Dorie Morgan’s Rising Up
Navigating Twenty-Something Suburban Life
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Archive of "marriage" Category
Brian, Dorie and Stress
I used to forget that men and women deal with stress differently. But I also think that most of us forget we deal with stress differently until we watch someone be beaten over the head violently with their own stress. Then we remember. And then we go back to the blissful state of ignorance when the poor victim of stress walks away. Life is great.
This stops working once two people decide to walk down the aisle. Then, all bets are off. I’m not trying to scare the single friends out there but it’s true.
Then you get the pleasure of living with your mate’s stress and their way of addressing their stress.
Like many women, when stress hits I give myself a pep talk and pull myself up by my bootstraps. Your house collapsed and you have nowhere to go? Great, I’ll organize a community meal schedule and prep the house for you to stay with me for a month. I’m five minutes away. Oh you need a baby sitter with ten minutes notice? Great, by the time you pick up your family, the kids will be fed, homework will be done and my house will still be immaculate. Money is tight, we got a surprise bill and you don’t know how we’re going to manage it? That’s fine, I moonlight as a miracle worker, and I’ll make it happen.
It sounds ridiculous but this is how I process everything in my head.
Brian’s approach to dealing with stress is much different. He shuts down. He ceases to function. Do not pass go, do not collect two hundred dollars. He’s okay with stress to a point, and then he is not. He just stops.
I go into “Super Bitch” mode when I get to that level of stress. At that point, I’m going to get my shit done and you will not get in my way. Brian is very kind when he calls me “Cranky Face”. A little too kind perhaps. Kind to the point of lying to me.
We both get a little annoyed with the other for our respective coping mechanisms. The coping mechanisms that worked best when we were single are not necessarily the best coping mechanisms in terms of a marriage.
I talked to my friend Carmella about this. Carmella is a marriage counselor and a newlywed herself. She is also my frequent voice of reason. When I cross over into crazy land with my expectations of other people, she is the one who can say I’m being unreasonable and I know that statement from her does not come from a defensive place. It comes from the voice of someone who is pursuing a Ph.D. in Psychology.
Carmella, of course, tells me that this is normal and most couples find themselves with similar responses. Which I find hard to believe at first. Because how did we as humans manage to populate the planet if the men-folk were shutting down every time stress happened? “Uh-oh Honey, some prehistoric beast is attacking our cave! No wait; don’t hide in the corner, save our offspring!”
But while I am still contemplating the evolutionary implications of our stress reactions, Carmella tells me that the dinners I make are excessive. And she’s right. Because dinner is a massive undertaking in our house. It takes me at least an hour to make dinner every night. Maybe I’m going overboard but I want my husband to have one really good meal every day.
The night after I talk to Carmella, Brian looks at me and says “you get home every night and it’s late. And then you make dinner and it’s late. And then you clean up dinner and it’s late. And then we watch TV but you fall asleep.”
I deal with stress by trying to make a perfect meal and Brian deals with stress by wanting to watch television with a wife who is awake.
We continue the dance of figuring out what it means to be in a marriage with each other.
Life with Don
I keep finding posts and articles about Gen Y and moving back home stumble flash across my browser and I think it’s time I say something about it. Mostly in the form of a confession.
Brian and I have spent the first 18 months of our marriage living with my father-in-law, Don. I usually try to avoid saying it flat out but I know I’ve alluded to it in the past in both comments and posts.My name is Dorie, I’m 26 and I’m a boomerang kid.
I moved back home follow graduation. Which was horrible. I am convinced that the only way possible for my mother and me to function as rational people is for us to live in different zip codes. Life post graduation in my childhood bedroom was mind numbingly horrible. We fought constantly, I tried to be drunk for as much of it as humanly possible and I was stuck. It’s a miracle anyone survived.
Then I met Brian, we decided to get married and I moved into his father’s house. Most women fear moving from their father’s house and directly into their husband’s house. Brian and I were flat broke and that wasn’t an option.
We spent the first six months on a futon on the floor of his high school bedroom. For the last year, we’ve actually had a bed to sleep on. It was by no means comfortable living but we did it.
Part of the weirdness comes from the fact that I run my late mother-in-law’s household. It’s her organizational systems that I maintain. I cook in her kitchen. I use her washer and dryer for the household’s laundry. It kind of feels like limbo. Because it is limbo.
So why did we do it?
1. Housing in Lower Bucks County is really expensive. A one bedroom apartment in the bad part of town will set you back at least eight hundred dollars a month. For about four hundred dollars more, we could get a mortgage. Since we were committed to the Philadelphia area, why rent when we could buy?
2. We could not afford to buy a house right away. We did not have enough money for a down payment. It took about a year for us to save enough money for a down payment. Had we been renting, we calculate it would have taken 3 to 4 years to save enough money.
3. We wanted a place we could stay rent free while we renovated a home. Brian is a carpenter. It made sense to get a handyman’s special.
4. Nine months before our wedding, Brian’s mom passed away. Moving was just too painful.
Now that our time in Brian’s childhood home is wrapping up, I catch myself reflecting on the time. There are a lot of pros and a lot of cons too.
Pro: It taught us how to fight. Having someone else in the house to hear it when we were disagreeing helped us to stay kind to each other. Because it’s one thing to have in-laws. It’s a whole different thing to have your spouse’s family hear your disagreements. The upside is that we’re pretty good with disagreeing without yelling.
Con: Sometimes you just want a good fight with no one listening. Sometimes I want to rant and rave like an absolute lunatic and not have my father-in-law listening to my insanity.
Pro: It’s broken down the typical “in-law” issues. Brian’s dad isn’t just “my father-in-law” but Don. He’s a real three dimensional person, not just someone to deal with at family functions. These living arrangements have connected me to Brian’s family in ways our marriage couldn’t do by itself.
Con: It makes it harder to be “Dorie” in terms other than “Brian and Dorie”. Limited living space a couple means that there is also limited space for me to still be home but alone. For the first 6 months, we were literally on top of each other because our “bed” was so small. We now live in two rooms but it can still be a challenge.
Pro: We didn’t have to buy what was available. We were able to be fussy about the house we purchased because we didn’t have to worry about when a lease would be up. We also were able to start our renovations without having live in construction or pay rent. It took a lot of pressure off.
Con: Sometimes it took a little too much pressure off us. To the point of becoming lazy. It becomes easier to say “no, I won’t work on the house today because it is raining” instead of saying “I have to move in a month, I have to get to work”.
Pro: We were able to save a ton of money. We were able to have money for a down payment for our home and still have money left over for renovations. I won’t say we are rolling in cash but we are able to get by today without too much panic.
Con: Sometimes it was really tempting to spend that money. Sometimes we were able to practice self control, other times we just couldn’t do it. While I may have loved coming home some days to random jewelry surprises (“Hello Sapphires, I love the way you look on me too”), it did not help our plan to put money aside.
Overall, living with Brian’s dad has been very good for us but I’m not sure I would recommend it to anyone else. If you do find yourself in a situation where you are married and living at home, set some ground rules first and get those rules in writing. Some questions you should ask:
1. Are we expected to pay rent? How much? What day should I give you money?
2. What household responsibilities are we responsible for?
3. What household errands are we responsible for?
4. What are your responsibilities are you response for as the home owner?
5. How will we handle the holiday seasons?
6. What are restrictions for having guests over?Treat everything like it is a business arrangement. It may sound impersonal but it is a key part of maintaining a functioning family in an awkward situation.
And don’t forget to make an exit plan too!
Just call me Crackles
When Brian and I first decided to get married, we had this dream of owning a business someday. Or rather, we dreamed about building our own real estate empire. We wanted to buy old houses, renovate and remodel and then either rent or sell the properties. Brian would be in charge of the actual construction and I would be in charge of everything else. It seemed like a brilliant idea.
In fact, it still does.
We finally bought our first property three weeks ago and we get the pleasure of really learning about what having an entrepreneurial marriage would look like. And by pleasure, what I really mean is something more along the lines of having our eyes opened by surprise and shock.
We really weren’t expecting this.
But we’ve also learned a lot of good things too. About ourselves, about our marriage and about how we want to build a business.
Your Network
Your business is only as good as the people who support it. And the character of the people who support your business are a reflection of the character of the business. If your network is filled with people who suggest actions that are illegal or slightly unethical, take a step back and ask why those people are in your network. We learned this lesson but interacting with the seller’s representatives. We will not work with people who exist in that network again because we know there are problems within that network, we just don’t quite know where.
Your Work
I’m a self starter when it comes to projects. I want to show up, get the job done and move onto the next thing. I’ll take a break when the task is completed or if the task is too big, I’ll break it up into smaller chunks. Brian, on the other hand, is not a self starter. He’s much better at making the day fun. And that’s okay. Between the two of us, stuff gets done and everyone has a good time.
Our Marriage
Sometimes, you just need to be reminded how well you work together. I won’t lie; it’s been a rough few months for my husband and me. With family drama, house drama and work drama, it isn’t always easy to connect. But working together on the house gives both of us a chance to look at each other at our best. And I shouldn’t forget to mention how great it feels when we can share the sense of accomplishment (instead of telling the other about a sense of accomplishment during dinner). Team Morgan becomes stronger because of it.
Our Knowledge
My husband has totally different set of skills than I do. He creates beautiful things in homes and I know he makes other people’s lives better because of it. Working together gives me a great opportunity to learn new things from Brian. Learning new skills changes my perspective and helps with problem solving elsewhere. I might not use carpentry skills everyday in the office but who can’t use a new way to look at the world? Once you have an understanding of a skill set, you can look to apply that set in new directions.
Our SillinessOn our first day of work, my dear sweet husband started giving out construction names. My mother was named “Butchie”. Because of my dad’s resemblance to the guy on the Mr. Clean bottle, he was named “Sparkles”. But what did Brian name his wife? “Crackles.” Why? Because “Cracker” was already taken by someone else he knows.
So I did what any good “Crackles” would do: I told them all to shut up and get back to work
A mentor for my marriage will matter more
I suck at finding mentors. I hate asking people to mentor me. I don’t know how to do it without it becoming awkward. And I secretly fear that the person I’m asking will laugh and say no.
When I was in college, it was so much easier. The theatre association I joined assigned every new member a mentor, it was just up to you to maintain the relationship. When I joined my sorority, you picked your big and your big then mentored you through out your Greek Life experience (and I still go to my big when I’m mulling over major life decisions, Thanks Michelle!). When I was elected president of my chapter, there was an alumnae member just waiting to be my advisor. Everything was provided for me.
But now, I have to find my own mentors. And I don’t know where to begin. I really don’t have a mentor for my career or a mentor for blogging.
I’m more concerned though about finding a mentor for my marriage. Because, at the end of the day, I will only be married once. Making this work, and in a healthy way, is so important. I won’t get another shot at a happy marriage but there will always be a second chance with my career.
There are a few reasons why finding a couple to mentor my marriage is so hard.
- So many marriages end in divorce. And so many marriages end after the kids have already grown and left the house. I don’t want to be mentored by someone whose marriage is falling apart but at the same time, you don’t really know if a marriage is successful until one of its partners has died.
- We would have to find a couple that would be beneficial for both of us. This mentoring relationship wouldn’t just be about me and the mentor but me, my husband and the mentoring couple. Just thinking about establishing a relationship makes me realize just how different Brian and I truly are.
- My husband and I are Christians. Brian has a Pentecostal upbringing whereas I have a Presbyterian past. But here’s where it gets complicated: I broke away from the church for years (hello sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll). It took a long time for me to come back to the church and when I did, I discovered it was really difficult for me to relate to other Christians. Brian, on the other hand, has no past like that to deal with and address. My past is just as much a part of my marriage as the present we now share. We encounter very few Christian couples who understand what that sort of past really means.
With that being said, not having a mentor is just not a good idea. But I’m not quite sure where I am supposed to go next. And when something is so important, how do you establish criteria without crippling yourself in the process? It almost feels more difficult than the decision to become a married couple.
Where do you find your best mentors? And how do you establish that relationship once you have realized the potential?
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?
Is blood thicker than water?
My mother gives me a lot of unsolicited advice when it comes to married life. I suppose it’s a natural and overwhelming urge for her to pass on these gems of wisdom. Nine times out of ten, I strongly disagree with what she believes to be true, which is making me wonder how I lived in the same house as this woman from birth until adulthood.
Lately, the advice has been relating to interacting with his family. Since I am an only child and an only grandchild (yes, I know I blogged about my cousin last week but she’s actually my step-cousin), I need all the advice I can get when it comes to interacting with siblings. While I spent the first 24 years of my life learning how to be quiet by myself, Brian learned how to survive having 3 older sisters.
When it comes to healthy family relationships, I am in over my head.
So my mom gives me advice to make up for the fact that reproduction is not my family’s strong point. She seems to think that if she passes on enough pieces of truth from her own life, it will make up for some of the confusion in my own life.
But really, her advice is just getting under my skin. “Blood is thicker than water” is her favorite phrase to utter over the phone during my commute home.
The way I catch myself interpreting her advice is that biological family ties will be the bonds that trump all other bonds. I’m not sure that is what she really means but it is what I keep hearing. And in my life, there are so many things wrong with that mentality.
For example: I don’t know who my birth father is. Despite the fact that he was married to my mother when I was both conceived and born, I have not seen him since I was six months old. In my house, we don’t talk about it. I don’t know what he looks like and no one will answer my questions. Which then leaves the question: If blood is truly thicker than water, is the blood flowing through my veins just really crappy? Is it less bonding than other blood?
Take another example: My step dad adopted me when I was thirteen. I’ve called him “Daddy” since the day he married my mother. He gave me away when I married Brian. But despite a slight resemblance, I share no genetic material with the man I identify as my father. There is no “blood” between us. If blood is truly thicker than water, does an adopted child only have a chance at a deep relationship when they grow up and have kids of their own?
But more troubling, my mom’s advice makes me think of baby boomers and the waves of divorce I have watched my friends survive. Even as adults, the experience of watching their parents divorce has shaken the world they live in. And the shared blood through their children still was not enough to make things work.
If blood truly is thicker than water, how does a marriage survive and thrive? Will sibling relationships always take the cake for closeness?
And then I wonder about my life and my marriage. And I wonder about the world of twenty somethings and their budding marriages. Will our ability to learn from our parents’ mistakes enable us to change the face of American marriage? Could we decide as a generation to make the difference between family and friends irrelevant?
Are you liberated by your marriage?
When Brian and I first decided to get married, I hated my job. Actually, I probably hated 90% of my life but it was easier to focus that energy at hating my job. But I felt stuck. I needed the money too much to quit working but I didn’t really have the time to devote to a job search. And my job made it next to impossible to take time off to interview.
I spent a lot of time crying because of it. But crying didn’t help me at all. It didn’t give me more money. It didn’t help me find a new job. All crying did was make me hate my job even more.
I was stuck. And I got to the point of stuck where I didn’t know how to become unstuck.
But this is where marriage steps in. I’ve been extremely blessed by the support and the liberation that my marriage has given me. Brian picked up my bills so I could quit that god awful job and hunt for something I truly loved. That might not seem like a big deal, but when Sallie Mae owns you to the tune of 1k+ each month, having a stretch of freedom is amazing.
A lot of times, we think of marriage as commitment and divorce as liberation from that commitment. But what if we changed the way we look at marriage? What if we start to think of marriage as opportunity? What if marriage liberates you from your fears? By changing our views of the institution of marriage, are we capable of changing its impact in our lives?
The fear of failure is still there for me but at the same time, its hold isn’t any where near as strong. Brian’s support liberates me to make choices that would be just too risky if I was single. And his support goes beyond financial. The emotional support he provides during times of stress and challenges is far more than what my family is capable of providing to me on a regular basis.
At the end of the day, I’m left with this: If your relationship does not uplift you and support you, why are you in that relationship? And if you are not capable for providing that same support to your partner, why not?
Why you are actually reading about my husband
I blog about a lot of things.
I blog about work. I blog about my health. I blog about current events. I blog about my relationship with God. I blog about everything.
But really, this blog is about my marriage.
Even when I don’t write about it, it all comes back to my marriage.
Why?
My relationship with my husband is the single most important relationship in my life. It influences every decision I make. When I make a decision about what career path to follow, I am thinking about my husband. When I am seeking medical treatment, I think about how my treatment will affect my husband. When I look at CNN in the morning before work, I am thinking about, that’s right, my husband.
Brian is my priority.
And I don’t anticipate this changing. Even when we have kids, my husband will continue to be my highest priority. Why? Because we can always make more kids. I cannot recreate my husband.
Brian is the family I picked. I looked at him and decided that not only did I want to be in his tribe but I wanted to make our own little tribe with him. I wanted to create a life together.
Jobs will come and go. Friends will move on. Parents will (hopefully) die before I do. Politics will change. Current events will become history. Fads will fade and pop culture will be forgotten.
Brian will be the man I grow old next to. My wrinkly old hand will someday be patting my husband’s wrinkly old butt. And that’s the way I want it.
My commitment to Brian and Brian’s commitment to me is the most influencing factor in our lives. Everything will always come back to my marriage.
Why my husband’s low point is really a marriage high point
Over the weekend, I had the pleasure of seeing my husband in the bad-drunk category. It started off cute enough – he told me how beautiful and wonderful and smart and sexy I am and how much he loves me. Then he passed out. Then he woke up. Then he leaned over and puked all over me. Then he smashed his head on the wall and knocked himself out for about five minutes. Then he woke up, puked some more and sat in bed for a while.
In hindsight, I probably should have taken him right to the hospital to have his stomach pumped but I was concerned about the cost. At this point in our careers, we don’t have the income for hospital visits in non life or death situations. But in the five minutes where Brian was knocked out, I questioned whether or not I would be able to save his life if he began to choke on his own vomit. Thankfully, I never had to find out.
The point of this is not that my husband is a drunk – he’s not and when he tells me this was the first time he got sick from alcohol, I believe him. The point of this is that in marriage, you end up in a lot of places you never thought you would be.
I never thought I would spend twenty hours cleaning up vomit. But from two in the morning on Sunday until ten o’clock that night, cleaning it up was what I did. Brian probably never thought his wife would be coaching him through a shower and forcing him to drink water. But we did it. He also probably never thought that I would be waking him up at eight on a Sunday morning because I was mad at him for being drunk, but I did. Because if I had to suffer, he did too.
It is only during the unpleasant moments of marriage that we truly realize how much we love our mates and how much we actually are capable of doing. In college, I was notorious for what I called a “death fear of vomit”. I made girls in my sorority house who were sick (whether it be from booze or a stomach bug) go to the basement bathroom to throw up because the mere knowledge that vomit was happening near me was enough to push me over the edge. Yet somehow in the early hours on Sunday, I learned that I could survive. My urge to care for my husband was stronger than my own urge to throw up everywhere, although not by much (once a sympathy puker, always a sympathy puker).
Marriage is not always pleasant, although Disney would have you believe otherwise. Prince Charming does some dumb-ass things from time to time. The true test of the strength of a marriage is not whether or not the poor decisions happen but the way you cope with those decisions the next day.
Besides, it is only a matter of time until I do something dumb too.
PS - Taco Hell, I mean Bell and cheap Canadian whiskey are always a bad idea.
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.
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