I have arrived in Germany, as I think my last post has stated. I am seemingly over the jet lag at this point, although it is 7:45 here and I am fast away, writing on the blog for my loyal reader(s).
Here are some pics of Lili and Wesseling, where her parents live.
The planning of the wedding is coming along nicely. Now that I am here in Germany, Lili and I both feel much more connected and more at peace with the current situation that is happening with my job. We are a team and we will get through this slightly rocky part of the journey. Its pretty amazing when you spend your adult life fending for yourself to then move into a shared situation where you have dual incomes and dual responsibility--now when I make a mistake, I have two people to answer to.
It's a great feeling and it has been such a long journey to get to this point, for me and for her and for us. I have spent many years with many different partners and a lot of time as a single guy and in that time you really learn a lot of good and bad traits, some of which work when you carry them over to a new relationship but most of them do not.
I have been thinking a lot about the level of commitment that a relationship takes on and it makes me wonder why it is so difficult now to maintain that relationship, why so many of them fail. People are getting more and more commitment phobic, I think I was for a lot of years, but now everything seems so natural with Lili that I couldn't imagine not being on the track to marriage.
Then again, I don't know if I would have considered marriage when I did, if it wasn't for the visa process and knowing that we would need to get married if we really wanted to be together. Don't take that the wrong way, but I think its the American in me that has a fear of marriage because of all the baggage that is associated with it, which was all in my head, but I think its a generational thing and to a certain extent, a regional issue as well. Seattle has a lot of single people and dating is quite difficult. This is something I never really thought of until I moved to Alabama, which is a huge kid factory--there are kids everywhere and its refreshing to see. (Except that really young parents, which there seems to be a lot of as well.)
Seattle doesn't have that much of the baby boom because of the cost of living and because its being built into a condo town--and condo's are not the best place to raise a family. So, perhaps I was a product of my enviroment, after all I did have to get out of the city, into another country, China, to meet the woman that I was convinced fairly early on would be the mother of my children.
One last comment on this whole thing, when you are removed from your comfort zone, as I was from Seattle, this is when you really discover what you truly are made of.
As always, thanks for stopping by.... Read more!
