On Married Life

I have been asked 2 questions a lot lately... 1) How is married life? and 2) When are the babies coming?

Now on married life...

6 months into the nuptial arrangement (I know, SIX months already!!) I would say... we're doing ok. In fact I think we're doing better than ok.

We were told to expect the first-living-together-arguments, and though there were a few bickerings, there was nothing serious. I think the 6 years of going out prior to marriage helped spread them out a little (and the to-do white board helps too).

More time is now spent on house chores (time which I would rather spend shopping), but they have quickly become just part of the routine. I think we divide the tasks between us well, and I get to do the laundry and cooking which suits me better than the vacuuming and mopping.

The most significant adjustment for me was not so much living together with the husband, but it's more about NOT living together with the family. I spent a lot of my life coming home to a noisy and lively household and having meals around a table full of people. Now I come home to a house with me and the husband. Although initially difficult, like everything else, we quickly fall into a routine where we would visit the family a couple of days throughout the week and that made it ok. I now look forward to Saturday mornings where I go grocery shopping with Mom (and sometimes if there's time, some other type of shopping too).

And now, slowly, I have started to enjoy coming home in the evening to a quiet house. Where I can lash out my creativity in the kitchen while the husband exercises in his "gym". And then we both sit down to dinner and he compliments me on the food and I ask him about his day. We will then watch some criminal shows on TV (or his collection of Futurama DVDs) and if it's a good day I would get a bit of rub on the back. And when we get tired we go to sleep.

And I love it. I love the simplicity of it all.

Hot.

I am not using the word in an aesthetic sense. I mean, mercury rising hot. Sitting in a room with no wind hot. I want to sit in an air-conditioned room hot. I want to be back in winter Korea hot.

Well maybe not the latter. But definitely the former.

It was only a week ago this time that I was screaming "Cold!" in the midst of the -20 degree Korean winter, whilst scurrying around a Korean street looking for a warm Korean haven to sneak into. That seemed like a distant memory now. Which kind of vaporised once we stepped upon the soil of 37-degree Western Australia.

I miss that. It was the first trip that we have taken as a family in years. We used to travel together a lot when we were kids, and I have really fond memories of those times. But with jobs, university, boyfriends, girlfriends, fiances... we just have not had the luxury to plan family trips in a while. So when my parents and brother decided to go on a Korean tour and my sister happened to be visiting at the same time, I bought myself a ticket and looked forward to it all happening.

And I had so much fun. I saw parts of the country which I did not have the opportunity to see the last time, skiied for the first time, caught snow falling on my tongue, watched as snow pour from the sky and cover the landscape in shimmering white powder, slurped hot steaming odeng tang in cold freezing weather, ate cold freezing Haagen-daz in cold freezing weather, feast on samgyetang to my heart's content, ate slimy, slithering octopus, bought my first BB cream (and many other make-up products), attempted at making (and succeeded in eating) kimchee, shared numerous lame jokes and laughed at countless English signs (for example the Bakery / Deli sign that read as Bakery / Delhi).

But it was not without its challenges. For one, the weather was at times so cold that we could not stay outdoor for more than a stretch of 15 minutes which made it very inconvenient to do anything or get anywhere. And secondly, even after the second trip, I still cannot get used to all the pushing and shoving that we experienced in Seoul, with no courtesy words of "excuse me" or "sorry".

But the worst challenge was, I found (and this has nothing to do with the destination itself but which will sadly change the way we travel forever) is the fact that we are all grown up to be mature adults with our own ways of thinking, and therefore could not agree on a single thing even if our lives depended on it! Simple questions like "What would you like to do today?" or "What about this restaurant here?" were usually returned with not so simple responses which could ultimately result in us walking for an hour in the cold looking for a place which we were not sure exist.

The strange thing is, I should have seen it coming given that we have all changed so much in the last few years with each building our own lives. But no, in my simple mind, I thought it would all be like before when we were kids, and our parents would take us places, and we would follow and everything would work out fine. It was only the after the first couple of blunders (which left me feeling confused and frustrated) that I realised we were no longer the sweet and innocent adoslescents we used to be and are each on our now fiercely independent and stubborn adults.

Ahh the joy of growing up.

Don't get me wrong. I still enjoyed the trip and would not hesitate for 2 seconds to say yes to another family trip. However as we are now better equipped with the knowledge that we cannot agree on anything we can devise some foolproof family-trip strategy to mitigate against that. We can go on tours where we will be told what to do and where to go, or we can pick a destination which once we are there, do not require a great deal of decision-making e.g. some isolated island where the only thing you would have to decide is whether to have barbeque or raw fish for lunch.