“You don’t need to be on the same wavelength to succeed in marriage. You just need to be able to ride each other’s waves.” – Toni Sciarra Poynter, From This Day Forward: Meditations on the First Years of Marriage
i feel as though i’m at a loss for words these days.
i started this post the day after my wedding. i got as far as “i feel as though….” i left those words on the page for a while and waited for my head to form thoughts. nothing came together to form anything. so i saved those words and the post titled “the calm after the storm” and decided to come back to it when i felt like i could bring it all together.
now, over a month after we’ve been married, i’m returning to the blank page, full of potential and colorful expressions, thoughtful sparks of excited word spasms, or even opinionated two cents about what a wedding is all about. it’s eerie how calm i still am. the comfort of post wedding is like some sort of muscle relaxing drug that keeps you from feeling any spasms or pain or tightness… but you know it’s there. being married doesn’t totally change that. or perhaps this is just the comfort that being married provides you with. an inability to feel the uncertainty of being unhitched. logically…. because you are. hitched that is.
i like to think of this calmness as “the comfort of forever after.” the few spats we’ve had in the past month have been small and inconsequential – pay more attention to me, why are you waking me up, turn off the light, it’s your turn to take the garbage out… why do you have to leave…? that sort of stuff. all in all the frequency we are vibrating on are intertwining together to maintain a steady high wavelength… a beautiful pitch of harmonized monotone. i love our monotone. i find comfort in it. i reach up to grab it and pull it over me – wrap it around me tightly like a warm blanket… with this tightly wrapped blanket keeping me warm, i could potentially move anywhere. vancouver… victoria…? i think it’s a quite realistic possibility to assume i will have to close the distance gap between me and my hubby… maui and bc… brought closer by jumbo jets, but no matter how you spin it they’re still too far apart. the distance will definitely affect our frequency. there is bound to be some static. static. ugh. static… the destroyer of my clear communication. and static, shocking me softly under the comfort of my warm blanket.
“You don’t need to be on the same wavelength to succeed in marriage. You just need to be able to ride each other’s waves.” – Toni Sciarra Poynter, From This Day Forward: Meditations on the First Years of Marriage
i suppose it is inevitable that things will change when you get married. change is such a stark constant in life. sometimes the change is slow and predictable… something you can prepare for. sometimes it quick and surprising… turns your world upside down. there isn’t much you can do but roll with the punches, hoping they won’t hit you in a funny bone or knock the wind out of you. eventually you build up a bit of resistance, begin to predict certain moves… we adapt to the fights we get ourselves into and can eventually internalize some sort of a plan of defense. once the wind knocking, funny bone sparking hits can be avoided… once the offense and defense begin to meld into a coordinated explosion of moves, it almost becomes like a sort of dance. a dance that melds the expected and unexpected together. a fight that is beautiful instead of ball busting. kind of like capoeira. kind of like this.
maybe that’s it. maybe i’m finding this state of serenity so eerie because i’ve gone through my whole life preparing for some sort of a hit. something unexpected. some sort of reason that things won’t work out. some sort of altercation that changes everything. it’s happened so much in the past – in past relationships mostly – that i’ve always prepared myself for it. i haven’t let the moves flow and continue moving. i’ve grabbed onto all i know and white fisted my grip to be sure i didn’t lose too much when i was hit. and by standing still as a stagnant target my world would collapse when i was hit. now… now my mobility and relaxed movements come from the knowledge that i have a partner to dance with… a partner that will help to support me when i fall or when i get hit. it’s amazing what a partner will do for a life. you share the load, you share the responsibilities, and everything becomes lighter and more easy to manage. you have give up some of the gripping control that you’ve trained yourself to have over the years – which for me was difficult – but once it is gone, you never quite miss it, because everything else gets better. i’ve gone from pretending to be an adult back to become giddy and naggy like a kid. not that i’d ever really given up those qualities by growing up. i guess i was just pretending… repressing them… masking them with what i know and calculated confidence. i guess i just never wanted to annoy anyone with the way i really am. i’ve just now found someone i want to annoy for the rest of my life. it comes out in full force. it’s a beautiful thing.