On being married.

A lot has happened since the last time I was able to commit to myself to sit down, open my laptop, and jolt something down in this dusty, neglected site.

(To be fair I did write in other medium (hence not mentally burdened by the “write more” goal of 2017 I imposed upon myself) which you can find here. That bit is actually quite cool — I convinced myself to participate in a 15-days writing competition about energy, my field of work where I am passionate about, and apparently got selected as a finalist! Two of the articles I cross-posted on Kompasiana also got featured in their homepage, Twitter, and Facebook which made me excited and nervous at the same time, as these babies got viewed by thousands pairs of eyes. Anyhow, that’s a side story.)

Early last year I got engaged — and in the process of convincing myself that this isn’t a decision I would regret, I wrote down my thoughts hoping that those words would serve as a reminder should I start to falter and freak out (it did help, by the way).

To cut the story short (and no, I won’t delve into the vendor-hunting bits of it), we got married on the eleventh of November last year and as of writing we’ve been married for half a year (shy of one day!).

This is the clichéd part of the blog post where I say “time flies”.

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If you ask me, then, how does it feel being married?

To be perfectly frank with you, it feels nice. It is indeed a very anticlimatic and boring choice of word, but it does feel nice.

I used to freak out at the thought of being committed to someone “for the rest of my life” (paraphrasing my engagement post), but many of these days when I see Andhika doing house chores or simply sitting there with his laptop open, I feel grateful that he’d be there for the rest of my life. (A-year-ago-me would feel icky typing that, but well as I said, you can’t logic your way out on this subject.)

It feels nice that someone understands that the number one thing you hate most is doing laundry, and that he’d willingly do it for you. Likewise, I have to understand that he has… different anatomy leading to sleep apnea and rendering you to wake up due to his loud snores.

It feels nice that you can discuss on which Hyrule shrine you should go to next, and hours later in the middle of the night discuss your Individual Development Plan for work and plan your careers together. Sharing notes and lessons learned from our own mentoring sessions are quite productive, too!

And as there won’t be rainbows without rains, there were, of course, down days — those that are more than petty fights over failed dishes and small daily annoyance. I think it’s inevitable — after all you are putting two people with different personalities together in an extended period of time. I still stand by my opinion from years back that these fights will only make you stronger.

We spent more than half of our married months so far being physically apart from each other. I got an assignment in Singapore (another big life update from the past year!) and have been working here since January. This role also requires me to travel quite a bit. Likewise, Andhika’s new job (in which he moved job partially to find a workable arrangement to join me in Singapore!) requires him to travel every now and then, too. This, on top of the first few months of the year where he was still based in Jakarta ends up in us meeting only on few weekends and not more. Some people frowned at this thought of me working abroad and us living separately — certainly not ideal for a newlywed, they thought. However, Andhika and I had agreed before getting married that the marriage should not restrict us in our career and that we’ll find a way to work it out. And after all, there isn’t one model ideal type of marriage and more often than not, overthinking about what others expect you to do don’t get you very far.

More than one person warned me that being married will limit and prohibit you — from reaching your goals, from taking daring decisions, from hanging out with your friends, … and the list goes on.

I would beg to differ. If any, I feel like it expands us. And in a crazier way still, I feel like it grounds us, giving us a firm standing — and in turn propelling you to roam, fly higher. It gives you assurance that there’ll always be something, someone there to return to and catch you should you fall. It strengthens and heals, at once.

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