Finding your Germany: Navigating the Early Years of Marriage
By: Mary Strecker
The simplicity of young love is striking, and sweet, but sometimes nauseating. And yet, we still love love, don’t we? Many of us are either hopeless romantics or total cynics. It’s rare to find something in-between, although perfectly normal, I assure you. Those of us prone to extremes, however, often vilify the external world as the primary threat to love. Shakespeare and Austen loved to tease out this narrative. This dichotomy is often felt when we marry young like I did. The chasm between the inner experience of love and the outside world seems vast: you’ve found someone completely like-minded, and the world feels simple between the two of you, making anything less than a blissful existence seem unfathomable. It never occurred to me that many of our own opinions aren’t really our own, but are rooted in our familial histories, reaching back for generations. The shifting of loyalties and instincts from family to partner can be really tricky, regardless of the quality of your relationship with those who raised you.
We got married one week after my college graduation. Soon after, we had our first son, and then another, all while my husband was getting a master’s degree. It would be an understatement to say that during this period I floundered as I tried to gain my footing, unwilling to admit to myself that being a wife and a mother weren’t coming naturally to me. I existed in a fog of postpartum depression and loneliness, convinced I was fine.
After four years of marriage, we made plans to move to Germany for a year for my husband to continue his studies, and I felt a spark of life return (I graduated from Hillsdale with a German major). While he studied German in Vermont for the summer, the boys and I lived in the apartment in my parent’s barn. My mom still fondly remembers the sight of the three of us walking across the driveway in our pajamas to come have breakfast each morning.
When it was time to move, my in-laws flew to Germany before us, got the keys to our apartment at the Hochschule, and did some cursory exploration. They met us at the airport when we arrived just to greet us and ease the stress of our travels.
We have great parents. Finding your footing as a couple and shifting focus to your partner is not about rejecting the loyalty and love you hold for your family. You might ask, is shifting loyalties really even something I need to think about? What I discovered is that the process of becoming one in marriage is something that comes only with a willingness to learn many new things. Both husband and wife carry a lifetime of stories, relationships, experiences, and habits of speaking and being spoken to. These shape us and create a million expectations and assumptions that we’ve never even voiced to ourselves, and these are the real threats to love; not the naysaying or opinionated relatives.
When we moved to Germany, something occurred in our marriage like the Clean Slate and Lightning Bolt strategies for forming new habits, as prescribed by Gretchen Rubin. Suddenly we had to learn how to do absolutely everything in a new way. Even taking out the trash followed a complex rubric, and the Hausmeister would absolutely know if you were the one doing it wrong. I’m still grateful my mother-in-law knitted our one-year-old not one but two blankies, as one soon succumbed to a user error washing machine fiasco. Communication seemed to get even worse between us. For all these reasons and more, the first several months felt harder than ever. We were poor and parenting was hard. Dark thoughts entered my mind more than once—I still wasn’t better, and I was now unhappy with our marriage.
There was one small thing I can point to that I think planted a seed of hope. My sister came to visit at New Year’s, and she shared with me that one of her coworkers told her the first 5 years of marriage are the hardest. Hearing this truth, I think, was the permission I needed to be struggling. I needed to release myself from the burden of sustaining lovestruck bliss. It was okay that our unity wasn’t an easy or effortless thing.
As the new year dawned, we started to rely on each other more and realized that a lot of the difficulty we were experiencing was due to a lack of shared vision for our family. We began to cherish our life in Germany and our relationship got better and better on pace with our language skills. Becoming more fluent in German was one of our shared goals, and our three- and one-year-olds excelled even more than we did. Date nights looked like late-night candy runs to REWE enjoyed during an episode of the German Seinfeld-like show, Pastewka. My thirst for beauty was insatiable. I began walking for hours every day, running errands, exploring, getting a cup of coffee, and doing Kindy drop-offs and pick-ups. I would forage in the neighborhood for seasonal blooms (and learned that my dream job is to be a German postal worker on a bicycle, but I digress). I was returning to my normal self, and as a couple, we were finding ways to fill the cracks in our relationship: to have fun again and recognize where our dreams intersect.
I have said many times that Germany saved us. It was our life in Germany that clued me into the mystery of two becoming one. It’s not that the two lose their individuality, nor the particular identity that arises from the family that raised him/her. Rather a third element is built into the framework that’s already there. It takes a lot of grit and imagination to build something new out of two old things, to remodel if you will. The rudimentary structure of the first “I do” becomes fleshed-out, cozy—home. It’s okay to tear down walls and make new ones. It’s okay to traverse the scary places together; it’s worth doing whatever it takes to find your Germany.
