Hillary writes at Midwestern Berliners. She’s living in the Midwest, is the mom of two girls, and the wife of one Andy. She’s working on her PhD dissertation, and the blog name comes from some time that she and her family lived in Berlin while she was doing doctoral research. She was in the Indiana cast of Listen To Your Mother this year, and she wrote and read this essay for the show. I already know she’s awesome, but in case you don’t yet, here are 15 reasons why.

Thank you for being here, Hillary!

I didn’t plan on getting married.  My parents are on their 3^rd and 4^th marriage respectively, and seeing that many failed marriages made me pretty much reject the entire institution for a very long time.  Then I met Andy.  He came from a wonderful family where his parents married right out of high school and still actually loved each other.  He was handsome and a dynamite kisser, so what could I do but say yes when he asked me to marry him a mere seven months after we started dating.  It felt right.  I felt like I was home when I was with him.

How does a girl who never wanted to get married have such great expectations for what married life should be like?  This is the question I spent the first year of our marriage asking myself.  I somehow had this picture in my mind of exactly how happily married people lived their life together.  There were two problems with that picture.  Firstly, it was a completely inaccurate picture of actual married life.  Secondly, I had no idea how to live the life of half of a matched set.  I had a complete disconnect between my hard-won fiercely independent single self and the happily married and somewhat dependent self that I became when we signed those papers.

The biggest problem with me personally rectifying the conflicting ideal with the daily reality of married life was that as I struggled to bring them together, I didn’t know how to communicate any of this to my new husband.  As we wrestled with the big questions that inevitably come up the first year of marriage, I didn’t know how to fight fair.  In my mind, arguments had to be fights, and winning was important.  I was fighting the unrealistic ideals in my head and my wonderfully supportive husband in our apartment.  Any fight had the potential to be the last one, and I constantly worried that Andy was going to leave me.

I got depressed.  It was only natural.  For me personally, I find that I get extremely depressed when I have some sort of ideal that my life has no possibility of matching.  I sunk so very low that I couldn’t get out of bed most days.  This wasn’t the first time, and I didn’t want to ask for the help I desperately needed again.  I was supposed to be happy.  Weren’t we supposed to be humping like rabbits, blissfully eating perfectly cooked meals while talking about our days, and cuddling on the couch watching romantic comedies?  Andy finally persuaded me to go to Student Health Services and talk to someone.  I got medication, again, and I felt even more defeated as I swallowed them every morning in a newlywed slump that I couldn’t have predicted.

But this amazing thing happened.  As the medication worked to restore my Serotonin to a more acceptable level, we worked together to talk out our dreams and ideals.  We created a new common picture of how we wanted our life to be, and it was so much more realistic than the one in my head.  We started solving some of the problems I had been putting off for too long, and our new vision started to take shape.  I got better.  We made plans and grew closer together than I could have ever imagined.  That first year was so unbelievably hard, mostly because of my great expectations.  It is amazing the transformation that is possible when two strong intelligent people come together to form parts of a whole.  Andy’s patience and the great example of his parents saved our marriage from my great expectations, and we haven’t looked back since.

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