Young Love

If you had been a fly on the wall in Hubris' kitchen the other night, you would have overheard me say, at one point: "Apparently I was dumb and inexperienced when I was 18...go figure" in reference to the age at which I embarked on what was an 11 year relationship.

I got married in June of '97 when I was 21 years old, a few weeks before my husband-to-be turned 23. It seemed like a good idea at the time. I was filled with youthful idealism, a surety that love would find us a way through the issues that haunted our relationship. After all, I had always been "old for my age". I'd been looking after myself since I was eight. I knew the "appropriate" languages of disagreement. "When you focus on my flaws, I feel hurt". "When you assert that your way is the only way to do things, I feel frustrated and unappreciated". I was saying my piece, he was listening respectfully. We had things all figured out.

The minister who married us agreed to do so only if we took a pre-marriage counselling course with her. We learned, again, about respectful communication, we filled out questionairres independantly, to be sent off to a central marking facility which would gage our long term compatibility. We passed with flying colours. She came back to us in surprise and expressed a surety that, despite our age, we DID know what we were doing. We clearly were made for each other.

We were smug in our compatibility.

Thing is, we neglected to recognize that some of these recurring issues that haunted our relationship were simply too big to continue to hurdle, day in and day out, through housekeeping and child rearing. We didn't have a crystal ball into which we could peer and discover that the narrow channels of difference between our viewpoints would grow into huge gulfs as we matured and we didn't have the experience to know that that isn't unusual.

Codependancy seemed like a nonsense word. Something you were SUPPOSED to have in a relationship.

He didn't know that owning lots of expensive stuff would never be important to me, I didn't know that he would feel threatened by new friends I found from outside our existing high school social circle.

We fought, early on about a lot of the things that broke us up in the end. He would insist on "taking care" of me. His goal was to arrange it so I didn't "have to work". I would tell him that my independance was important to me and I didn't want to be taken care of. That never seemed to quite sink in, and when we started having children and I did stop working, part of him danced, the victor. Soon, he began to fill the role he'd wanted all along. The patriarch. I didn't have one growing up, and I certainly didn't want one now.

I responded the only way I had any experience with: the petulant child. Defiant, challenging. Resentment built. The more control he tried to seize, the more I resisted. The final year or two were ugly on the inside, while remaining quite cordial on the outside. Passive aggression, cutting remarks and physical control became staples of my life.

Still, I smiled. I grinned and bore it because, that's what I'd agreed to. After all, these were the same issues we'd always had. This WAS the man I'd married.

Our marriage vows included a bit about never putting one another down to outside parties. It was finding out that he'd been doing that that provided my out. Not the put-downs, not the constant reminders of my shortcomings, not the combined one-two punch of ignoring me for days on end, as I trailed after him like a lonely puppy dog then turning around and accusing me of not paying attention to him, not loving him, not being attracted to him when I finally gave up and pursued an activity of my own, but the breaking of that wedding vow, written by an inexperienced 22 year old boy-in-love.

Odd how the mind works.