Still Being You! Maintaining Individuality AFter Marriage

I’ve always believed in having balance between the marriage, your family, and friends. I feel like just because you get married, does not mean you ditch all your single friends and live in a bubble with your man. When Jeff and I first started off, he would criticize me for wanting to still catch up with friends on a consistent basis. He would accuse me of acting like im ‘single’. In his world, he felt like once you get married, you do everything together with your spouse, and if you do go out alone you should be home at a ‘decent’ hour. That decent hour was like 10pm. You already know that cause major problems in the relationship. Phrases like “Im not a child” and “I don’t need a curfew” were thrown out…a lot. We had two very different ideas of what married life should be.

My version: a partnership where we have our life together and lives outside of each other. He knows everything about what I’m doing and where I’m going. I continue to have that time with friends, family, or even coworkers without him because nurturing these other relationships is also important to me. Plus, I want to miss my man a little bit and being glued at the hip with him was not really my idea of a happy marriage.

His version: a partnership where we are each others best friends, spending as much of (if not all) our free time together- especially on the weekends. Having a wife who is available at his beck and call to make him feel cared for and fulfill his innermost needs and desires. (Ok, I may be exaggerating a little!)

But it would actually make me frustrated that he would want all my free time. It was cute at first but after a while I needed room to breathe. Everytime I made plans he would huff and puff and began asking me for my confirmed plans ahead of time. I began feeling as though I shouldn’t make plans with my friends because I didn’t want to disappoint him as he looked forward to our time together. Then questions began ruminating in my head like ” is this healthy?” “Is this what married life should be like?” “Is something wrong with me for not wanting to spend every waking moment with my husband?” Because let’s face it, social media has us feeling like every married couple is on cloud 9- 24/7! So something had to be wrong with me.

I finally decided that regardless of how other married couples behave, we have to set our own tone in our marriage for the both of us to be happy. Being perfectly honest with myself, I am a true extrovert and if I can’t be the social butterfly that I am I will be miserable. I realize that I am dealing with someone completely opposite from me- an introvert. Yikes! How did I not know this before???? The problem was that he wanted me to be more like him. And I wanted him so badly to understand my perspective. So we had to come up with a solution.

Date night was the key and became super important for us. Carving out that time every week was crucial. I let him pick the day and he chose Saturdays. I stopped making plans on Saturday nights as those were officially “bae time”. He works every other weekend so I would make weekend plans on the Sunday he is working as opposed to the weekend he is off. That helped alot too. And finally, if I did need to attend something on designated bae night, I would tell him in advance so we can reschedule our time and he isn’t left disappointed. All the issues we were having stopped after that! It took us a while to get to that point but it’s so much better now. We are no longer arguing about my nights out! And all he wanted was dedicated, consistent time with his wifey but didn’t really know how to say it.

Individuality could mean setting personal goals and working on attaining them. Having your own hobbies that you do without your partner. Or spending time on the relationships outside the marriage.

It’s OK to still want to be you in your marriage. Don’t feel like you have to give up so much of yourself for the mere fact that you are married now. It’s a partnership, not ownership. Talk about it and come up with a compromise where both of you can be happy. This is a lifelong journey and you have to find your own unique ways to make the marriage work and please each other. You both win in the end.