Happy Life with a Russian Wife

Posted By Liubov on August 6, 2010

“You are so beautiful and happy, and you can engage yourself in a creative work and self-asserting activities. And my place is in the kitchen and near the washing machine loading, extracting and hanging out the laundry. Oh, I forgot to mention vacuum cleaning. Again, I am losing the skill of typing in Russian, and there is nothing interesting that I could share with you in this letter…” Natalia, Connecticut …

Imagine that you are going to marry a bright, intelligent, decent and sensitive man with a great sense of humor, who, without a doubt, loves you. And then, when you arrive to his country, you meet just the opposite: a dark and closed person, who resists the slightest attempt of your intrusion into his life. In addition, you have neither driver’s license nor money (that is, you are absolutely dependent on him regarding the transportation and inhabitancy), you have no connections, your knowledge of the foreign language is pretty poor and you have no idea of what you could do to succeed in the new environment. This was my starting point of living here.

The majority of Russian wives find themselves in a similar situation when they move to the U.S. Not because the American men are bad, but because they are accustomed to living like that. The American husbands are confused: on the one hand, they want the independent Russian women to love them and stay with them, on the other – how dare they violate their boundaries!

Imagine how I washed my face with tears almost every day and how I regained inch after inch of my personal space in the house, for I thought I came to live a long and happy life with my beloved husband! What could I do?

I had a variety of choices:

1. to return to Russia and consider our love invalid, because “American men are jerks” (which is a common opinion among Russian wives)
2. to return to Russia thinking that there was something wrong with me and that my life is over
3. to stay here and put up with the role of a shadow
4. to stay here and become a bitch making my husband dance after my pipe (which, in fact, would have been pretty easy, because we had had a long conversation about the marriage contract, but had never signed it, and according to the law, in case of divorce the husband leaves half of his property to his wife + alimony)
5. to stay here and organize my life not giving a damn for my husband.

But I felt uncomfortable in all those “clothes.” I left my children and grandchildren in Russia not to fight for life here. So I chose to organize my living with the help of my husband showing him his own internal and external resources at the same time. All my creativity and passion focused in this direction. Everything has changed greatly, and I see that it is a rewarding task and, above all, it makes me grow and develop.

My God, I invent so many things! I make fantastic combinations of sheets and pillowcases to brighten us up. Every morning, I prepare new fruit cocktails and ask him to guess what ingredients I have mixed. I write slogans and ideas for redesigning our house. I involve him in our joint reading (to improve my English, and at the same time we have the opportunity to talk about some important things). I take on so, ask questions, utter long monologues, share my fears and ideas of how his behavior might cause them and how it looks from my perspective (he just had not thought of those things until he realized that he had barred oxygen to himself, and then complained that life was unfair). I write letters to him with the explanation of my position…

To deal with the money-related fears and find out our actual needs and standard of living, I began to keep accounts. My husband was very pleased that everything had got clear, and it woke up the excitement of economy in him – exactly according to the parable, “Can you make a hat out of this skin?” – “Yes, I can.” – “What about ten hats?” – “I can make ten as well.” It turned out that I could do everything (and it was fun), including having my share of the economy and managing my money independently. However, this is only the first step in initiating good relationships with money and dealing with fears in this regard. I have no doubt that the following steps will be even more difficult, because it is a basic fear, which is extremely difficult to change even if you know exactly that freedom and light are to follow.

Our next victory was the planning of things. My husband is used to keep everything in mind and gets very tired of this. On the other hand, it is very convenient – being free from the responsibility for doing nothing when there are so many chores, all of them requiring his exceptional commitment. My first attempts to make him record everything that needed to be done and prioritize it ran into his demonstrative ignoring – he just sat in an arm-chair (it was good that by that time we had redesigned a cozy room for meditation – again, through his wild resistance) and read all day without any pleasure, because he felt guilty. Of course, we talked about it. Now, on Friday nights he offers planning himself (surely not always, but this is definitely a progress). And, of course, it causes a range of other complaints on his behalf, for example, that changes happen too fast and he has no time to adapt, etc. Now I came up with the slogan, “Yes, changes are fast but not faster than life itself.” And am going to ask him a couple questions about it. For instance, “If you are planning your life, does that mean that you are in control of it, or you are under its control?”

The meaning of all this is not to prove that someone is good and someone is bad. The idea is that when it is written and scheduled, you can re-focus your attention, “unwind” the mixed-up inner energies and accept the responsibility for your life. There is no way you could blame someone else in case of a failure, because it is you who has made the decision. With the accumulation of information, it is cool to analyze our own approaches to life based on this material.

I can already be grateful to him and life that I have learned to disconnect myself (unfortunately, not always) from the catastrophic thinking and unravel things hidden behind it for me and for my loved ones. It turned out to be important not only for the two of us but for the whole family of his, which have the same type of thinking. Yesterday we discussed it with his daughter, who invited me to lunch, and I appreciate her trust very much indeed.

What happens as a result? My birthday has lasted for a week this year: as a present, he gave me three wonderful rose shrubs chosen by me, planted them himself and is taking care of them now. This definitely implies my artful design. But I shall tell you about it some other time. The main thing is that both of us are happy.

As you see, the thing is not in the circumstances offered to you by life, but in how and for what purpose you use those circumstances. You always choose yourself what to do and how to feel, and if life has offered you an oven and a washing machine this time, you are capable of turning it into a fountain of creativity that will make others envy you!

Always yours,

Liubov

Categories: Empowering Each Other, Family Matters, Home Sweet Home, Letters As They Are, Life Without Limits
Tags: how to improve relationships with an American husband, Russian women abroad