Its amazing to me how fear can manifest itself. The past few weeks have been a bit rocky for my fiance and I. If it wasn't the budget, it was the household finances, or the philosophical nature of a marriage, or the holidays, or my job. We dance the dance of fear of what it means to create the "we" from our independent selves.
Its hard at times to wonder if you are just scared or seeing big red flags. The last thing you want is your life running like a horror movie where you keep screaming at the stupid girl not to go into the dark house and check out the noise. This is my fear. How does one tell if it is just cold feet or something bigger?
I've talked to my bridesmaid chaplain who has done a lot of marital and premarital counseling in his life. He listened and said that it just sounds like normal fear. This was reassuring as well as consulting all of my feminist essay books and couples counseling texts about what is normal. However, I realize that my fiance does not have this advantage for reassurance and so it seems that every few days there is another issue to tackle, whether imagined or real.
Last night we tested the waters over family identification. How do we spend 4 days of precious and isolated time with those that we love? Add in a holiday and it gets more complicated. Do we just split up at the airport and do our thing with our respective family of origins? I said that does not feel like a stable marriage pattern to me, only because the idea of being separate in a marriage was never encourgaged or even entertained in my role models. He countered with the fact that it felt more stable because we were comfortable with our individuality. He didn't want to be attached at the hip, neither did I, but I also didn't want us having sleepovers with our respective parents without one another. I began to question if the apron strings were cut or if they ever would be and how would I keep that from being "chatter" in my family? In my view, we needed to create an identity of us within our families. Not to assimilate, but to incorporate. Two hours and 44 minutes of conversation later we both just admitted to being scared and then he asked if we would ever get the issues of our families resolved?
I spent some time with my girlfriend on Saturday morning. Over cheap breakfast she gave me some insight as to how her marriage of 6 years + twins has worked. She laughed when I said that all we need to do is find our rhythm and we'll be fine. She told me to just get ready, because just when you find that pattern, it changes.
I remember when she was a newlywed and family issues emerged. Her husband came from a really strong families together approach and she was used to her nuclear family spread across the Nation only seeing one another at holidays. Weekly Sunday dinners a la in laws were intrusive to her routine and idea of what a marriage should be. Years later, although they are more independent as a couple from their family of origins, the topic still carries a lot of heat.
You always view yourself as "the normal one" and that your viewpoints you were raised with are the "right ones." Last night when I was drawing the line in the sand of what I needed him to commit to and where my boundary was, I realized something. I told him that through my relationship with him I've come to find that statements and beliefs I have that I thought ended with a period, actually had a comma. And those that I thought were negotiable with a comma, some had a period of definition. Its a process finding the punctuation in a relationship. Questions lead to all sorts of exclaimation points, commas, and periods when you are writing your own story.
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