The Unwilling Homemaker Prologue

I have decided to start blogging about my personal struggles and experiences as a young, newly married wife (just over six months). I am a very stubborn person and this leads to many unnecessary arguments. Our lives are especially turbulent due to me adjusting to my first full time job and the fact that he works 7 days a week.

I started working full time as a research technician in the end of September and my husband will be graduating in May. He is a 6th year pharmacy student and currently works 7 days a week, full time. This leaves little time for us to spend together. We have different sleep schedules as well, him being a night owl, and myself more of a morning person. He usually comes home from work or rotations and sleeps until 6-8-ish and stays up until early in the morning. I on the other hand like to eat dinner around 6 and prefer to go to bed by 11:30.

Overall, we have very little time to spend together and the time we have ends up in arguing. I suppose most of it has to do with my stubbornness and how different we are from each other. Sometimes I fear that our marriage won’t last, but the only thing I can do is try to be a better wife and pray that seeing me change for his sake will win him over.

I am not much of a homemaker. I am not a ‘clean’ person. I am certainly not dirty, but I prefer a ‘lived in’ setting for my home, and he prefers more of a sterile household. I can certainly work on cooking more and having a broader repertoire of what I can make for meals. However, to me, each of these things, especially cleaning is a battle of wills. I feel like I shouldn’t have to do certain duties, and sometimes he will say that he is the husband and I am the wife and that I should do what I’m told. This of course bothers me to no end and I usually react angrily because I don’t want to listen to anyone else besides myself.

This is not how a marriage should work, however, and I will do my best to fix it. Though I must admit that it can be so appealing to just give up and not do anything. Oftentimes I do nothing and waste time because I do not feel like working hard. I definitely have a problem with lazy and idleness. I do not think that I am as bad as the younger generations of young adults who believe that they have the rights to get everything without any effort, but sometimes I get caught up believing that I don’t need to do anything and that things should improve.

That is not realistic and now I do truly understand that in order to get where you want to be you must work hard to achieve that. I have worked hard in school and college, but when it comes to relationships there is a huge hole. I have taken for granted that friendships are easy to keep and have learned the hard way that it IS hard work to maintain friendships. You cannot depend on the other person to set up time to hang out or spend time together. You must go out of your way to call and set up times, because they too may be just as bad or worse at maintaining friendships.

This goes the same for marriages. Marriage does not just WORK with no effort. Sure, if you are brand new and haven’t been together very long it may seem effortless at first due to the initial infatuation period. I have known my husband for over 6 years and although we do love each other very much, the drive to go out of the way to please him just does not hold the appeal that it used to.

I now understand that if I want to improve the marriage that I cannot sit on my behind and expect things to change for the better. I MUST get up and work hard, harder than I have ever worked to love and treat my husband the way he should be treated.

Please do not take this and believe that I am a pushover who puts her husband on a pedestal and thinks that he can do no wrong. We are both sinners and both say and do things that are rude, thoughtless, or downright hurtful and I do not condone that. This is merely to document my efforts as the Unwilling Homemaker in an attempt to win her husband over.