When I think of the type of person I married and what makes him love me, I cannot help but to think of the "hero syndrome" that I so often attach to him. When we met, I was only fifteen and we were in high school and we were young and were just facinated by one another. We are alike and yet different to say the least and what I loved most about him was his ability to open up to me and share things with me that I knew he didn't share with any other. And the same was true with him. I told him things about me that I hadn't shared with many and he had immediately gained my trust. He had always been so open and honest and sensitive and smart and I could just listen to him talk for hours on end without getting tired. I loved the sound of his voice and most of all I loved him and all he had to offer. With him he brought so much. He brought comfort and peace and comfort and ease that I had come to depend on. I knew early on that I loved him and that I never wanted another day without him in it. He had changed my life. He was perfect for me. I was attracted to everything about him. I loved how we could be best friends. How he could talk to me and share his feelings and thoughts and know I wasn't judging him. Our relationship worked. We got each other. I couldn't decide what to title this one, so I decided to name it what had come to mind. Like the title, there are two sides to every story, two people to one relationship. And in our relationship we both bring something to the table, good and bad. Along with his charisma and confidence he brings hurt and along with my wit and beauty I bring fears and there are just some things you can't ignore. One of my biggest problems when it came to our relationship, that I did not find out until we were on our own, married and taking care of responsibilities is that I had really high and unrealistic expectations. I had never seen a good marriage, or a healthy relationship up close, and when I did I was not exposed enough to know the daily ins and outs. All I was equipped with was the fairy tale ideals I had and all the negative experiences I was determined to avoid. His biggest problem came when he was used to being the hero, the one I came to to escape from trouble, my partner and my refuge which brought him confidence and a sense of well-doing. But what happens when I want to escape from him because he is now some sources to my pain? What do you do when the hero is also the villian? (sidenote, my husband is NOT a villian, it is just used for literary purposes and not meant to dismantle any one's character or abilities). Or when the girl of your dreams seems to have become a nightmare and a constant reminder of the failure you feel inside? I expected the world's best marriage. All the disney movies put together and all the mistakes of those I knew avoided. I thought as long as I do what they do on tv, this should be great. I had no idea what so ever what I was doing. When it came to living everyday life I was lost. What's next after cooking and cleaning and sex and school? Literally, what do you do? I became frustrated, feeling like the smart person I am should know what to do. I lost all confidence over time when it seemed like failure after failure after failure kept occurring? Why is he unhappy? What am I doing wrong? As time went on he lost his smile. His charm, his will. Why bother? She's just gonna complain anyway. It was boring and stressful and confusing and scary. What the heck happened? We were so happy. I have come to realize that we happened to ourselves. My expectations led me to be ungrateful and and anxious and my emotions exaggerated my responses and my fears anticipated our failure. We were self destructing and didn't even know it. I also lacked the maturity to know how to deal with my emotions and the wisdom to know that not everything is my fault and not everything I can control. I had learned to be the victim and found comfort in being the one always wrong because that gave me the power to fix it. It was a foreign idea to me that sometimes we are just gonna have a bad day. No matter what I do. That people get cranky but they get over it and that it is not the end of the world. And where he used to find confidence in being my hero, here I had too many personal issues to be dealt with and he got tired of carrying me. He was drained, became lifeless, hopeless and our love seemed less and less. With each new day the thought of it all being a mistake became less and less un-thinkable. We had convinced ourselves that it just won't work. I cried all the time, mourning for our future and longing for the past. He became mentally and emotionally distant, and we despised one another at times. I tried to be his everything because he had always been my everything and it just wasn't working.
I don't regret my marriage, but there were times I did. But now, with new understanding, though some things are hard to say and accept I am glad we got through it all. We are still getting through it. I didn't know what I was doing, only what I didn't want to happen, and it caused all my worst nightmares to become a reality. I didn't see what happened after the show went off. After the car turned to corner with the happy newly weds in tow. I was so busy trying to not be, that I never learned how to be. And when it came to my hero actually being human, and needing support I wasn't able to give it. Mental support and companionship, not just a clean house and food on the table. When he lost his appetite and no longer enjoyed coming home I had nothing. I was at a loss. I felt inadequate. Like this was something I should already know. I lost my confidence and my drive and no longer felt the need to try because I wouldn't succeed anyway. My constant need to have that feeling of being in love and to have that climactical "in love" feeling like in movies was draining and unnerving to my husband. I was never satisfied. Instead of appreciating the gestures he was doing today I wanted to make sure he'd be back same time tomorrow with another. And the worst part about it is, I didn't know. I didn't know there was a problem nor the slightest idea how to fix it. Our first year of marriage was really hard, but I was determined, sometimes more than others. Determined to at least understand my failure. I wasn't very well equipped coming out where I grew up to handle relationships. And for the first four years, our love was real and it was the only thing that got us through. But when it came to self progression and all things that came with "self" I dropped the ball. I stopped all self discovery (not that I had much understanding prior to) and focused entirely on what I had been waiting for my whole 15 year life. I had mental maturity, but there were still things I had yet to know. I had never made decisions on my own that I had total confidence in and all the things I needed to function as person, just as a person I hadn't fully learned. I wasn't ready. I don't think either of us were. But I know that staying where I was in life wouldn't have left me in a better position either. So I would have eventually come to this point anyway. But now I am working to understand me. Getting the self confidence that I need for myself. And then finding relationships where I can learn the ins and outs on healthy ways to live and what expectations to have. I know we didn't make a mistake. It would have been better to have went to college together and finding out the things we needed to know about ourselves and each other to be successful. I never got a chance to really know myself and explore and learn and be. Unfortunately growing up I did not have that privilege and was really at a disadvantage. So I am taking it day by day, learning so many things about myself, some good and some bad. And I am learning to accept who I am and love who I am so I can learn to do the same with him. Its like we are starting over, and sometimes I feel like a newbie or a retard because some things don't come easily to me. When I was first told that there would be days where he'd just be out of it, and that its not my fault it just happens, it freaked me out. I didn't understand and that concept was completely foreign to me. I thought that as long as I tried really hard I would never get on his nerves or make him mad or anything because I wouldn't intend to and it didn't make sense that I in fact would, just because and even more so that he expected it and was okay with it. I had to learn that sometimes its not my fault and I don't have to stop my life because he is having a bad day, it happens cause sometimes I'll have a bad day. And its okay to have bad day and I don't have to pretend that I'm having a good day if I'm really not. I feel like in the past couple of weeks we have began to settle. I get this picture of a pond with rocks settling to the bottom after a disruption. As we are starting to better understand each other and I myself, the things around us can settle into place and I don't feel as anxious. I can refocus my mind and feel more at ease. That this marriage wasn't an end all be all to all things me. That I can still do the things I like and be a wife as a additive and not a replacement, because those are the things that make me, me. So he can have his video games and I blog, or read or clean or whatever it is that we do and can still have one another. So I finally get to know what happens after the credits roll and the happy couple rides off into the sunset. They live. Plain and simple! (it even says so... "and they LIVED happily ever after"...) and happily ever after doesn't imply the absence of pain and suffering as I once believed, but the strength and contentment found in conquering it. And it means that they now have each other to face things with and I think that over time it should be that they spend less and less time battling against one another and more and more time battling everything else as a team, after all isn't that the point. So the moral of the story is that I can be a princess and he can be my knight in shining armor all the same, but underneath the skirt and steel we are both yet human and as long as that remains true we will bump heads and disagree and fail and succeed and I have to try not to loose sight and passion for those things that brought me identity and attractiveness in the first place.
