Happy Life with a Russian Wife

Posted By admin on January 27, 2010

We continue to publish the real pieces of correspondence with Russian women, who have managed to make their lives successful not withstanding the challenges brought by the period of adaptation to the new circumstances. Find below a letter belonging to a Russian woman who had married a foreigner and moved to the USA. In it, she shares her impressions and experience, and peculiar observations of getting used to the new conditions.

“Hello Alyona,

At last I’ve found some time to respond to your letter and questions.

You say “you cannot perceive the work as a personal matter” … Maybe not, but then it is just a pity to spend the third of one’s life on survival and earning a piece of bread, even if it is with jam and butter.

On the other hand, when you want to spend that one third of your life to its maximum, your boss would not always appreciate it, especially if s/he believes that only he or she can be right.

Sometimes we have to choose out of those two options. But I always admire people who have diplomatic abilities and are able to combine the first and the second parts without disturbing their bosses.

Unfortunately, I have no such talent. I am as straight as a die. But it gives me some advantages too.

In fact, last week we celebrated our first wedding anniversary: we invited our friends and laid the table in our newly repaired library. We lit the fireplace, which had not been used for about ten years, and candles…
It was amazingly festive and symbolic, the family hearth being alive once again! So, when my husband begins to resist to the changes that I propose saying, “What’s the rush?” I remind him that if I did not rush him, we would have still lived in chaos.

You cannot imagine how much garbage and how many obsolete things we had thrown out.

Lucky Americans, they have the space to store those bits and pieces . But now when we’ve got rid of them, I feel how the house is becoming more alive and how Ross is getting full of beans.

My plan for the next year is to gradually transform the top floor, because it looks poverty-struck now, in comparison with the ground floor. During the repairs, we have found new application for many unusual and original things from all over the world that Ross had collected for 20 years. Before it, they just gathered dust in the corners like orphans.

But why am I describing all this? You and your husband Andrei should come to visit us on your vacation to see it.

By the way, our families are just in the opposite situations: it’s me who needs immediate results, and I am ready to work on achieving them until I fall. Ross is a different type: he takes a lot of time to get ready, to reflect and to study and to research – until I fire up and just begin doing something.

Then he would get in a bate about it, because he had been hived off. But then, when he has to start moving, there follows an incredible burst of creativity and effective solutions on his part. So we have me as a strategist and ideologist at the first stage and the main workhorse at that stage too, then I serve as an electric battery transmitting energy. And he is the initiator, the creator and the God.

It’s very familiar to me, being under one blanket hogged by each of us (periodically I wake up chilled – different weight categories ). In fact, my moving to another country having left a whole life behind really creates a fundamentally different situation.

There’s nowhere to retreat. Both of us have to keep asking ourselves and each other what for we live together.

Of course, each of us wants to live a better life than we have lived before. But what does “better” imply, and what is the picture of this “better?” What can we take from each other to integrate into our lives and feel richer afterwards, and what would the other partner agree to share?

This is true for many things, both material and intangible. The initial picture that Ross had about us, for example, was like this: we sat together and read (each his or her own book), and communicated to the minimum and only on a lofty theme, while I had to keep him young and healthy.

My own picture was exactly the opposite: I imagined us being very active socially and professionally, and finding myself thanks to his contacts and resources…

Remembering a course on family therapy, you can imagine the barriers we have come across at first. I have described you a lot of them.

I think that the transformation of the house, which required the participation of both of us, has helped us with the integration. In any case, we had got more understanding and confidence in each other, because we were simply forced to discuss every step to make the house space supporting for both of us.

Ross has learnt to show and release his aggression (before, it resulted in his suppressed defense and headaches), and I have learnt not to be too emotional over it.

You ask whether the process our getting accustomed to each other is over. I do not know, I think everything is just beginning.

My relationship with the house is not simple too. I do not feel like a guest from the first arrival, but I do not feel a hostess as well. Rather, I would call this a partnership.

The house has hound out Ross’s previous wife, and I understand why: they had resonated with Ross in their depressions and were afraid to go beyond the “decency” as they understood it. The atmosphere was terribly dull and lifeless, because everything was too “right.”

I have it all “wrong,” and lively and fun, so it seems to me that the house supports me and even offers its own solutions. I alone would be unable to cope with the Scandinavian stubbornness of my husband.

As far as the cross-cultural barriers are concerned, it seems to me that when there is a real interest and confidence to the other side, they are not that high. In my little experience so far, I can say that personal qualities (and sometimes professional) play a much bigger role.

I do not have any cross-cultural barriers with the local Russians, but I have more understanding with the American friends and acquaintances. The Russian ladies here are often prone to complaining about their lives and men, and the Americans use each other’s abilities to make improvements in their lives.

Thanks to them I began to appreciate the qualities in myself that I had ignored before.

Bye, and give my best regards to everyone,
Inga”

Categories: Empowering Each Other, Family Matters, Home Sweet Home, Letters As They Are
Tags: a Russian-speaking wife, anger and creativity, barriers to understanding, expectations met and unmet, family therapy, getting rid of the garbage, International Couple, new discoveries, New Home, planning and implementation, roles in marriage