Skip to main content

Mismatched Pace

Marriage more than anything else is about opposite personality types being drawn together. DB and I are unlike each other in very significant ways.What had seemed entirely about a great balance of strengths and weaknesses at first is turning out to be an adjustment challenge. I, for instance, thrive on pursuing my goals with zeal and determination. If there is a task at hand, I refuse it give it less than my fullest and best. What is more, I don't wait - I get to work immediately.

DB is slower, far more deliberate and likes to mull things over - for a very long time. Once he is good and ready he can act very fast. I am a sprinter and he is a marathon runner. Very different skills, strengths, strategies and end games even. So here we are with me sprinting and waiting for him to catch up, growing tired that the finish line is so far away. DB on the contrary is completely comfortable with his pace because he is not in the business of sprinting at all. Every time I have to break my stride and pause, I grow frustrated with him for being so slow. He does not understand how I could reasonably expect for him to go at my pace and still travel the distance.

Maybe in a few years we will both adjust our pace to reach somewhere between a sprint and a marathon. A pace and destination that will give us both what we need.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t

Cheese Making

I never fail to remind J that there is a time and place for everything. It is possibly the line she will remember me by when I am dead and gone given how frequently she hears it. Instead of having her breakfast she will break into a song and dance number from High School Musical well past eight on Monday morning. She will insist that I watch and applaud the performance instead of screaming at her to finish her milk and cereal. Her sense of occasion is seriously lacking but then so is mine. Consider for example, a person walks into the grocery store with the express purpose of buying detergent because they are fresh out of it and laundry is only half way done. However instead of heading straight for detergent, they wander over to the natural foods aisle and go berserk upon finding goat milk on sale for a dollar a gallon. They at once proceed to stock pile so they can turn it to huge quantities home-made feta cheese. That person would be me. It would not concern me in the least that I ha

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques