Every Marriage is Unique

My thirty- sixth wedding anniversary is this month and for the first time I will spend the day away from my husband. He is still in Manitoba golfing, playing baseball and dealing with our real estate business while I am in Hong Kong beginning the teaching year at the International School where I teach English Composition and Journalism. The four years we have spent in Hong Kong have definitely impacted our marriage. Initially we needed to depend on each other a great deal since we were away from the support of life long friends and family members. We grew closer as we shared the living space in our small apartment. You get to know a person in a whole new way when your home is one quarter the size you were used to in the past and you need to negotiate how you will amicably co-exist in such a small space.  Traveling together to more than twenty different countries and experiencing and learning many new things as a couple has also enriched our marriage.

           Many of our trips have been made with other couples, friends from Manitoba, family members and friends we’ve made in Hong Kong. Our marriage has also been changed and re-evaluated as we lived and traveled in close quarters with so many different people.  You really get to know married couples in a whole new way when you travel with them.  

         Every couple handles money in a different way. In some marriages one partner holds the purse strings either tightly or loosely and in others every purchase is a joint decision. Some couples are extremely cautious about their travel budget while others throw ‘caution to the wind’ when it comes to spending money on a holiday. It has been educational to compare and contrast our own money management style as a couple with others we have observed.

           In some marriages one person is often the ‘worrier’ frequently thinking of what could go wrong or how things aren’t going exactly as planned. From what I have observed fortunately they are usually married to someone who looks on the bright side, jokes their paranoid partner out of their doldrums and is easy going and flexible. One person in a marriage is commonly the organizer or planner while the other tends to step back and let their partner take the lead. I have also noted that one spouse is usually more adventuresome than the other and needs to encourage and support their partner to take ‘chances’.

         I have learned that even couples I thought had ‘perfect’ marriages have times when they don’t get along and can irritate each other and disagree on things. It has been helpful and interesting to see the unique strategies couples have developed to handle their differences.

           Couples divide up the ‘work’ of marriage differently as well. We have frequently spent a week or more at a resort with a couple and have hosted many couples in our Hong Kong home. In some marriages it is the woman who does laundry, plans for meals, tidies up their room and packs the suitcases. There are husbands however who do these tasks instead. Sometimes it’s the woman who takes all the trip photos, in others it’s the man, and some couples have several cameras and both record the trip with their own set of pictures.

       Each marriage is distinctive and every couple has worked out a unique system of co-existence that seems to work for them. We already know that two couples from Manitoba will be visiting us in Hong Kong this fall. It will be interesting to see what new things we can learn about marriage from them.