C married a wonderful man and I was maid of honor the bride's bitch/wedding planner/music coordinator/only voice of reason in their wedding. [Ugliest bridesmaids dresses ever. No, really. I could go on, without exaggeration, about the ridiculousness leading up to this wedding, the actual event, and how hideous these things were for days - another time.] Naturally, those involved in and attending her wedding, whether I had met them before or not, wanted me to be as happy as she is (very sweet) and felt it necessary to dole out unsolicited advice (very interesting.) It cracks me up when people do this because it supposes that relationships and therefore humans are one-size-fits-all. Pssst, I'm going to let you in on the secret of the magical formula, and if you follow these steps exactly - poof! Married! [Note not marital bliss, but married, kind of an important distinction.]
Fairy tales end with "happily ever after," but what about all of the crazy/wonderful/hard/mundane/awesome stuff that happens after that? I feel like some women seem to think simply being married equals happiness, or that what matters most is having the wedding of her dreams. [Don't even get me started on that one. Ahem, Kim Kardashian.] What if I think the real story starts after "happily ever after?"
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| "He insists on wearing tights every day, and I wouldn't call burping the alphabet charming." |
Some women want the fairy tale. I think I'm too much of a realist to believe in fairy tales, and I've certainly never had the term "princess" used to describe me. No, I'm not that horrifically cynical. To me, a fairy tale implies that a) the wedding/act of being married is the pinnacle of the relationship (what about the next 50 years after that?) and b) that once you've found the right person, that's all it takes. I want something real. I believe in order for relationships to work it does take finding the right person. It also takes a lot of love and a lot of dedication on both people's parts to make them work. This is not "The Bachelor," people. Dates are not all in Thailand and Fiji and other exotic locales. Odds are more time is going to be spent at Target than at fancy restaurants.
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| Wait, so you're saying none of our dates will involve helicopters, famous singers, or fireworks? Shit. |
On my first road trip post-firing, I visited four sets of cousins ranging in ages from 25-35, who have been married anywhere between three and almost fifteen years. [I was in two of their weddings, so it's interesting to see them go from dating to wedding day to 10 and 15 year anniversaries and multiple children.] Day in and day out you have to make sure there's (soy) milk in the fridge, the bills are paid, figure out what's for dinner, what you're going to do that weekend, and whose family you're spending the holidays with this year. You wake up next to the same face every day, see them in their glasses first thing in the morning before coffee with messy hair and puffy eyes, when they're sick and curled up on the floor of the bathroom...and if you're lucky like my cousins all seem to be, you love them and even though it's not always glitter and unicorns, you're genuinely happy to come home to that person.
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| Damn you and your catchy tunes, Taylor Swift! |
David Foster Wallace's commencement speech to Kenyon College is the best example I have found of someone being honest about what real life looks like, and why it's important to not simply be a mindless drone - another brick in the wall. Milestone events in our lives, whether they are graduations, weddings, birthdays, they are not the end of something, rather the beginning. Real life occurs in the minutiae of the day-to-day, or as he says, "being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day."
I ran into a guy I knew from college, and for the past four and a half months I have been so happy with him. Not in a "isn't it great we both love Chinese food?" kind of way, but a "it's fine if you move to North Dakota, we'll make it work" kind of way. Something real. Something where when I flew to North Dakota (he sells oil drill bits) to see him, he took me out to work with him and we spent ten hours a day in his truck together talking, laughing, singing songs. Grocery shopping. Cooking together. Laundry. Decorating for Christmas. Five days of virtually inseparable bliss.
Somewhere in there I got caught up in my own fairy tale. He talked about wanting to go to Thailand with me before we turn 30. He asked if I thought our kids would be tall like him or short like me. He told me he thought I might be "the one."
I fell for it/him.
My fault.
I wish I could say I knew what exactly happened, but I don't know. It's over now.
Maybe part of me wanted to be a fairy tale princess more than I realized after all.
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| Not this time. |
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