Dorie Morgan’s Rising Up
Navigating Twenty-Something Suburban Life
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Archive of "love" Category
Awesome Blogger
Yesterday the interview/conversation I did with Jun Loayza for his Awesome Bloggers series was posted. It was a lot of fun but it was still slightly nerve wracking for me because I tend to over think things and get distracted by my over thinking. I’m also not entirely sure I am always an awesome blogger and especially after my blogging break, I’m still trying to get back in the swing of things.
At the end, Jun said something about top three tips for couples and if I had any to share. Nope. None. Not one. I’m not touching that with a ten foot pole. No way, no how.
So instead, I’ll share with you my top 3 reasons why I’m not doing it.
1. Misinterpretation.
So many people take amazing advice, twist it around in some weird way in their heads and then apply it in some god awful way to their own life/career/kids/whatever. Maybe they take the advice as literally as they can. Maybe they “tweak it” for their own needs. But then later on, they blame the person who said it initially. I’m not opening myself up for that, or at least not on this topic.
2. Most people are the rule.
They don’t want to be the rule. They want to be special and unique and different and better than everyone else. They want to be the exception to the rule. And then they (especially chicks) read books like “He’s just not that into you” and don’t seem to get that it was written for them. In fact, Greg Behrendt could have titled each book individually to the woman reading it and she still wouldn’t understand the point directed at her. It isn’t fun, glamorous or sexy to be the rule but it is the way life works.
3. We started out as the exception and then became the rule.
Or rather, if you are operating under a different set of rules, look at us. If you want advice on whether or not your current sweetheart is the one for you or how to get your man to buy you the engagement ring you really want, we are not the ones to look at. Brian and I didn’t date. We courted. And even if Brian died tomorrow and it was time to start having relationships again, I still wouldn’t date because I have no business dating. If you want advice on how to court, by all means, call us and we’ll be happy to tell you about our experience. Or in other terms, if dating is the rule, we are the exception. If dating is merely one set of rules, we opted for the courtship rules instead.
So after all of the why I’m not giving relationship tips, here is one tip for you: advice rarely lives in a vacuum, especially when it comes to interacting with other people. If you are given a piece of relationship advice that cannot be applied to any other relationship you have, throw it out. At the end of the day, there isn’t much of a difference between how a person should treat a colleague versus how they treat their spouse versus how they treat the homeless addict on the street. Be kind. Be respectful. Have healthy boundaries. The boundaries are what help you determine what is and is not respectful behavior.
Of course there are extra things you do for your spouse, but the fundamentals of being a person are always appropriate in any situation or relationship.
I am so grateful to be featured by Jun. He’s done a great job with the series so far and I can’t wait to see who he will interview next. Check out the interview here and while you’re at it, check out the guest post Jun shared in September here.
Passing On: my introduction to death and dying
- Dorie and Gampy
If you’ve been following along here for a while, you may have noticed that my grandfather has not been doing well. It’s been breaking my heart to see him suffer.
As a loved one, it feels next to impossible to make difficult decisions during the end of life. Sometimes honoring their wishes means making insanely painful decisions. Sometimes it means watching and feeling helpless.After five years of struggle, my grandfather let go this morning and passed. I’m filled with a strange mixture of grief and relief. While I am so grateful that his suffering is over, I realize that I am now starting the next phase of my life and I do not have his wisdom next to me to directly guide me through this.I am so very, very grateful to have had 26 good years with my grandfather. He was more than a grandfather to me: he was my best friend, my mentor, my teacher. Grandfather became a term that was severely inadequate to describe all that he was in my life. At some point over the years, “Grandpa” was shortened to “Gampy” and that name somehow seems most fitting.I am grateful for a grandfather who helped me when I was small with my homework. He encouraged my curiousity about the world around me. He humored my experiments in making peanut butter in a blender when we ran out of Skippy (we never did perfect that recipe). He took me bike riding at Core Creek Park after Summer Theatre in the afternoons. He never just told me “no” or “because I said so” – he explored the why with me and encouraged me to ask tough questions of my surroundings. I will always look back with fond memories of times when he taught me about physics while also teaching me about world history (he was a pilot in the Civil Air Patrol so it works better than most people realize). He taught me about the importance of being mindful of current events while always remembering the past (by the way, he was not a fan of the current economic stimulus plan). He gave me his car when I graduated from college to give me a head start in my adult life.My Gampy taught me about how to give and receive unconditional love. He instilled a strong Protestant work ethic in me. He gave me a dry sense of humor (not very useful in a small child but I wouldn’t trade it for anything now). He made Patsy Cline, Glenn Miller and Ella Fitzgerald into the sweetest lullabies. He offered forgiveness freely and unwavering faith in my abilities and place in the world.I was blessed to spend a quiet, undisturbed hour with him last night that I will always cherish. I know when he slipped away, it was peaceful and quiet. It was with dignity. It was with grace. While I ache now, I am grateful that in the end his wishes were honored.I‘ll be taking a little break from blogging. I’m not quite sure how long it will be. I need to take some time to be quiet with my family and process what this major change will be for us. I am looking forward to connecting with everyone again after I have a better sense of how my life has changed.Thank you for all of your support. It is appreciated deeply by myself, Brian and our family.A Very Romantic Rising Up Valentine’s Day
Our first Valentine’s Day as a couple was rough. In fact, it was so bad it made me wonder if Brian and I should even get married. I was drunk, there was a card with a picture of a dead rat (that I suspect Brian went out to buy while I was drunk) and then there was crying. We never had the intent of making a big deal out of the day but then it somehow was a big deal.
We were inadvertently trying to keep up with the Jones’.
Except Mr. and Mrs. Jones had crazy money and went out for a romantic dinner with flowers and chocolates and jewelry and more presents and we were just two drunk twenty somethings with a card that had a picture of a dead rat.
The Jones’ may have won that night.
But it changed the way we thought about romance and now those pesky Jones’ don’t have anything on us.
Romance is baking cookies together on a Tuesday night (try our chocolate peanut butter chip macadamia nut cookies… they are amazing). It really doesn’t matter what we make though. It is the time together that really matters and playing in the kitchen is a fun way to enjoy each other’s company with the TV off.
Romance is going to the community ice skating rink on a Friday night for the open skate. Sure the place might be filled with obnoxious teenagers and might resemble a roller-skating rink during the 80’s. Its fun to remember doing those things when we were younger and now enjoy new things together as adults. Plus we get to split a soda at the Penalty Box (the refreshment stand) and giggle as the teenagers point and laugh.
Romance is pouring over paint colors while we plot and plan what our home is going to look like. We plan ridiculous color schemes and watch as the other one squirms. We make suggests that we think the other will love even though it may be something we hate. We get to envision our future together and share our ideas.
If you are starting to notice a theme, romance has nothing to do with gifts or expensive dinners or showy displays of affection. Romance has everything to do with experiences together. Those experiences don’t have to be expensive but there’s nothing wrong with it if they are (but if the only good experiences you have are expensive experiences, you have some other issues we should probably be talking about instead).
Without the day to day experience romance, the gifts are meaningless.
Last year, Brian bought a beautiful jewelry chest for me and after our first Valentine’s Day together, I was shocked to receive it. It wasn’t opening the present that made the gift romantic – it was filling the box with treasures together. Remembering the ring he gave me on our honeymoon. Smiling about the diamond earrings my grandmother gave. Carefully tucking away his stainless steel ring I wore as an engagement ring until we found the right engagement ring. Without the memories together, it would have been just a box with stuff in it.
This year we aren’t doing anything special for Valentine’s Day. There will be no fancy dinners out. There will be no tickets for the theatre. There will not be any lavish gifts.
There will only be a man and a woman who love each other with a pure heart. There will only be me and my true love. After all, he is stuck with me.
Zeus is just a dude
Yesterday, Rebecca Thorman and Ryan Healy let out a public announcement about their relationship. In the form of a post on Rebecca’s blog which I thought was fabulous. And really messed up too (but my inner blogger with voyeuristic tendencies can’t resist). After all, if social media is all about transparency, then why aren’t we talking about everything online from the beginning?
But there are such good reasons for not talking about everything online. Holly Hoffman may have blogged openly about her alcoholism but she also waited a year to do so. Milena Thomas is a happy blogger because she has set her boundaries. After all, is it really anyone’s business? Probably not.
And I have my very own, built in appropriate meter. His name is Brian. You may have heard of him, he’s that crazy guy who thought marrying me would be a really great idea. (Side note: it totally was.)
Brian keeps a good portion of my blogging desires off of the internet. I would love write about sex but sex isn’t just about me anymore. It’s really about my husband. And he would rather it if I didn’t tell everyone about his penis. I’d also love to blog about my in-laws. Because on some level, I still identify them as Brian’s family and therefore, I can mentally critique their behavior in a way that I cannot do with my own family. But he is my family and therefore his family is my family and once again, my built in appropriate meter tells me to put the laptop down. I would also blog about some of my more neurotic tendencies but something tells me that Brian would need to be able to show his face in public again and perhaps I should keep my mouth shut.
I’d love to be a totally open book. But I can’t be.
And then I realize how lucky Rebecca and Ryan have been to have the option to keep their romance off of the blogosphere, at least for a little while. They let themselves have time to be quiet and enjoy the newness of what was happening between them.
Brian never had that option. He just had a wife who blogged.
To make up for my own presence in social media, Brian is just not there. He isn’t on twitter. He occasionally comments on Brazen Careerist as his alter-ego but he’ll never have a profile (probably because he knows I would out him fast enough to make his head spin). He finally has a Facebook page, but he only has that because I created it for him, added all of his friends and then informed him that he had to get with the times. (By the way, you should totally add him as a friend and tell him I sent you. He may squirm a little bit but I think it’s good for him and character building).
Brian has been living on the web for through my identity. I tell you about our life together, usually in six hundred words or less. And then you comment while Brian reads. We rarely hear his portion of the experience, just the way I perceive the world happening. His online identity is based largely on how I see him and not as much on how he sees himself.
And for awhile, Ryan was in the same boat. We saw this mysterious “Zeus” character through Rebecca’s eyes. While he probably could have given her a cute little name and blogged about it on Employee Evolution, he didn’t. But since we weren’t reading about him in terms of “Ryan Healy, Co-Founder of Brazen Careerist”, Zeus’s behaviors made sense to us. Will Zeus still make sense to us tomorrow? Or did the assigned alter ego die a public death?
Now that it is all out in the open, will it change the way we perceive Rebecca’s writing? Will we feel more quick to judge now that the whole world knows? Will we find descriptions of interactions more questionable?
Rebecca knows Ryan for who he is at the end of the day and we just have a sense of who he is during the work day. And really what happens between the two of them is none of our business (we’re not investors in their start-ups).
These questions make me happy that B doesn’t have a blog. I’m not sure I could answer any of those questions in my own online life.
Commitment is Liberating
Out of everything Starbucks has printed on the side of a cup of the years, my favorite is The Way I See It #76.
“The irony of commitment is that it’s deeply liberating – in work, in play, in love. The act frees you from the tyranny of your internal critic, from the fear that likes to dress itself up and parade around as rational hesitation. To commit is remove your head as the barrier to your life.” – Anne MorrissI’ve loved the quote since the first time I saw it. I read it out loud at my best friend’s wedding as I made my toast (she may have laughed because I had been carrying it in my purse for months or maybe it was because something I loved was related to coffee yet again). Before I moved in with Brian, I had the quote hanging on my dresser mirror to remind myself of its importance each morning as I started my day. I since lost the quote but it still came to me from time to time.
Commitment is deeply liberating. It is a fact that proves itself on a daily basis.
When I committed myself to my marriage, so many other aspects of my life came into place. I had the freedom to take risks in my career because of unconditional love and support. I did not need to worry about the port I would return to at night so the chaos of my career was not overwhelming but manageable.
When I committed myself to my writing after a long period of neglect, I felt a surge in my creativity and in my sense of who I am. The commitment to craft words that could stand for me released the built up tension in my mind. I didn’t need to worry about what I was going to write, what my ideas would be, or how to best articulate my ideas – I just needed to stay committed my writing. I was liberated.
That is why commitment is liberating. It frees you from a question that plagues your mind and consumes your energy. Instead you energy is spent on what you love, what you care about, what is most important in your universe.
My internal critic had a lot of time to practice being a critic. That was also called being a teenager. But the danger with that is as time goes on our inner critic grows stronger, more jaded. The critic sees why this won’t work, why this won’t be a fairytale ending, why you don’t deserve what you want. Commitment scares my internal critic. Commitment reminds my critic that she does not run the show. And there are times when it is appropriate and relevant for my critic to make and appearance but that is most definitely not all day, everyday.
After the turmoil of the critical teenage years, it seems to me that your twenties should be an exercise in learning how to listen carefully to yourself and how to take what the critic says with a grain of salt. It makes me wonder: do the people who learn how to listen to themselves in the twenties enjoy a more peaceful thirties and forties?
I hope so.
In grief, it is the small things I think about
I canceled my hair appointment that I scheduled for last Friday. I justified it by saying that my roots really aren’t that bad, my layers are falling in a very cute way around my face and if I waited till closer to Thanksgiving, I’d look nicer for the holiday season.
Money has been tight in the Morgan household lately and I didn’t want to ask Brian for $100 for a cut and color when he’s been eating PB&J at lunch for the last month. If you’ve been reading along, you know that my husband is a carpenter. With the current state of the economy, people are not adding crown modeling, shadow boxes and staircases with the same enthusiasm they did three years ago. He’s still working most days now but that doesn’t mean I can keep spending the way we used to.
Canceling that hair appointment seemed like a really smart idea. It would also give me more time to think of a low key idea for my hair – red hair may make me feel bodacious but it’s a lot more work than I thought it would be. I don’t dye my hair myself because the last time I did, it turned pink. That was okay for college but this is the working world and the pharmaceutical industry is not filled with pink haired employees.
But on Thursday, a close friend of the family (Demi) died suddenly. We didn’t hear about it until today and the viewing is tomorrow.
Suddenly, my roots look like Shakira’s in the “Underneath Your Clothes” video. My cute layers are not feeling so cute. And don’t even get me started on the state of my eyebrows.
It’s a reminder that the way I present myself might be different from the way I see myself.
When things are going well, it is really easy to look in the mirror and think about how great you are/look/feel.
But when life hits you unexpectedly, it is easy to let those doubts (that are usually kept at bay) seep in.
Reality is somewhere in the middle. My hair doesn’t look as great as I thought it did last week when I canceled my appointment but it doesn’t look as bad as I think it looks today. And really, my hair has nothing to do with the world that surrounds me.
There is this fine line between taking pride in your appearance and letting your appearance take over you. You need to go to work each day, dressed with the same passion that you dressed with before your first job interview. You need to also be able to still get your hands dirty in life – whether that be making mud pies with a small child or trying something new for the first time.
Demi was a person who saw my family at their best and at their worst. She set my parents up on their first date even though neither of my parents were interested in dating. She stood by my mom when my mother was raising a small child by herself. And it was at her house where I got stuck in a tree when was five.
It is easier to fixate on my own appearance than it is to really process what happened. Because I can change myself but I can’t change what happened.
Falling in love with fiction
Literature is mostly about having sex and not much about having children; life is the other way around. ~David Lodge
I haven’t been blogging as frequently as I want to because I fell deeply in love with Twilight last week. Translation: In the last eight days, I’ve read the first three books twice. And flagged my favorite sections with post-it notes and gone back and reread those sections.
It’s like book crack and now I need rehab.
I should have realized I had a problem when I tried to convince my husband to drive me to all of the places I needed to go so I could read. But I didn’t realize it then. No, it wasn’t until I was sitting an exceptionally long red light thinking about getting the books from the back seat that I realized I had a problem.
I’m okay with my obsessive book tendencies. This isn’t so different from when I was a kid – I realized when I was about 7 years old that I could hide in the bathroom to read because no one would bother me there (my mother must have been convinced that I had intestinal problems for years when really, I was sitting behind the bathroom door with my nose in a book). I also kept a night light in my room until I was twelve so I could read at night when everyone thought I was asleep. It was a sad night when it was finally discovered that I was always so tired from reading well into the early morning hours.
So last week, I let my whole life fall by the wayside so I could read Twilight with desperate need. My husband was confused by it. He’s not a reader. The more I consumed of each book, the more annoyed he became (the ride to Sam’s club may have pushed him over the edge). And the more annoyed he became, the more I grew in love with the characters.
It was so easy to fall in love with the characters too. Why? Losing yourself in the fantasy of a fictional man is effortless. Books don’t write about how he leaves dishes in the sink, the toilet seat up or that he thought it was a great idea to start making fun of your mother’s cooking at the last family reunion. Books are about the desire, the urges, the emotions that are not dirtied by day to day living.
In a book, we never get to the part of the story where the woman loses interest in sex and the man can’t get it up in a moment’s notice. Or if we do get to that point in the story, it’s because we started there and we then discover how something sparked passion again. In a book, we feel the initial passion for the first time and we remember the passion that may have waned in our own lives.
All of this got me thinking: If someone were to write about my life with Brian, where would be the part where our “story” would be “over”? The beginning part of our story is easy. We meet. I avoid him. I realize I’m falling for him. We go on one date. His mother dies. We court. We decide to get married. My parents flip out. I cry. Nine months later, I finally become Mrs. Morgan.
But from there, what happens to the story? Does the story go on to talk about my own cancer scare from last year, which ended anticlimactically? (Thank God, there was no tumor.) Or does the story go on to tell about me making sandwiches in the mornings and doing laundry at night? Does the story go on to weave words of how we sit around playing World of Warcraft together while passing a bottle of wine back and forth?
When we fall in love with fiction, whether that is movies, books or any other type of fantasy, do we set expectations for our mates that can never be reached?
There is a very fine line between high expectations and the impossible.
Happy Anniversary: One year down, the rest of our lives to go.
Today is my first wedding anniversary. Somehow, Brian and I have survived our first year of marriage with no visible scarring and still like each other. The still liking each other part is important. Sometimes I remind him that I promised to always love him but I made no such promises about always liking him.
Comments like that are usually met with some response regarding him always liking me. I don’t think that is true. I have a tendency to do really stupid things. Fortunately, he is much more mellow than I am and much more forgiving.
Between the two of us, we make one very balanced and reasonable person.
Brian and I never dated before we decided to get married (well, we had one date and then the next day, his mother died). We also only knew each other for about three months before we announced our engagement. And for two of those months, I tried to think of Brian as “Kelly’s little brother” and refused to learn his name.
I have always been a firm believer that when you know, you know. It’s that simple. If you don’t know at the end of three months if you want to marry the other person or not, you’ll never want to marry that person. You could convince yourself to marry that person but it isn’t really your desire.
Dating is highly over rated. And it isn’t very effective either. Dinner and a movie can only tell you so much about a person. And most of us try to put on a good face for dating – you hide how crazy your family really is and you pretend that you normally shave your legs everyday. Eventually, the façade has to come down and you have to decide if you really like or even love the person lurking behind the façade or if it was all just a waste of your time.
What Brian and I had was a courtship. For us, a courtship consisted of about a week’s worth of heavy, serious conversations about what we wanted from ourselves, from our lives and from each other. It was intense and it was scary. But, I can honestly say that during the first year of marriage, there were no surprises as to who the other person was.
By having a courtship, Brian and I opted for the slow burning love that we often discount as boring. We decided that it was more important to have an enduring marriage than just sparks at the beginning.
You have to really know what your priorities are in order to have a sustainable marriage. It isn’t something that you can just walk into blind. I spend a lot of time wondering about other couples – after the initial spark is gone, are they as happy as Brian and I are? What makes those marriages last?
Why I Don’t Celebrate Valentine’s Day (here’s a hint: It involves a dead rat)
Last year, my husband experienced Valentine’s Day for the first time on this side of a relationship as he had always been single before then. He tried to warn me in the months before the holiday that he had never celebrated Valentine’s Day, he didn’t see the point of it and he did not want to celebrate. I thought I could utilize the skills I learned in premarital counseling and compromise by purchasing cards for each other instead of gifts. It seemed like such a good idea.
When Valentine’s Day arrived, we stayed in. It snowed so we played hooky from work. We made breakfast together. We lounged in bed. We had dinner together and shared a bottle of wine. Then it was time for the card exchange.
My dear sweet husband bought me a card with a dead rat on it. Nothing says romance like a rodent. And since I was drunk, I cried. I questioned whether or not we should get married. I got so worked up that Brian ruined an upcoming surprise to try to make me happier. I still cried about the dead rat.
We may have ended the evening by sleeping in separate rooms.
This year, I am not celebrating Valentine’s Day.
Let’s be honest for a moment: I know I am an individual with high expectations. I set these expectations for myself, for others and for inanimate objects. My husband does not have high expectations for anything. He goes with the flow and rolls with the punches. Valentine’s Day is not a declaration of our love but a clash of our differences.
I didn’t buy a card for Brian this year. Instead I found red boxers with white hearts and I left it at that. I know he bought something for me this year but that’s only because he made a mistake with the check book and I had to go back and fix the math.
But that’s okay. By not celebrating Valentine’s Day, I lowered my expectations and I can be happy with whatever he chooses to give to me.
After all, it is just another day and ten years from now, it won’t matter. One day is just a drop in the bucket when you have the rest of your lives together.
How Quickly Ghosts Return
I received a phone call from an ex boyfriend last night. Not that a call from an ex boyfriend is all that unusual. I’ve had a lot of ex boyfriends and I am still friends with the majority of them. After all, I dated them for a reason and usually the reason I wanted to date them is reason why I want to maintain a friendship after the fact.
This ex boyfriend and I have a lot of history. I truly believed until a year ago that he and I were going to get married. Now I’m married to Brian. The ex and I have had the oddest relationship since day one. The first time I met him, I fell in love with him. I came home and told my mother that I had met the man I was going to marry. Mind you, I was 16 and he was 14. He is one of the rare people in my life that I know I will love forever regardless of the ways we have hurt each other in the past and the ways we will hurt each other in the future.
His phone call terrified me. He didn’t know I was married. And there was something in his voice that scared me as that revelation I was made. I know him the same way I know Brian. Which is also very scary.
Six months ago, I thought I was never going to see him again. Now he calls and says he’s been thinking about me. I almost gave up everything for him and now he’s thinking of me. Great. Day late and a dollar short my friend.
My marriage is my priority. I hope he understands that nothing can change now.
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