Being married to Aya
A.P. Atkinson
I never wanted to get married, in fact it would be more true to say I wanted never to get married. Ironically, I managed to get engaged three times before, not bad for someone with an apparent morbid fear of commitment.
I have a brother and he grew up with a similar attitude. Neither of us wanted children and we never went looking for a serious relationship.
I blame our parents for instilling a healthy fear of reproduction in us both. My father once told me to my face, when I was a very small child, “Son, having kids ruined my life.” That sort of passive/aggressive parenting didn’t instil my brother or me with a burning desire to pass on these life-lessons to the next generation.
My brother kind of got the whole thing right and wrong. He married a woman who already had two kids of her own, and therefore successfully avoided having any of his own. It was like he leapt head-first into all of the commitment with none of the dreadful months of panic as you slowly lead up to the bloody horror-show of having a baby. I didn’t think it would work out but he actually stuck with it, married her and became a great dad to her kids.
I had a little more trouble with the whole thing.
I was first engaged to a Turkish girl but that didn’t work out. We were happy at first but there were issues and lies and spiralling debts and, shockingly, none of it was my fault. It ended rather unpleasantly, leaving me feeling that I’d had a lucky escape.
Later I met a Thai girl in London. Eventually her visa expired and I thought I’d give Thailand a try. We got engaged on New Year’s Day and split up two days later. Her brother nearly shot himself in the head in a drunken incident while playing with a damaged firearm. It wouldn’t go off so he looked down the barrel to see what the problem was and pulled the trigger. The next day I discovered he’d tried to steal my motorcycle and her mother wanted tens of thousands of dollars to let me get engaged to her daughter. Our relationship couldn’t survive it.
When I finally gave up on Thailand I tried my luck up in Cambodia. I met a girl and we ended up engaged after she accidentally became pregnant. It didn’t work out and the whole ended in the worst possible way, but that’s a whole different story.
Finally, after a while, I met my wife. I first encountered her in a coffee shop and we ended up chatting over a brutally strong cup of American, a coffee so strong that it could rip off the top layer of skin from the leathery mouth of an apex-predator.
While I was spitting out suspiciously large chunks of skin, we discussed our lives, such as they were. She had a BA in English language, so her communication skills were very good, her mastery of my language being vastly superior to my mastery of hers, which barely extends to swearing and counting to all of the fingers on one hand. She was an accountant and was still training to be a different kind of accountant. I have to admit, that was the least interesting thing about her.
My only reservation was when she told me she had been a student at my school. That caused me to take a momentary pause but it turned out she’d graduated university a year before I had arrived in the country. So all was good.
We saw each other socially a few times, meeting for drinks and even seeing a movie together She was a social person, slightly shy but happy to speak with foreigners to improve her English skills.
Things didn’t seem to be going anywhere so we just stayed friends. I knew she was looking to get married and have a child and I was looking to stay well clear of marriage, and wasn’t at all sure about the child I already had.
I decided we were very different and we just met each other socially and kept things friendly. I helped her plan a trip to Vietnam since I had friends there and she came round for dinner a few times. Then, all of a sudden and for no reason I can actually recall now, we were suddenly in a relationship. Nobody was more surprised than me, she crept up and crept in and the next thing I knew, there was a woman in my house, eating all of my fruit and insisting I had to clean things.
Because of the social and cultural differences, she wasn’t technically allowed to share my bed unless we were married. Her ancestors would be offended if we did, although they seemed to be perfectly fine with it, we found.
She proposed the idea of getting married, which I was about as enthusiastic about as the idea of snapping off my own testicles with a spring-loaded rat-trap. In essence, it amounted to the same thing, I always imagined.
But, perhaps this was different because the idea wasn’t totally awful and I quickly came round to it.
As well as beign a great girlfriend, she was amazing with my son, James. He loved her from the first moment, and she treated him like her own. I could see she would make a great mum. In the end, I agreed to get engaged. It was a small ceremony that would keep the ghosts of her relatives happy and would only swallow half a day of my life. It seemed a small price to pay to keep her happy.
I had to meet her father, probably her least favourite person on the planet, and the reason she has many interesting emotional layers. We then had to go and ask the local policeman for permission. I went along with it for her sake but certainly didn’t take that seriously. It’s not, and should never be, anyone else’s choice but the people involved about who marries whom.
As it turned out, all he was interested in was that I wasn’t Chinese or Korean as so many of them marry naive local girls in land-buying scams.
Two evenings before the fateful day, she revealed over dinner that we weren’t actually getting engaged, we were actually going through with a wedding. It was a tiny bit of a surprise, to be sure, much like a baseball bat to the side of the skull might be when you’re expecting absolutely nothing to happen.
I told her she should have told me earlier, I would have gone along with it in any case. I was happy and I knew what I wanted.
Was I growing as a person?
In fact, I had been pretty romantic up to that point. She had wanted an engagement ring which caused us to explore half of the city looking for just the perfect one. We weren’t getting engaged (married) until March and she kept gazing at the drawer the ring was stored in. I suggested a workaround fix, us getting engaged ‘Western style’ on New Year’s Eve, at the stroke of midnight and then do it her style in March as planned.
I could tell she like the idea, she gazed at me with a silly smile on her face as I suggested it, the gears in her brain grinding noiselessly to a halt. She would have jumped at any chance she had to wear that ring.
The wedding itself couldn’t have been any more demeaning if I’d been required to turn up naked and be physically violated by a chicken. I was made to wear various different clothes, the first was a wrap-around piece of silk and the second was a cheap suit that didn’t come close to fitting me.
I went from looking like a ‘camp pirate’ to looking like ‘James Bond had really let himself go.’
It was all pretty painless and then I was the proud owner of a wife, something I had taken ridiculously huge steps to avoid up to that point.
Marriage was not what I had expected since it really wasn’t that bad. It mostly involved eating out a lot more, instead of drinking with my mates, having sex instead of drinking with my mates and staying home to watch movies and eat takeaways, instead of drinking with my mates.
I didn’t really have a lot of mates and rarely went out drinking with them anyway, so it wasn’t a huge shift in my personal reality.
On the down-side, she sort of fusses about things that I don’t care about. If I wear the same socks for a week, she complains. It’s the same with trousers and underwear. She used to bitch and moan, but I would just deliberately do it more to annoy her so she quickly learned that that doesn’t work.
We ended up coming up with an arrangement where she now just removes dirty clothes and replaces them with clean ones so I don’t notice.
Cooking has been a bit of a problem too. She can’t cook because she grew up supporting her family and simply never learned how. I like to cook but she’s a fussy eater so it’s difficult to get things quite right. She doesn’t like salt at all, which makes everything doubly annoying. She won’t eat it if there’s too much, or too little and when I ask how much to add she always says, ‘just add the right amount’.
And I’m stuck with this untill death.
She’s changed a lot during the year we’ve been married. At first she would never swear and was extremely straight-laced. Now she cries out, ‘cheeky little bastards’ as she chases mosquitoes around the bedroom and punches to my stomach are frequent and painful. She’s more laid back, and is now comfortable inside her own skin, as am I, and we’re literally happier with the whole marriage thing every day. I guess, when you get right down to it, that’s what love really is.
So, I have no regrets. I would have done it sooner if I’d known how painless it was going to be. As it turned out, I really had no problems with marriage, I just had problems with getting married to the wrong girl. Aya is intelligent, motivated, hard working and beautiful. She would be anyone’s ideal woman, I was just lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time, give or take the roof of my mouth.
We’ve managed a year so far with no real problems, at least no real problems in our relationship. I know that’s early days but I have no other metric to judge it by, except that of my parents, which seems a bit unfair on both of us.
Aya is a great girl, a really close to perfect partner and I know just how lucky I am to be with her. I support her when she needs my help and she does the same with me.
If I could change anything, I probably wouldn’t. Not many people are lucky enough to say that. Not her, certainly.
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