Yesterday was our five month anniversary. Given that Emily spent a good portion of it in the bathroom and the other portions looking like death warmed over, it wasn’t our best anniversary. Nonetheless, it was our five month marker and we still managed to acknowledge and appreciate in the moments Emily was lying comfortably.
Neither of us is sure that five months feels like five months. We live in a strange time warp. It’s not the time with each other part so much as the fact that four and a half months of travel feels like so much longer.
We experience the strange phenomenon that things we’ve done and the places we’ve gone seem so long ago. A month ago we were in Istanbul – which now seems like a fading memory. We hold onto Patmos like it was a distant and wonderful time in our lives. We were in Israel in August but I already feel like I haven’t see Ziv in such a long time.
Time is doing strange things to us.
The good news is that our year abroad is not slipping through our fingers. We don’t wonder where the time went. We don’t regret our choices – except buying street snacks from a man who probably used his left hand to handle them, thereby rendering someone violently ill for a day…. We still have almost two-thirds of our journey in front of us and we already have a lifetime of rich memories and experiences.
So, at five months of marriage, we’re doing well. We’re rich in memories and experiences. We have spent our marriage living our dreams. What more could one want?
At the same time, we spend so much time around each other that I’m not sure we feel completely like your classic newlyweds.
My friend Leanne talked about how during her first year of marriage, she was so excited to learn to cook new dishes and have a wonderful dinner ready for her husband when he got home from work. During my friend Mazyar’s first year of marriage, his wife, Makhameh turned their apartment into a meticulously laid out and beautiful home using all the gifts from their wedding. There was no mistaking the change in Maz’s living conditions.
We don’t cook for ourselves and we don’t have an apartment to decorate at this time. We have some fantastic wedding gifts which will eventually get used in a similar way – so we may have the joy of doing it all a year after getting married – which will be fun.
But those little surprises, the missing each other during the busy work week, the trying on the classic role of being married – we’ve skipped that.
I think we have instead dived in to some of the more advanced stages and dynamics of marriage. We work as a team constantly. We have taken the intensive course on each other’s needs and inner-workings. We have each other’s backs in situations where there are outside problems or challenges.
The occasional arguments or disagreements that could easily have faced a “I have to go to work, I don’t have time for this – we’ll have to deal with this later…” are now “Okay, we need a decision here because this guy over here is waiting for us to decide….” and then there’s just the phenomenon that no one really wants an ongoing disagreement when we live and work in close quarters in a foreign country. We’re pretty quick to move to resolution.
Maybe the fact that 95% of the time, we have a great time and work fluidly is “The Honeymoon Effect”. But I like to think that it’s the success of trial by fire.
My friend Tony who was here a few days ago stepped into our hotel room, looked at the backpacks in the corner and Emily’s work papers and files on the desk and remarked on how differently Emily and I are doing our first year of marriage.
“If you can survive this, you can survive anything,” he said referring to the intensity of time and togetherness. Given that Tony’s an avid traveler and an expat of 11 years, he has a special appreciation of the interpersonal dynamics of travel.
One unexpected part of spending all but two weeks of our marriage traveling has been meeting so many couples and seeing the lives they have and the choices they make. This weekend we met a couple (referenced yesterday) where he’s an American doctor from Michigan and she’s a Canadian school teacher at the American international school in Kathmandu.
They met in Kathmandu and their entire life as a couple has been in Nepal. They have three-month-old baby now. I asked David if they’ll be continuing to live here. He said, “It’s hard to say. It’s become harder with the baby.”
I’ll bet it has.
Yet at the same time, last weekend we met a British couple, Hillary and Paul, who are about our parents’ age and work together as development consultants. Developing nations hire them for their expertise. They moved their family to Bangladesh when their oldest was eight-years-old and raised their family not only internationally, but among some of the third-worldiest of third world countries.
They told us that expats in Kathmandu have some of the best quality of life in the world because the accommodations for expats are so nice, the help so cheap and available and people don’t work late hours and weekends – families have lots of time together.
Watching and seeing how people makes you think about your own values and perspectives. While I can understand how it works for people – because both financially and ease of lifestyle-wise, it must be great – I knew in an instant how much I want our future kids to be surrounded by family and friends. I can’t imagine choosing to keep my kids away from grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and our friends who will undoubtedly be another set of aunts and uncles. I want my kids to grow up around Mazyar’s and vice versa.
Besides, who doesn’t need help? Whose marriage does better for not having help?
I also know that with the possible exception of Bali, I’m not a third-world parent. I want car seats and airbags and bottle sterilizers and knowing I can run to any emergency room and get decent care. I don’t think I could sleep at night without knowing that if something happened – because things happen despite your best efforts – I couldn’t get the kind of care that might have made the difference.
These things are good. We see the many ways in which people live and do marriage. We think about them. We learn about what’s out there and what does and doesn’t work for us.
My favorite arrangement is Hugh and Yvette’s. Our Australian friends who we were surprised to learn have been together for 24 years, but aren’t married. Hugh refers to Yvette as his wife. But Yvette refuses to get married because she doesn’t want to be “owned” and feels a strong, innate need to have an emergency escape hatch – even though she doesn’t see anything ever changing between them and plans to live her life with him. They have a son together – who she insisted have her last name. He has three other kids from a previous marriage, so he relented.
They aren’t traditional in one sense, but they adore each other – and it works for them. The lines seem like semantics which make Yvette feel comfortable. But whatever – they’re happy.
And that’s the part I like so much. As we travel along – developing our relationship, a step outside of our “normal” lives – we see and learn. There are so many ways to make marriage – and coupledom – work.
At five months, I think we’re doing great – and we’re aware that marriage isn’t a fixed set of steps to be followed, but a recipe we all take and tweak – adding in a little more of this and a little less of that to suit our taste. Maybe that’s why in each country, we buy a cookbook. Because you never know when down the line, you might need some good ideas about new and forgotten flavors.
