Life, Expectancies

I’ve discovered some surprises about myself as my life and Sam’s begin to intertwine. I trust Sam absolutely, so in some respects, it’s as easy as it possibly could be. But I’ve realized how much of the last eleven years or so of my life have been devoted to learning to make myself happy through independence, and how consciously I have to figure out how to enact that independence in this new context.

I have deeply intimate and rich and challenging relationships with friends (a shout-out to Jules and PJ here!), but none of them require me to give up my autonomy really. In fact, they function to cultivate that autonomy further, helping me to shape my preferences and ideas about things. Certainly, Sam does many of the same things. But then, obviously, occasional compromises need to be reached, on issues that for the most part aren’t important enough to warrant large-scale summits. The big things are what’s easy because they’re what have connected us in the first place (morality, life goals, a shared sense of how to treat others), and the small things aren’t a big enough deal for either of us to get worked up about (where to eat lunch, what movie to see).

It’s a bunch of mid-range decisions that have cropped up that have shown me how accustomed I am to running my own life, and to knowing that I can do whatever I want to make myself happy. Yielding some of that may sound like the kind of depressing anti-feminist experience dramatized in “Story of an Hour,” but it's not like that—it’s just a choice to make a different kind of decisions, ones that acknowledge that some part of the way I'm growing right now is in the context of another person and the matrix of the relationship we are creating.

I know it sounds like what I'm saying is, "I can't believe that I can't be totally self-centered anymore." But it's not quite that--or at least, not only that. I guess what I'm saying is that a big part of the way I make decisions has to do with a sense of profound resonance with my own instincts, discernment, and feelings. That's an especially challenging process to integrate someone else's views into, both more and less so because Sam makes decisions very similarly. I guess we deserve each other. ;)