ADJUSTMENTS in marriage (the series..

One day Mr and I went shopping outside our town. It was just before Christmas, about five months after our wedding. At the mall, we bumped into a friend of mine. I decided to hang out with her, since Mr was getting bored already, so we parted ways and agreed to meet in a few hours. My friend and I shopped to our heart’s content and when we got tired; we went to a café and sat down to have a bite and a chat. As we sat down, she turned to me and asked, “So, FG I’ve been meaning to ask you. How is married life?”
I wanted to answer the question honestly, so I told her that married life is a lot of fun, but there are many adjustments to make. She asked me what kind of adjustments, and I told her that they were stuff you would never think of if you were a single girl living on your own and accountable to no one but yourself. I told her, “For example, when we were shopping just now, I had to be mindful about the clothes and underwear I was buying, because someone cares about them”. She found that really funny and said that she couldn’t imagine having to put someone else in the picture when making the smallest decisions such as the clothes she bought or what she wore underneath. I laughed and told her that it does take a long time to get used to.

Apart from that though, there were a few more “inconveniences” we had to work around, for example:

We had to learn to share the television fairly. Who knew that something that sounds so simple in theory can actually be very complicated? Mr and I have very different taste in TV programmes. I like watching dramas and sitcoms, he likes watching wild-life documentaries, sports and news debates. Even when we want to watch movies, his choices are always very different from mine. Cue arguments and accusations such as “change the channel, my show is on now!”….“But you’ve watched that show a hundred times; can I watch my own show now?”….. “Hey, you can’t change the channel; my show comes up in a minute”…… “Can we watch something else?”…… “Babe please change the channel, this show is boring!”…… etc. You get the picture (lol). How we manage to resolve it? Patience, patience, patience and compromise, as in seriously. Recently, reminders and one-hour-later channels have made a big difference too. LOL

One of my hobbies is listening to music. Preferably as loud as possible, with me singing along since I usually know all the lyrics by heart. To me, that’s one of the ways I relax and tune out stress. For example, after a long day at lectures or at work, when I get home, the first thing I do is to put on my CD player or my laptop and turn up the volume. Now this was fine until I got married and I had to factor in somebody else living in the same house as me. I got a shock one day when I was enjoying my music in the afternoon. Mr came into the living room and said I was making noise and he wanted some peace and quiet. I stared at him as if he wasn’t making sense. How could he call my music “noise” and ask me to turn it off? Did he not know that listening to music was one of my favourite things to do? We argued for ages but we still didn’t come to a resolution. I just couldn’t imagine giving up listening to music because of him. He suggested that I should use headphones. I grudgingly obliged but it was just not the same. Now though, I have learnt to leave the room he is in when I’ve got my music playing. And I make the most of it when he is not at home and I can turn it up as loud as I want to!
Something else that needed to be worked out was sharing the chores in the house. In this re gard, I must say I’ve not had much of a problem, as Mr gets stuck in with the housework and he doesn’t leave it all to just me. He doesn’t like dirt and grime so he would rather scrub the tub himself, for example, than wait for me to do it. We’ve got some unspoken rules as to who does what, but they are flexible depending on who got there first. And we don’t have a time-table as such so we just do our chores as and when necessary. Usually on Saturdays, he wakes up before me and starts tidying up and I’ll join him later. And sometimes, I take charge, make a list of what needs to be done and we share both the difficult and easy tasks accordingly. It works well for us right now, but I have a feeling that when we have kids, we will need to be clearer on who does what!

PS:Repping a friendie