Since returning from honeymoon I’ve suffered a serious case of writers block. Now that we’re all settled into our new home I decided it’s time to break the block. So in a creative attempt to get me back to writing I opened myself up to being questioned. The response was a little overwhelming, especially the number of questions sent to me in private, so in an attempt to answer everything I will be doing this in two posts.

Here are the questions (with their answers) that were posed to me regarding myself:

1.  What is my career? I am a qualified makeup artist
2. How many siblings do you have?  I have three younger sisters and now I have an older sister and younger brother (my husband’s siblings)
3. Am I a pet lover?  Yes I am. Much to the horror of my mother, I absolutely love animals especially cats. 
4. Do you have any pets? Growing up I was quite sickly and was not able to have many but now we have between two to five cats in the yard at any given time of the day.
   
5. How did you meet your husband?  Ours is a rather funny story. There was a Whatsapp group of people including my husband and someone added me to the group by mistake. It was a total case of mistaken identity. Somehow I made friends in the group and one of my closest friends eventually turned into the man I am now happily married to.

Now to the more interesting questions. These questions come from girls and people who have heard all the marriage horror stories out there and could not stop themselves from finally asking “what is it really like?” and others are simply just questions we’ve all wondered about but never really had the guts to ask anyone in person.

1. How do you know when it’s right to accept a proposal? I don’t really know how to answer this without feeling completely and ridiculously cliché. So all I am going to say is be honest with yourself. Trust your first instinct. Don’t let idle gossip or far-fetched stories influence your decisions. If you’re truly unsure turn to whoever you worship and ask for help. Listen to the concerns of your parents sometimes they see more than we do but at the end of the day trust yourself.
2. What has changed and what has not? hmm, this one is hard. I’d say things that have changed include waking up later than I used to and sitting with a family after supper to watch tv or just relax. City life meant that everyone was always on the move and after eating supper together we all went off to do work or homework or just have a moment of silence alone and it’s completely different here.  However some things will never change and I still eat leftovers for breakfast sometimes (especially chicken curry or pasta, much to my husband complete despair) and I still avoid exercise which results in my husband dragging me to workouts. 
3. Do people suddenly treat you differently now that you are married? I married young ( I’m only 21 and look about 12) so I get a lot of funny looks when people see the ring on my finger and even funnier looks when my husband and I cuddle up or walk together. Other than that, life is pretty normal although people do assume that you are one of the more responsible people in situations involving kids or teenagers.
4. How do you suddenly learn to adult?  You don’t. Honestly both of us are winging our way through it. You decide together to be a team and you take life as it comes. Yes, there are tons of really hard “adulty” decisions to make. so we sit down (with a bowl of 2 minute noodles and some pez sweets between us) and we talk and talk and talk until we agree on a solution…. Sometimes we even bust out our colour pencils and draw mind maps. Just kidding but now that I think about it, it’s not such a bad idea.
5. Is it all rainbows and sunshine? When your eyes open in the morning and he’s already grinning at you because your hair looks like a nest and there is drool  on your face but he loves you any way then yes it’s rainbows and sunshine. But there are times when one of you will be angry or sad or just plain blue… So no it is not always rainbows and sunshine but I can assure you that the good moments out weigh the bad ones.
6. What do you do if you guys fight or one of you starts crying? I’m one of those annoying people who will piss you off and then follow you around like a puppy till you forgive me and attack me with kisses (I literally make puppy faces at him till he melts). But to be honest we have an open relationship. If something is bugging one of us we talk about it. If one of us burst into tears the other is there to hold it together. Once again I’m going to say this, you’re a team. There’s no reason to hide your tears.
7. What was the biggest difference for you about living with a husband compared to living in your parents home? Easy. It’s having a guy walk into the bathroom while I was washing my face or brushing my teeth instead of my sister. It’s walking out of the bathroom in a towel and learning to fight the urge to run back in and cover yourself with ten more because there’s a guy lazing in your room now and all your life you’ve been taught that a guy in your bedroom is definitely taboo!
8. How do you move past doing weird or embarrassing things in front of each other like farting? This question made me giggle way too hard. I could almost hear the last part being whispered like a dirty secret. We never really made a big deal out of any of these. He’s my best friend so we never really went through the awkward parts and we just laugh at each other most of the time.
9. What did you wish someone told you before getting married? Don’t stress the small stuff. Everyone you meet in his family is feeling just as awkward as you are about meeting someone new. You aren’t replacing your parents by taking his parents as your own, you’re simply adding two more people to love and to care for. Oh, and that it’s perfectly normal to let someone spoil you sometimes without feeling selfish.
10. Was it hard to adjust? For me, not really. His family is wonderful and super welcoming so they made my transition from city girl to country girl pretty easy. I have my own space and I am free to do anything I desire making my transition much easier, ( I can be weird and no one will judge me).
11. Do you miss home or has the place you now live become home?  From the beginning my parents always told me to make a home with my husband. So this is my new home however I do sometimes miss my parent’s home.
12. Did getting married make you re-evaluate certain friendships or friends? When we got married there were certain friends who were too nosy or interfering in our relationship so we took steps to distance ourselves from these types of friends. There were also friends that our spouse did not gel with or found a little too friendly and to avoid complications or any funny stories surfacing we chose to focus on ourselves and our relationship thus removing certain “toxic” friends from our lives became a must have. For me, personally, friends who were only around if they needed or wanted something  had no space in my life as well as friends who required constant attention which I could not give them.

To conclude this section I’ll end with the quote from Robert Louis Stevenson who says, “Marriage is like life – it’s a field of battle, not a bed of roses.” It takes work from both partners to come out of every day happy but when you throw yourself on the bed with a happy little sigh before your eyes close and your lips stretch into a smile, you realize it was worth the fight.

Hopefully, these answers are satisfactory for the curious minds who sent them to me. I thoroughly enjoyed this experience and after answering these questions I am considering making the Q&A posts a series. Perhaps once a week?

Feeling good to be back,

Brokebella

Email all new questions  or suggestions to brokebellablog@gmail.com or through one of the social media pages linked above.