The first thing that came to my mind was the house we bought on an impulse. One day we drove past a sign for an open house and we pulled in. We had not seriously discussed buying a house at all before that moment. After going through the open house that weekend, we put an offer in Monday morning. I don't even recall looking at any other houses. It turned out to be the worst financial decision we made together by a long shot.
As I sit here this evening reflecting, I'm stuck on why I would have gone along with that impulse. I have been an over-planner, over-researcher, over-thinker my entire life. And we didn't truly have money to throw away at that time. This was in the first couple years of our marriage. We would have barely been done paying off our wedding. I had a measly teacher's salary. I'm not saying we bought over our means - it was a very modestly priced condo. But such a large decision like that should have received more thought.
Over the years, I felt like I had to learn to navigate when to just go with his impulses and when to try and slow him down. Whenever I tried to slow him down, it created a lot of tension. I wonder if in his mind, I became the problem in those moments. I think it put me in a mother-type role with him which probably fed into his toddler-like push back on any opinion I had.
It had to have done a number on my nervous system. I don't think I'm built for that level of impulsivity. Add to that the fact that we never actually resolved any conflicts. So we just kept jumping from one thing to the next without ever resolving what happened in the previous actions. No wonder my body was trying to tell me my nervous system was a mess.
I studied in Spain for a semester in college. I was intent on making the most of my time abroad and booked trips all over Europe every long weekend, school break, and even some short weekends. I was making use of every second with trains that would come in at 7:00 a.m. with no time to spare to get to my first class of the day. And although every trip didn't always go smoothly (thinking about the wrong date on the overnight train from Paris), every trip was meticulously planned, except two. And when I think about those two trips, I remember more clearly the anxiety than I do the specifics of the trips.
The first was a solo trip to Barcelona. I bought train tickets first and then couldn't find anywhere to stay until the very last minute so ended up in a hostel I wasn't comfortable with. The second was a trip with two friends to Portugal. We bought one way bus tickets to the first city with plans to figure out all the rest (hotel, transportation to the next city, transportation home, etc.) when we got there. I don't regret either experience, I learned a lot about myself in both cases. But it did confirm my personal need for a bit more planning and research before jumping into something.
So I laugh now as I try to align that knowledge of myself with the fact that I married a man with poor impulse control and I gave into his impulses so often. I suppose the second part goes back to the fact that no one wants to have to be their spouse's mother and have to be the one to rein in their impulses. I married thinking I would get a partner to make rational decisions with, not chase after his every whim.
But that still leaves the question as to why I would marry a man with such poor impulse control in the first place. And I can't say I didn't know. I have journal entries from that first year we were dating, before we were engaged or had even moved in together. I talked him out of replacing his car.
A mechanic had messed something up on his car and he didn't even want to give the mechanic a chance to fix it. He was ready to just trade it in for something else. This was after we had signed a lease to share an apartment the next school year. I saw any money (of what little he had) that he threw away on a car in that moment of frustration as money he wouldn't have to help pay for the apartment we would be responsible for together.
As I try to still process pieces of my marriage like this, a year and a half later, I marvel at how I used to actually believe I had a good marriage. Maybe that should be my reminder of the delusion I was living in. My sense of reality got so distorted. I was so disassociated from both reality and my body that I convinced myself that the fantasy he presented was my reality.
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