Inner Journey #1: Becoming a Wife Without Losing Your Identity

Right before I met Bill, I was again caught in the web of a driven life in America. Aside from babysitting a grandson, I was teaching in three schools of higher learning and volunteering to counsel small businesses for the Service Corps of Retired Executives (SCORE). I felt doomed; I was truly not wife-material! 

Enter a knight in shining armor. Bill was almost as driven as I was. He had been President/CEO of a national printing solutions company, board director for the Document Management Industry Association, active in church and politics, and owner of a printing franchise. Early in 2007 we “fashionably” met on the Net and at 8 pm on 08/08/08, we married on Champagne Lady, a private cruise ship, on Washington’s Lake Union. We cruised together to a life of cruising in an RV. 

We crossed the continent in a whirlwind, from Canada to Mexico and all over the US. It became an extended honeymoon. But in the mainly white RV communities of campgrounds, I met only one Asian, a Hispanic couple, and a few African Americans in almost five years. So different from my homeland, the lifestyle was fatal for the Filipina in me. I longed for a familiar social support system. At first, each scenic sight became a coping mechanism. But soon I wanted to throw out the pillow we bought at the Palm Springs Villagefest. It said, “We get along in our RV ‘cuz we have no room to disagree!” 

All couples disagree. John Gottman's bestseller The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work says that 69% of a couple’s problems will never go away because most disagreements are rooted in fundamental differences. Dan Wile said it another way in his book After the Honeymoon: “When choosing a long-term partner… you will inevitably be selecting a particular set of unsolvable problems that you’ll be grappling with for the next ten, twenty, or fifty years.”  

For us, that 69% statistic may as well be 96%! We met with values and habits very set and with personal, gender, and cultural differences to boot. I found out that I was way more driven than he was. He had patience, I didn’t. We increasingly had fights and we weren’t doing it right. Another best seller by John Gottman (with wife Julie Fight Right was published in Nov. 2023. It could have helped us turn conflict into connection. 

On January 2013 after New Year’s Day, Bill left me in Seattle with my daughter and he went to his son in Boise. During tough times, I usually bury my attention on something else. That was when my first book, Carolina: Cruising to an American Dream, was born. It reaffirmed who I was as a person. When Bill came back on Valentine’s Day, we were able to see that neither had to change himself/herself. We found out that we still shared our passion for travel (Lesson #5). We just had to change our circumstances (Lesson #9) and go on to a new phase of discovering the world. 

After a survey of the Southwest, in October of the same year, we settled on Viewpoint Golf Resort in Mesa, Arizona as a base. I have been to thirty-five countries from that base, he was with me in twenty-five. Four years later, our base was no longer a parked RV. He carried me over the threshold. It was a thrilling first experience, at 69!    

We were assured that we had a good level of compatibility with 7 Qs (Lesson #8): intelligence, morals, finance, religion, politics, and desirability.  My tremendous luck is that he is a man with a high emotional quotient. He had a twenty-nine-year marriage that ended only because she passed on due to cancer. My first lasted ten; the second, two. 

Bill’s consistent request was for me to view the totality of the relationship, not any specific situation, certainly not the moment, and not to withdraw every time there was a difficulty (Lesson#3). I learned how to stay, without losing my identity. It was the deep respect we had for each other, being similarly accomplished, that made us stay and remain committed (Lesson #10).

Last August, we renewed our vows on our fifteenth anniversary (headline photo) on the island of Oahu in the presence of our families. My inner journey to becoming a wife is complete.  

Next Week: How to Stay Young as Late as Possible: The Longevity Diet Part 1