3rd Anniversary Observed (Great Expectations)

This weekend, Brock came for a visit (as I've mentioned before, we live two time zones apart). We celebrated our 3rd anniversary over homemade asparagus and pancetta harsh and mimosas. Brock has wonderful taste in jewelry and gave me a beautiful necklace set with 2,000 year old Roman glass. I've been eyeing up these beauties since 2004 and casually mentioned it last time I saw him. I'd like to get Brock a nice, personalized leather dopp kit, but Brock is pretty particular about his things so I'm waiting to see if it meets his size specifications.

I absolutely adore this man, but the dude is hard to be married to.  The marriage has heretofore been a complete disaster, but I stay because I'm crazy about him.

I'm beginning to see that the disaster comes from a mismatch of expectations and what can be. Brock and I each have expectation of what a wife should be, what a husband should be, and what a marriage should be. The mismatch is two-fold. We each have different expectations of these three things and these expectations are different from what these three things realistically could be. This is where the neurodiversity comes in -- we are both limited by the configuration of our brains. I wilt without attention. Brock shuts down without enough time to himself. As of this weekend, I've pretty much given any expectations I've had about myself as a wife, Brock as a husband, and our marriage in general the heave-ho. But now that we've stripped our marriage down to studs, I'm not sure how we're supposed to build it back. There's no blueprint.

Luckily, since Brock and I don't live together, we've got some time and space to think about this.

I've been asking myself a lot, "Why did I get married?"

I finally was able to answer that last night. Because I don't want to do everything alone. I want to share my life deeply with another person. Intimacy. Connection.

But, ironically, of 300 men I could have married, I picked one particularly intimacy-disabled. C'est la vie!

The action item is to ponder what we expect of each other and of this marriage. I'll continue to share as we figure things out. This blog is a counter-narrative of what a marriage can be.

Further reading: Giving Through Relationships