Questions

Questions Couples Should Ask (Or Wish They Had) Before Marrying is the "most emailed" article today at the New York Times. What to do if the answer is, "We both aren't sure right now"? Where's the guarantee that you both will come to the same conclusion about that question after many years of marriage? I'm continually amazed at couples who stay happily married for their entire lives, because they've obviously mastered the trick of growing up and changing together. Maybe some of it's luck, but what's the rest of the secret? People change, develop different interests and hobbies, and come to expect different things from their partner, so it's easy to see how a couple could grow apart. Maybe that list should be titled "Questions Couples Should Ask Continually Throughout Their Marriage."

1. Have we discussed our expectations for how the household will be maintained, and are we in agreement on who will manage the chores?
2. Do we have a clear idea of each other’s financial obligations and goals, and do our ideas about spending and saving mesh?
3. Have we discussed our expectations for how the household will be maintained, and are we in agreement on who will manage the chores?
4. Have we fully disclosed our health histories, both physical and mental?
5. Is my partner affectionate to the degree that I expect?
6. Can we comfortably and openly discuss our sexual needs, preferences and fears?
7. Will there be a television in the bedroom?
8. Do we truly listen to each other and fairly consider one another’s ideas and complaints?
9. Have we reached a clear understanding of each other’s spiritual beliefs and needs, and have we discussed when and how our children will be exposed to religious/moral education?
10. Do we like and respect each other’s friends?
11. Do we value and respect each other’s parents, and is either of us concerned about whether the parents will interfere with the relationship?
12. What does my family do that annoys you?
13. Are there some things that you and I are NOT prepared to give up in the marriage?
14. If one of us were to be offered a career opportunity in a location far from the other’s family, are we prepared to move?
15. Does each of us feel fully confident in the other’s commitment to the marriage and believe that the bond can survive whatever challenges we may face?

What's in a name?

I've been reading this string of comments about women changing or not changing their last name when they get married. I have several feminist tendencies, I think, but this falls under the category of Mostly Unimportant as far as I'm concerned.

Granted, I'm not married and not about to be married, so I haven't spent a whole lot of time thinking about it. I also don't yet have a strong professional identity to consider, and that would be a larger factor if I were getting married later in life. It also gets trickier when there are children to consider. Keeping my name would seem very natural if it were just the two of us, but I feel strongly that my imaginary children should all have the same last name. Whether that's mine or his doesn't really matter, but I don't think some children should have one name while the rest have another.

Several commenters brought up the fact that the spouse that's changing their name can feel like they're losing their identity. I think I would feel a little sad either moving my current last name to my middle name or giving it up altogether, but it's not like I would lose my connection to my immediate family or extended relatives. Sure, I wouldn't have the same name on the family tree, but I wouldn't feel any less a part of it. My name is how the rest of the world addresses me; it's not the way I know who I am.

Again, a caveat here is that I have a pretty generic last name, and I suppose I might feel different if I had a very unique name or something that was very representative of my background. And maybe if my imaginary husband had a very ethnic last name, I would feel a little like an imposter taking on a name that presumes I'm much different than my regular white American self.

I want my family to be a cohesive unit, and I don't want there to be any confusion if I need to be with my husband or children in the hospital and we don't share the same name. So if that means me taking his name, him taking my name, or choosing a new name altogether, great. But I don't want to hyphenate, and I don't want to keep my name and then be forced to carry around a copy of my marriage certificate all the time so that I can prove that I'm a part of my own family. So if that means I become Melanie Y instead of staying Melanie X, so be it.

It seems like several years ago more women were keeping their names when they got married, and now the percentage of women who do that is down. This seems to outrage many women, but I don't really understand the drama. The feminist cause has bigger fish to fry than getting women to keep their names.

Women be shopping

Yesterday my older sister, my mom, and I drove out to David's Bridal in Westland to get bridesmaids dresses for my cousin's wedding next month. Debbie choose the color azalea for our dresses but let each of us choose any style of dress in that color. Seems pretty flexible, right?

Wrong! Since the wedding is only a month away, the saleswoman told us that there wouldn't be enough time to order dresses, so we should both try to find something off the rack. The problem was that there's not much ON the rack in azalea (hot pink). So Katherine and I tried on a handful of dresses and vetoed everything because it was too big or too strapless (chests large enough to hold up such articles of clothing, unfortunately, do not run in our family). After we concluded that we'd have wear potato sacks to this wedding, the saleswoman reconsidered and thought that just maybe we'd have enough time to order dresses before September 16th. So we stuck with the styles we'd tried on that we liked but ordered them about 10 sizes smaller. So this is what I'll be wearing, as long as there's no ordering mixup. Then I'll have to pull out the pink potato sack.

Being in the store gave me a small glimpse of the stress and anxiety that can be caused by planning a wedding. The list of things that need to be written, bought, sent, arranged, and paid for seems endless, and the money is flying out of your hands faster than if you stacked up the dollar bills in front of an open window with a stiff breeze. Is there a point along the way where the process of creating the perfect day is more important than the fact that you're actually getting married? After watching a few friends go through this, it seemed like there was no way to plan a wedding that was both classy and inexpensive. So I began to think that maybe the best way really was to run off and elope - you eliminate the hassle of planning and can put the oodles of money that you or your parents don't really have toward buying a home or going on a nice honeymoon. After all, it's just one day. The marriage is what lasts forever.

I recently finished a book called A Walk Down the Aisle. It's about a couple who'd been living together for seven years before deciding to get married, and the author (the bride) talks about why she and her husband wanted to marry when it wouldn't have made any real change in their everyday lives. But although they already had a home together, they wanted to make the commitment to each other, in front of friends and family, to be together forever, not just while the relationship was easy or convenient. She also talked about how they struggled to decide which traditions to keep, which ones to toss, and how to create a wedding that felt honest and significant without being generic or cheesy.

So after reading the book, my cynical view began to soften a little. It's still just one day, but it's to celebrate a lifelong decision. And there are weddings I've been to that were classy and, I think, relatively inexpensive, so I guess there's still some hope that it can be done.

But I'd still rather spend the money on a trip than a dress.

Clarification

I should be clear that in the previous entry, my hangups come from the label and what other people will think, not the decision itself. I should also mention that this decision is by no means one-sided - we're both moving from different cities/jobs to be together.

The reason

As graduation looms on the horizon, I've gotten a few more questions about what I plan to do after getting my degree. There have been some subtle hints from a couple full-timers here about staying (which I don't want to do), and I feel I can get out of that relatively easily by explaining that I've spent over 5 years in Boston and am ready to move to a different city.

Of course, the next question that comes up is the our-group-in-Houston one: "Do you want to go back to Houston? Hopefully we'll be staffing up a lot down there over the next year." Well, that gets a little trickier to decline. I may very well be interested in a position with my current employer in Houston several years from now, so I don't want to burn any bridges, but I'm not interested in moving back to Houston right away. Not sure yet how to decline that one gracefully.

Which brings up another question that I'm not quite ready to answer: "Are you going back to JSC after graduation?" That ranks right up there with, "How did you like working at JSC? What was it like as a civil servant?" Again, not sure how to give an honest answer on that one that fits into 25 words or fewer.

I'm planning to move to Washington, D.C. after I graduate. Even if I didn't have personal reasons for moving, I love the city and I'd like a chance to work in the defense sector of the aerospace industry. If, however, I were only making the decision based on the job I wanted, I would be considering a handful of areas around the country, not just D.C.

But there are personal reasons involved. I'm moving there to be with someone that I've been away from for the past year. To me, there comes a point in any long distance relationship in which one or both of you have to move to make things work, and I really want this to work, so I'm going to move.

Unfortunately, there's still a small part of me that doesn't like how that sounds. When I was in high school, I knew plenty of girls (mostly) who went to specific colleges only to follow their boyfriends, and halfway through freshman year they were miserable because the school didn't suit them and the relationship had ended. Even though I know in my heart that this is different, I still feel like other people will judge the situation this way when I tell them about it.

Is this crazy? It's not like I'm moving to D.C. to become a 1950's housewife. And maybe everyone else that I talk to, especially at work, will understand my reasoning, and it's just me who views it as a jaded high schooler. I guess I just never thought I would move across the country for a guy, and it's taking me a little while to get used to that. However, I also never thought the best part of my life would be 1,800 miles away, so maybe I should just throw my high school brain out the window.

(Yes, I realize I'm breaking all the blogging topic rules - work, love life, etc. Too bad.)

Volunteering

A couple days ago, I volunteered for the first time at Planned Parenthood. There are plenty of ways to volunteer at the organization, but what I'm doing is pretty low-key: a handful of us show up on Wednesday nights for a couple of hours to do paperwork, data entry, make phone calls, or do other various administrative things. I was pretty excited about volunteering after going to the information session a couple weeks ago, but I was a little disappointed after leaving on Wednesday because we spent the whole evening alphabetizing returned mail so that doners' addresses could be updated in the database. To give you just an idea of how much returned mail, there were five of us sorting the mail, and it still took us about an hour and a half to do. And we only separated the mail into stacks of each letter of the alphabet, we didn't fully alphabetize them.

Anyway, I knew that the Wednesday night volunteering wasn't going to be very hands-on or a great way to become intimately involved with the organization, and that was fine because it was only a 2 hour/week commitment and I wasn't sure how much time and energy I wanted to devote to this or how much I would like it. But I sort of wish now that I had more time to volunteer doing something more interesting than sorting mail. I think after filling out the application and having to clarify in my own mind what it means to be pro-choice and why I wanted to volunteer at all, I was hoping to be able to put that into action. (In case you're curious, here's the short mission statement of the Planned Parenthood League of Massachusetts)

I've been asked by a few people why I want to volunteer at all at the PPLM. The most obvious reason is that I am pro-choice. I don't think abortion is something to be taken at all lightly, but I think every woman or couple has the right to decide for themselves whether they are healthy enough, financially prepared, and emotionally ready to be good parents. I'm well aware that plenty of unplanned pregnancies turn into happy, healthy babies and families, but I think every woman should be able to consider every possible option for herself and her partner.

The other main reason that I support Planned Parenthood is that I believe that everyone, regardless of age, gender, or income, should have access to information about sexual health and contraception. I know way too many college women who are sexually active and do not want to become pregnant, but they don't want to go on the pill because they don't want their parents to find out and they're still covered by their parents' health insurance. In addition, not everyone goes through a comprehensive sex education class in high school, and it's important that they have someplace to go to learn how to stay healthy, regardless of whether they're sexually active.

An interesting tidbit: the employees at Planned Parenthood refer to people on the other side of the abortion fence as "anti-choice" not "pro-life." I had never thought about how the term "pro-life" is subtly influencing, even if you had no idea what the two sides were debating. Everyone likes life, right?

Another interesting tidbit: the employees at Planned Parenthood are nearly all female, which is a nice complement to my nearly all-male environment at work. This means that men's restrooms don't exist there - instead, there are a couple of unisex bathrooms.

Domestic bliss

This is the kind of man that I hope every girl is lucky enough to marry.