Year 1 - Maybe marriage isn't for me.

I am an animal lover and my favorite animal is the sloth. They're just so lazy and I love it. They have a naturally smiley face, they are super slow and chilled, they are not afraid of predators because they depend on their long pointy nails to push away any attacker and they hang upside down all day. Did you know sloths only climb down a tree once a week to use the bathroom. I mean seriously, who wouldn't want such a chilled life?

Due to my obsession with animals, my husband decided to take us to the Amazon for our honeymoon. We flew to Brazil 2 days after the wedding, went straight to the amazon, spent 1 week there exploring the rain forest, meeting the villagers and coming face-to-face with some wild beautiful animals, including a sloth!

After that we spent 4 days in Rio de Janeiro where we walked around and visits touristic spots like any good tourist. We then ended our beautiful trip with 4 days resting in a beautiful resort in Recife with trees, beach, animals and their amazing food, dancing and constant celebrations. Brazilians are some of the nicest people I've met.

As muslims and Arabs, getting intimate only began after the wedding. So you could imagine how this trip was the perfect trip to starting our lives together.

After an amazing honeymoon, might I also add super expensive, we flew back to Dubai, where we live and began our marriage together.

People constantly mentioned how the first year is either the best year then it goes downhill, or the worst year then it gets better.

Well mine was an extremely challenging year and it only got worse. But the difficulties I had in the first year were mostly from my side. I was finding marriage life so hard as I couldn't get my self to adjust to considering everything for 2 people instead of just my self. Cooking for 2, buying groceries for 2, cleaning for 2, and so on. Little things like picking up after him drove me insane, because why? Why isnt he treating 'ÓUR' home like it's his too. I also had to change my sleep time to match his, my meal timings to match his, the coldness of the AC i like, and many other things. It drove me insane because I wasn't used to that. and no I didn't notice that i was changing everything for him while he wasn't adjusting to me. To him his mother did everything for him, and now he expected his wife to do that too.

Then we got a dog. Bruno joined our family in our 4th month of marriage. Man do I love that dog! He's a fluffy chow chow with light brown double coated hair and just adorable.

During our engagement, I was building a relationship with his mother, who i found annoying but it didn't bother me. I still thought she was nice but just overly attached to him. During our first year of marriage she actually started offending me because it always felt like she was competing with me for his attention. For example there were times she would ask him to go over and spend the night at their home because she misses him or come over unannounced. Or come over and negatively comment about furniture in the house that was picked by me. I even remember a friend of mine advising me to leave my underwear and bra on the floor when she comes so she could take the hint to give us a heads up when she's coming over. I thought that was really funny. I didn't do it but i know it wouldn't have changed anything. lol.

Whenever I was with them she kept pulling him away from me and holding his arm as if she was trying to show me he was hers first. The problem I had was not her, it was when I told him he took it offensively and told me I was imagining things.

Another problem I had with her is that she always complained to him about anything I did and most of the time it was stupid things like "why didn't she rush to say Hi to me when i first walked in" or "when you guys where over why didn't she help me take out the tea tray after lunch?" and he would come to me later saying mom is unhappy with you because you didn't do this or because you did that.

I kept telling my self, it's just the first year, once i adapt to this new life everything will be fine.

But we had a lot of good times too. we travelled a lot, explored new places, explored each other, and were comfortable with each other in general. I loved our home, we put so much effort into making in homely and comfy and we had a huge 8 seater couch but it had a huge problem. Every time we sat to watch TV together we would sit on the 2 corners separately and so far away from each other. I complained but it didn't bother him. He just liked that corner and I liked this one. I told him 90% of the time he walks in the room and I am the one already in front of the TV so come sit next to me but he still said I like that side more.

Once again, I just gave my self time to adapt.

In time, I realized that every time I spoke to him about something I did not like, he did not validate my feelings and always made me feel like i was making a big deal out of nothing. So I told myself, maybe it's true and I should complain less.

Our social life was great at first but in time i kept hearing "Not in the mood to see these people, or go without me, or not today". eventually I started seeing my friends without him but that upset me because I wanted to do everything with him. But when I got back home from my outing alone, we always had a fight because he also wanted to do everything with me. Since I felt like it was coming out of love, I subconsciously found my self seeing my friends less and less to be with him. I was ok with it because I wanted to be with him too.

But due to my nature of being extremely social and love being around friends, I didn't notice how much it was effecting me. He did, so he started making sure we were always hanging out with friends.... his friends... I loved them so I was completely ok with it.

But due to his hidden unsocial nature, which was always seen (and also also said by him) that he is very social, he was slowly making us see our families less as well. He said it's very boring to hang out with them" and i tried to respect that by not seeing them as much. FYI, my parents lived in our same building and his lived 10 minutes away by car. I didn't mind not seeing his parents because of the way his mother made me feel but I was close to my family and didn't like the feeling. But my mind kept telling me it's ok, because at the end of the day you married the man you love and now your lives revolve around one another.

I didn't know how much i was bottling up because there was a lot of good too. I thought it was balanced and we were doing ok and even if we were not, we will power through together and become great! Afterall everyone referred to us the power couple!

For the many times in the first year I thought to myself "Maybe marriage isn't for me" "maybe I did a mistake" or "maybe i should reconsider now before we have kids", he managed to always help me get rid of these thoughts and see the good in us and in our relationship. He made me doubt us a lot and we fought a lot but he always came back comforting me and helping me through it in different ways. Sometimes the ways were very wrong, like telling me I'm being dramatic and i believed him but sometimes it was just by showing me love.

Year one ended and we celebrated like a happy couple and continued to travel and experience everything together. We were attached to each other and loved each other so much. By the end of the year i felt closer to him and less uptight about being married. I adapted to living with him and considering 2 people for everything and was starting to feel better about marrying him. I loved him so much, I couldn't imagine not being with him. I knew we still had some work to do and that was ok because it's natural. We will do it together.

Now what?