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.
I moved out at 18 for university. I was too busy with all the other stuff to think much about it.
I was 18 when I moved to a shared flat with 2 friends. We had an apartment bong in the kitchen, didn’t clean a lot and are crap food. We had legendary parties there, it was a great time! Only lasted 1 year though…
A left the family home at 18 and it felt like the start of a new life. I grew up in a warm nest, but I have never regretted leaving my parents’ home.
Pretty good. Didn’t have to worry about my parents barging in, or bickering, or any of that.
It will take time for this new space to feel like your own! This is very normal. Start building your new routines - make the tea or coffee in the morning, plan out your day, start to incorporate little touches of your own through the house. One day you’ll wake up and feel like this was always home.
Have you put up any pictures yet? That can really help make a space feel more personal.
Expanding on this: it’s a great time to challenge your assumptions and try building ip different routines! Be mindful to not “get stuck” on routines and habits you don’t like
Freedom. But I was leaving into a college dorm, and both my roommates were upperclassmen that I wouldn’t see for another week.
But it was also far from my first time sleeping alone in an unfamiliar place — I’d done a lot of solo camping by that point in my life.
Left home with nothing but the clothes on my back. Thankfully my HS girlfriend and her parents let me stay with them. Had to buy clothes with the $400 I had and was riding my bike to my minimum wage job. It was simple times but good times.
Nothing unusual about it. As others suggested, take time to make the place feel yours, through decorating, routine, etc.
This is just something that takes a bit of time, especially since it is your first time in a new home without your family.
My first living away from home was a college dorm, and it did take a few weeks for it to feel like mine.
Even now at 50 moving into a new place feels odd for a bit.
Stressful. The couch surfing and car sleeping because of the homelessness was sub-optimal.
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.
I just saw on your previous post that you’re in Saudi and this is your first romantic relationship. Would you like to share a bit about the process - How well do you know your new husband? Is there attraction/interest/like or love? How much contact do you have with your family? Do you have friends who are married that you can talk to?
I think my kids felt weird when they went to college- not home, not their bed, strangers for roommates. But that was a temporary and they came home pretty regularly in the beginning.
I met him for the first time last March, and he proposed the following April. We spent time together and talked regularly from then until we got married, but there was always a wall between us, nothing romantic or physical. So I wouldn’t say I know him incredibly well on a personal level, since it’s only now that we’re able to interact without restrictions. I definitely like him and I’m attracted to him, but I don’t think love has really had a chance to develop yet. I have as much contact with my family and friends as I want, and I do have married friends and relatives I can talk to.
Sounds like you never had a chance to live on your own. Never had a chance to discover what your own tastes and preferences are. You were living in your parents house with your parents possessions, and now you probably have more authority than before (or at least I hope so, or this is even more sad) but every purchase, and every activity is still a compromise with your household.
This sounds less like growing up and more like a pet being given away to a new owner.
Most people don’t live on their own immediately after leaving their parents house. Whether it’s roommates or a romantic partner.
Calling OP a pet is rude and frankly sexist regardless of what you think of her circumstances.
I think her circumstances are sexist. I don’t blame her, I feel bad for her.
Is it rude and sexist to tell an abused woman that she should not go back to him?
It’s rude and sexist to tell a woman she’s an owned pet.
Yeah. It probably is a little rude, like telling a 600 lb person that they really need to lose weight is rude, but that doesn’t make it untrue, and it’s certainly not sexist.
Clearly I’m opposed to the sexist behavior of treating women like pets or property, that’s why I’m speaking out against it.
If you ever notice that I am unaware that I am being manipulated, abused, or mistreated, please point it out to me. I’d rather be told the truth than continue to be manipulated because “it would be rude”.
Shaming people doesn’t force them to change and calling a woman an owned animal is sexist whether you believe it or not.
If a woman is beaten by her husband would it be sexist to call her an abused wife?
Would it be racist to say “so and so was a victim of a hate crime”?
I didn’t commit the crime, I just pointed it out.
I think there is a misunderstanding here, the problem people have with your comment is not the meaning of it, but the words you chose.
Calling someone an abused wife is effectively pointing things out (as in direct description), but calling someone a pet is not pointing things out, it is making a metaphor (as in indirect description) that points at the similarity between a woman and a pet, which is what carries the sexist aspect. No big problem with that, you can simply withdraw the “pet” part and find a term that actually points things out.
You didn’t call her a wife, you called her an animal.
Good. It was nice being independent.
Glorious. I was already living part time elsewhere during high school. I only came home around 2 am to shower, change, sleep before leaving for school in the morning. I moved out as soon as possible after graduation and never went back. I’ve got tons of debt and no savings but staying at home was not safe physically or mentally.
Scary as fuck. Alone in my first apartment, in a strange city where I knew no one.
The first night I stood in front of my bedroom window looking at the city outside and cried from fear.
