Tuesday, November 9, 2010

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

Friday, October 15, 2010

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

Thursday, October 14, 2010

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