time. I was thinking that my husband is modeled a little like the chaos theory. It doesn’t really matter when he wakes up after a certain critical time. He will not get done any earlier, he will simply expand his routine to fit the time available. I suppose I am similar. I usually manage to find more cleaning or housework to do if I have more time. I’m not even sure why it bugs me so much that my husband is rarely, if ever, on time. I guess it’s because I’m such a stickler for being on time. I plan down to the minute to ensure that we arrive on time. My husband, however, was raised on “Indian Standard Time.” Indian standard time is much more relative. People do not arrive on time and you will piss off the host if you show up at someone’s house on time. A half hour – 45 minutes late is considered just fine. While he’s usually not that late here, the philosophy remains.
Becky

Shouting in a Whisper

Listening to: Steve Irwin prattle
Mood: Calm

Hubby and I took the kids to visit his sister and her family last weekend. They went to India for a month, so my 4 year old had been craving some time with her favorite (and indeed, only) cousins. The weekend was nice, but a bit stressful. My youngest had colic one of the days, and 2 adults sharing a double bed with a 4 year old means not much sleep for anyone. While we were relaxing on Sunday morning, my sister in law and her husband started bickering in the kitchen while they were making lunch. Nothing too important, it was mostly about a comment her husband’s brother had made while they were in India. The argument quickly deteriorated into a personal issue. No one was shouting, it was all said in a very civil, quiet manner. Unfortunately, my husband and I were sitting in the next room and couldn’t help but hear the conversation. They live in an apartment and there really isn’t much privacy anywhere. It was more than a little awkward for us. We ended up turning on some music so we wouldn’t have to listen to them and give a modicum of privacy for them to work out a truce. I don't mean to rag on my sister in law at all. All married couples have hot issues that they argue about. My problem was that it was embarrasing to listen to.

I know it’s just me, but I find it much more unnerving when people argue in a quiet, civil manner, but their words are heated. Especially in front of other people. In my house, we were taught that you never, ever, air your dirty laundry in front of anyone outside your immediate family. My husband, on the other hand, was raised in India. Working out your differences in front of family is not only okay, family can include anyone from your parents to your 5th or so cousins, as long as you aren’t shouting. My parent’s never got caught yelling at each other, even in front of my brother and me. I’m not sure if they even did yell at each other after I got old enough to notice. A lot of sarcasm and spoken arguments, but no yelling.

My history, along with this particular incident, lead me to start thinking about marriage and how and when married people argue. My parents divorced when I was 13. It was a ridiculously painful and unnecessary situation for me. My husband’s parents are still together, but that’s the way of their generation in India. You just don’t get divorced without an earth shattering reason. As a result of my parent’s fighting style, I feel that I didn’t learn how to disagree with another adult, let alone a spouse, in a constructive manner. In fact, I actually get a panicky feeling when I hear people arguing quietly.

When I got married, this was one of my biggest concerns – that my husband and I would not find a way to disagree without either screaming at each other, being passive aggressive, or ignoring issues until they get break us apart. I’m sure pretty much everyone can agree that how a couple argues determines whether or not they will be able to stay together. In American, most of us have little to no pressure to make an unhappy marriage work. We even have the concept of “starter marriages.” After going through my parent’s divorce, I was determined that I would make a wise choice of who to marry and then make damn sure I tried my best to make it last. My husband is old school and doesn’t believe in frivolous divorce, so we’re pretty well matched in that respect.

So how is the best way to argue? I found myself really pondering this question. I don’t think it’s a simple, flip answer that works for everyone, like the ones you read in magazines. My husband and I don’t really fight much. We’re both pretty easy going people. We try and avoid arguments that aren’t really that important to us as a couple, like what’s for dinner. I can definitely identify behaviors that I don’t want, but I have a really hard time identifying what methods I do want when we disagree. My husband and I will have been married for 5 years in April. We’ve pretty much hammered out a method for disagreement that works for us. Whether or not it will work for us in the long run and help us stay together is yet to be seen. How do you argue? Does it work?

Becky