My Identity is not limited to my Husband’s (Reflection Series #15)

8:30 am Monday (October 10, 2022)

Living away from your family after getting married is a different kind of hustle. This is something that I get to be made aware of on multiple occasions one way or the other.

As someone who had been living her independent life for the last twelve years, the understanding of identity and being did come up early. But the last three and a half years of my married life started raising some questions related to how I see myself and my identity. Not from my husband but from the people around me on how I live; what are my choices; how I dress up; the people I like to meet and so on. I have navigated them in my own ways, and most of the time, my way to navigate means to brush off any negative comments that I receive, not considering much about what I am being told. The other times I just turn deaf ears.

With this new setting, new kinds of identity questions have started to emerge and I wonder why they are only for me and not for my husband. As we both have left our home country to explore our life and career aspirations, I do believe that we both should be kept on the same metrics. If I am being judged on whom I am meeting or interacting with, he should be judged on the same. If I am being questioned for the hours that I am dedicating to my work and not being able to give time to my family at home, he should be questioned for the same. If I am being denied friendships for the marriage ring that I wear, he should be done the same too. Every time one way or the other, my identity gets tangled with my husband’s identity and I wonder if it is the same for my husband. To my wonder, he doesn’t get judged on these grounds, even if he is questioned, that aren’t difficult questions related to identity.

I understand that getting married definitely brings your identity in relation to your spouse’s with so many mutual decisions to be made. But being interdependent is one thing and being co-dependent is the other. That too in terms of identity is a different battle. So this residential fellowship has given me a chance to look into my identity from a different angle, different than how society sees it. For me, my identity is not limited to my husband’s identity.