When Jeff and I first started talking about living and working overseas 12 or 13 years ago, we imagined the adventure of it. We imagined being immersed in a different culture. We imagined food and sights new to us. We imagined new friends. We imagined our horizons being broadened. We imagined becoming wiser or at least more world-wise.
What we didn’t imagine was us, the real us, and how the cauldron of being uprooted would affect us.
In our normal day-to-day lives back home in DC, we are suspended, as a couple, in a robust and complex web of relationships -- brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, godchildren, parents, neighbors, co-workers, friends, his fellow sailors and my fellow Lutherans. Perhaps you envision marriage as a distinct unit set apart from other relationships. It isn’t.
Well, yes, it is in a way. The only two people that truly make a marriage work or not work are the two people in it. Yet unless those two people live a life devoid of other relationships, their marriage also happens within those other relationships.
Those other relationships feed each of us in unique ways. Those other relationships encourage us in our married-ness by the simple fact that they treat us as an emotional and logistical unit. They give us an outlet from each other when that is necessary. They laugh with us, they listen to us, they challenge us, they let us bitch and moan when we need to, and they celebrate our milestones and grieve our losses with us.
And 8 months ago we walked away from every last one of them and moved 10,000 miles away with only each other to provide that support, encouragement, etc. etc. etc. Skype, Facebook, and e-mail help maintain the connections but they aren’t anywhere near as useful as the face-to-face connections.
If you don’t think that affects a relationship, I can only say you’re wrong. All those things that other relationships provided we now expect and need each other to provide. That’s asking a lot -- a hell of a lot -- from a partnership. There is a myth that a husband/wife is really all you need in the world That the two of you against the world will stand strong, that marriage will be a bulwark against all the woes of life.
A good marriage is a profoundly valuable gift but being married these last 10+ years has also made me appreciate the limits of a good marriage (and I have one). I can’t ask Jeff to be my everything. He can’t expect me to be his everything. But, sometimes, we’re all we’ve really got here.
I’d like to tell you we have both risen to the challenge with grace, love, and imagination but, ah, if you’re reading this the odds are that you know one or the other of us (or even both of us) better than that. J We have struggled at times. Homesickness made everything harder. We yearned for missing connections and wanted the other to provide them. But I can’t be his missing sailing buddies and he can’t be my missing church friends. Just can’t.
We entered into this with a pretty solid marriage and, here’s the good news!, we’ve still got a pretty solid marriage. We’ve worked through (and continue to work through) the tricky times. As with most relationships, the tricky times served to illuminate ourselves to ourselves. I said a long time ago that the down side to really loving somebody is that it holds a mirror up to you at your worst. You see the effects of all the immature, fragile, and half-baked aspects of yourself through how they affect the one you love.
So does being an ex-pat.
An example….
I’ve got a temper. When I get pissed off, I can be a hot poker straight into your left eye. As more than one friend who’s experienced my furies has said, at least you know where you stand with me! At home, I’ve got…outlets for my anger. Or at least I can spread it around. J Here, not so much. Jeff gets the brunt of it.
I’ve been thinking about anger a lot in the last 6 months or so, after a stressful trip back to the US last September. Most of my friends are, frankly, terrified of anger, anyone’s anger. The funny thing is, so am I. So is Jeff. We respond in different ways. Yet anger is a pretty normal emotion. We all experience at some time or another. It’s…normal.
I hate to watch Jeff disconnect from me when I get angry. He does it to protect himself, naturally enough, but I hate it and I’ve got nowhere else to go with it. So I’m spending time paying attention to what makes me angry, what I need from the world around me when I get angry, what I need from Jeff and want I can honestly expect from Jeff.
I’m also going deep into my own fear of anger. If I’m not literally afraid for my physical, emotional, or psychological safety, why am I so twitchy around someone else’s anger? A friend here in Brisbane talked recently about her same struggles. She said she finally had an experience where she was able to say “his anger is not mine and it is not about me and it will not hurt me. So I do not need to be afraid.”. She said it was one of those life-changing aHA moments and she’s been able to be calm in the face of anger since then.
I want to learn that. I want to learn to not be afraid of other people’s anger. I also want to be able to recognize the validity of expressing my own anger when I am not threatening someone physically, emotionally, or psychologically (which, honestly, I rarely am).
Would I have explored myself like this if I had remained in DC? Maybe, eventually, over a long time. Here, it moves higher on my priority list because I can’t help but see the effects on someone I never ever want to hurt.
Leaving home…a mirror allowing us to see ourselves when we’d really rather not. J
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