Living together is a journey. It’s a journey of ourselves. A process of discovering who we are in a family. We are all born into one, whether it’s a single-parent family or a full-blown family consisting of parents, grandparents, siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins. We behave in a particular way within a family and our behavior is more or less consistent. We will play the role that we have come to play within the family. But how do we know exactly how we are going to behave when the time comes to start our own family?
As children we can never understand why our parents say or do things in a certain way! And to our liberal young minds, they always seem stuffy and traditional. Oh the memories just make you cringe don’t they!?! We always think that as husbands and wives we will not be that way or that we will be this way and to our minds we have already judged an institution that has helped mould us into who we are at present.
The very mindset we have developed regarding family is put to the test and sometimes changed when the time comes to start a family. With the gaining of a husband or wife, a house, bills, dogs, sometimes even kids, everything starts to change. Well, almost everything…
My personal experience of living with someone truly put to the test my ideals of what a wife should be; what a family should be like.
I lived with my husband for almost three years before we married. And those three years were dotted with fights, expectations, broken promises, and sadly, breakups. 11 months of singleness.
For my part I have always prided myself on being rather level-headed. When things were bad in our lives, I felt that I kept the home fires burning. When money was tight we made it last. True we were never able to save, but there was always food to eat, a roof over our heads and clothes on our backs. We had three dogs, one cat, and his mother to look after. The last in the list wasn’t exactly something we wanted to do; rather we felt obliged since she was his mother afterall! Cruel I know… but sometimes, living with family when you are trying to start your own family can be the worst thing to happen to you. That last year we lived together money was especially hard to come by, and the expenses just kept going up and up! And it most certainly did not help having his mother set us against each other! Finally everything fell apart. She left. But the damage had already been done. It was too late. We as individuals had changed so much, had become bitter and withdrawn so much, it felt like we didn’t recognize the other person, even when we were standing right in front of each other, or sleeping in the same bed next to each other. He stopped paying attention to me, and as if it was supposed to be a test from God to see how true I would stay to him, other men kept popping up in my life who paid more attention to me, who wanted to spend time with me. It didn’t matter that they were married or otherwise taken, it didn’t matter that in my mind I knew what exactly they were after. All that mattered was there were these people who were PAYING attention to me! And when such knowledge is in front of you, only God knows what kept me from straying! Perhaps it was the lack of money to ‘splurge’ on myself or perhaps it was the fact that I had too much to keep me shackled to the home front – afterall looking after 3 dogs, 1 cat, bills, washing, cooking and juggling all these with an 8.30-6.30 job is time consuming to say the least! Or perhaps it was my fear of karma – what goes around comes around!
Whatever the reason, I thank God that I did not stray! That now shows me that I can be strong on that front. But no matter how hard I seemed to try it all fell apart. For 11 months we split up. I couldn’t look at him without seeing him as the man who ruined my life. I went back to living with my mother (which, in itself is difficult!) he shifted to a smaller place which meant I had to take 2 dogs on since he had room enough for one dog and one cat. It was not easy. I had to readjust to a single’s life. Suddenly I was on the market. Word spread. Undesirables began to approach me. And they knew I had no escape! Some I even considered, simply because I was so lonely and badly wanted to fill the void that this man I loved had left behind. I was in and out of depression, regret, confusion, all the feelings of post-breakup. Nothing I wanted, seemed to come to me (meaning him and my old life). Yes, I wanted my old life back. No matter how hard or bad it seems, I still wanted it back because I hate change. It may have been difficult but it was my comfort zone. And I wanted my comfort zone back.
The more I thought about it however, the more I came to realize that we would have been miserable. In our own ways we contributed to the death of our relationship. I became more controlling and clingy. The more I felt him drift away, the more desperate I became to pull him to me. It was like holding sand in my hand tightly, squeezing the grains out from between my fingers and making it run out quickly, instead of loosening my grip and letting them just lie in my palms.
But to me the biggest change that took place was within myself. I lost sight of who I was and I became what I thought I was supposed to be – a responsible working housewife. Here I was, a 24 year old who loved reading and lazing on Sundays, who loved to watch travel shows and day dream of future travels, who loved nightly walks and the beach and music and hanging out with friends, suddenly changed into an adult who was beginning to forget the meaning of enjoyment! I lost sight of myself. I began to lose my cool more often than I would like to think of! I was suddenly a mother; not a wife or girlfriend or fiancée!! That to me was the worst change in me… I hated who I had become and I yearned to be who I had been before.
It took me 11 months of being alone to come to these realizations and to determine to never again change like that! Gradual maturity is one thing. Being thrust into adulthood beyond one’s experiences is a completely different story! The biggest lesson that I learnt was that I needed to strike a balance between responsible wife and loving partner. Compromise was the key I think but when I really think about everything, there were many keys that opened my eyes.
