I woke up this afternoon feeling so strange. It’s not my room, it’s not my bed, and nothing feels familiar. My family isn’t here, and suddenly there’s a man, my husband, sharing my personal space for the first time. I don’t even know how to explain it, but I feel like an impostor just walking around and doing things in this place.
My first reaction to this post was based on my own life, a Millennial who grew up in a first-world country, a country in which, even during childhood, there’s a strong emphasis on personal freedom and independence.
If there were an inner-jacket blurb on the novel of my life it would read something like: childhood bike riding out into the suburbs until sunset without a cell phone, driving everywhere on my own at age 16, moving away to college and meeting someone who I loved while living on the other side of the country, and ultimately moving across the country to start a career that I wanted and marry the girl of my dreams.
Above that blurb or below it would be a little American flag :p
Most of the comments here are all going to have experiences closer to mine than yours, in Saudi, as a woman.
Most of the comments here that echo fear and isolation are from people compelled to be on their own suddenly, abruptly, and without a plan. This sounds closer to your situation than those of us who, say, moved ourselves into college dormitories and brought our roommates home to meet our families on weekends so we could do laundry in clean washing machines and for a couple days trade our diets of instant ramen for fully-stocked refrigerators.
For us, waking up next to a strange man in a house where nothing is “ours” is completely and utterly foreign.
How that would feel is scary. How that would feel is permanent. How that would feel is like abduction.
I wonder if your husband feels the same.
Every married couple knows the feeling of keeping a secret from their spouse, and likewise the pressure release of finally telling them and having them not leave, or get mad, but look at you and say “That sucks,” and that they understand.
You’re getting a lot of advice about creating routines, putting up pictures, about making this unfamiliar space and unfamiliar time more like it’s yours.
My advice? Do this as a team. Tell your husband how you’re feeling. Go do something with your husband and take a photo. Put that photo on the wall. Don’t simply decorate your life with evidence of just how foreign all of this is to you.
It’ll be tough for a while but you’re smart enough to be bilingual and navigate the Fediverse, so I think you’ll be all right.