Original post – September 6, 2020

My daughter and her boyfriend got engaged in July! Their wedding will be in July 2021. This has me thinking all kinds of things. I’m remembering my engagement and wedding preparation while watching them plan theirs. They have some challenges that I didn’t have to deal with. First of all, trying to plan a wedding during a global pandemic is not as fun as it could be. For example, wedding dress shopping with a mask on via FaceTime with your mom is not how girls dream that experience to be. Planning a wedding when you live in Austin, Texas and your wedding is going to be in Portland, Oregon is also tricky. But I digress. Their relationship, their wedding planning process, their lives, and them as people are so very different from who I was and what I experienced. And, thank God. 

I met my future husband when I was 23 years old. He was a friend of a friend. We were set up on a blind date, of sorts. Our mutual friend, my best friend, and he and I met at a McMenamins in NW Portland, long before it was called The Pearl. (interestingly enough, my daughter is getting married at a McMenamins and honestly I think they had their first date at one too) He was nice looking and nice enough. There wasn’t an attraction but he was so different from the losers I’d previously dated so that was a plus. He was serious. He had a real job as an engineer. He had a nice car and apartment. He was responsible. He was husband material. There was nothing exciting about him but that was Ok with me. Husbands aren’t exciting anyway, according to my married friends at the time.

We began dating a few months after that initial meeting. He called me out of the blue. We talked for several hours and decided to go out together. We met for dinner at a fancy restaurant in NW Portland. We had a good time so we decided to do it again. We began spending a lot of time together. We had dinner out nearly every night. He wasn’t shy about spending money on me. We began doing other things too. We went to outdoor music festivals, indoor plays, comedy shows, and concerts. We golfed together. We went away for the weekend to luxurious resorts. He’d come have lunch with me while I was at work. He’d take the morning off to be with me and once in a while, the whole day. We just did so many things together. Our relationship was ticking a lot of boxes for me. 

We got engaged after two years of dating. We’d been ring shopping but when he proposed, it was still unexpected. The proposal was grandiose and just how I wanted it to be. We spent the day golfing which was one of my favorite things to do. We had dinner at the same restaurant where we’d had our first date. We went downtown after dinner to listen to live music on the waterfront. As we parked the car, a horse drawn carriage arrived. I still didn’t anticipate anything unusual. This was the kind of thing he did for me. We climbed into the carriage. We had the chattiest carriage driver in Portland, I’m pretty sure. She was telling us all these stories and historical facts as we made our way through town. Finally, my boyfriend asked her to zip it – albeit very courteously. I don’t even remember the words he used but there was no question in my mind…YES!!!

We planned our wedding for a year in the future. I paid for the wedding, mostly by myself. I had clear ideas of how I wanted it to be. Looking back on it, it was a generic, cookie cutter wedding. The only thing that was personal was the vows that we wrote. Everything else was straight out of Brides magazine. It was what was expected. We were married in a huge Catholic church. The reception was at a swanky country club. Sure, it was beautiful but it was very formal and not very fun, honestly. It was sedate and boring. We did all the things – first dance, cutting the cake, chatting with guests, it was a yawn fest. But it was what I thought I wanted. 

What I remember most about that day was how I felt. There had been a lot of stress leading up to that day. Me and my girls had gotten up at 4:00am to do hair and make up. I had a terrible cold so I was chugging Alka Seltzer. We arrived at the church for pictures before the wedding. Again, very professional and formal. There were no fun or candid snaps. Everyone line up. Click. When we were finished, we went downstairs and waited for the guests to arrive. As the church filled, we made our way to the back of the church for the procession. Throughout all that, I was nervous, stressed, focused, and just trying to do all the things when they needed to be done. As I’m standing at the back of the church after everyone else had made their way down the aisle, it was just me and my dad. In that moment, as I looked down the aisle at the beautiful church filled with flowers, our friends and relatives waiting for us at the altar, the pews filled with our loved ones, time stopped. All was right in the world. I had spent my entire life dreaming of this – the perfect man, the perfect wedding, the perfect life. I had arrived. (Little did I know that marriage was a journey and not a destination.) That was and continues to be one of the best moments of my life. It was pure happiness. It was not tainted by anything else. It was absolute and complete joy. As my dad and I walked down the aisle, all the emotion of the moment spilled out and I cried before we even arrived at the altar. My dear dad put his hand on mine and asked “are you ok?” He was so kind and sweet. I was more than Ok. It was just a lot. So we said our vows, signed the marriage license, went to the reception, and began our life together. 

Here’s where hindsight comes into play. All of that was true. But there was a lot more to the story that was also true. It never occurred to me, really, to think about what kind of husband I might want. Beyond the fact that he was responsible, serious, and not an alcoholic, I never thought about what I needed in a life partner. I was raised to be chosen. In fact, we as girls should consider ourselves lucky to be picked. The idea of me doing the choosing wasn’t ever talked about. Turns out, my criteria in a future husband was pretty limited. Not a jerk, not a drunk, not violent, not a cheater. It makes me sad to look back and realize how low the bar was that I set. But again, I learned well and considered myself lucky to be chosen. 

Things didn’t go south for quite a while, mostly because I overlooked and accepted things that looking back were indicative of big disconnects between my husband and me. Once we got married, he changed. Suddenly, I wasn’t a priority anymore – work was. He worked 10-12 hours a day, 5-7 days a week. He traveled for work 2-3 days a week, every week. Our hobbies with what limited time we had together were his hobbies. In our entire marriage, we never golfed again – not since the day we got engaged. There were no more food festivals, outdoor concerts, dinners out, no more weekends away or vacations. It was fly fishing or working. I viewed his work ethic as a good thing and an investment in our future. I didn’t know that this was just who he was and would do this his entire life because he showed me someone else before we were married. But he couldn’t tell the truth and I couldn’t speak up. I didn’t want to have conflict and argue with the little time we did have together. And besides, if that’s as bad as it gets that your husband works a lot and earns a bunch of money, why are you complaining? I felt crazy for being unhappy.

I think he and I both made a lot of assumptions about what our life would be like together and what kind of spouses we would be. There were many, many things that we just never discussed because surely we were in alignment because we were in love. Wrong. My idea of a good husband was someone that was present in my life. He’d be home for dinner, we’d do things together on the weekends, we’d travel. His idea of a good husband was to be a good provider and to create wealth. That was never important to me. This was long before people talked about love languages and such. He did what his father did. I wanted something different. We didn’t talk about what role our parents would play in our lives, for example, or any other dicey subject. I remember when we were at a weekend retreat that was required by the church prior to our wedding. The idea was to address potentially difficult topics under the guidance of the church. One topic was how to spend holidays. We both had very strong opinions and one of our patterns was neither of us were willing to give. We disagreed about where to spend Christmas – who with, how much time with each family, do we alternate, do we try to do it all. We spent that time crying. We were at an impasse and had no skills to overcome that. Unfortunately, we just turned the page, if you will. We never came to resolution that day and we just never re-engaged. This is just one example of how ill equipped we were to navigate through disagreements to get to a satisfying resolution for both of us. We had no skills. The point being, we just never talked about anything, really. Beyond don’t cheat, that was pretty much it. Needless to say, our marriage failed. It took awhile but we never did get any better at recognizing issues or working through them. It wasn’t lost on me the contrast between how it began and how it ended. It began in front of 120 of our friends and family with lots of laughter and love and it ended by myself with a notary public at a Mailboxes Etc. on my lunch hour. I didn’t even cry. It was just done. 

I learned a lot from that experience. It took me years and years to unravel my part in that and to be able to really plot the downfall – what he did, what I did, what we weren’t capable of. Neither of us were bad people. We were just wrong for each other and because we never had the difficult conversations, we didn’t know that. We both moved on. He remarried. I did not. My focus was being the best mom I could be to our daughter. 

So here’s the million dollar question. Knowing what I know now, will I ever get married again? It’s hard to say. I’m not even dating at this point. I have so much more wisdom now and my eyes are wide open. I now know that people don’t change and shoes don’t stretch. The things that I saw in him when we were dating that bothered me persisted throughout our life together. I have also found my voice. I am well aware that had I been able to acknowledge the issues that existed and address them early on, things would have been vastly different. Either we would not have gotten married or we would have had a satisfying and lasting marriage. Or maybe we’d stay married and just torture each other for the rest of our lives. Who knows. Once I did recognize the issues, I made a deliberate choice a thousand times to keep the peace. I didn’t say anything. I didn’t want to argue. I was very conflict avoidant. Neither of us was wrong. We just had different needs, wants, and goals. We weren’t perfect people. However, my marriage wasn’t a mistake, We live and learn. We have an amazing daughter that we were very successful co-parenting. She’s happy, independent, and successful. She’s wise beyond her years partially because her parents failed as a couple. 

The challenge for me is to open my wounded heart to another person. Even though my divorce was over 20 years ago, I keep with me all the mistakes that I made and question how much different I would be in another marriage. Also, there’s a fear that knowing what I know now and having lived alone for 20 years that I might be too picky. One huge contributing factor to making the wrong choice in my 20’s was my list was too short. Now, my list is so long, it would fill a ream of paper. I am also so much less tolerant. I am unwilling to overlook things and recognize that everything else is good. I’m much more likely to throw the baby out with the bathwater. For example, I might have to kill my future husband in his sleep if he chews loudly or breathes loudly or doesn’t pick up his feet when he walks. Doesn’t matter if he’s decent, kind, respectful, funny, smart, etc. I am a person that thinks in extremes. It’s something I’m trying to overcome but my tendency is all in or all out. And we haven’t even talked about me and my worth. I’m also a person that’s an egomaniac with an inferiority complex. What that looks like is I’m a piece of shit but I’m better than you! Sigh. I’m gonna be single forever unless I figure this shit out. Not that I have a great need to be married but I don’t see myself dying alone either. I need to really internalize that there are some things that are deal breakers and everything else is negotiable. It’s just noise. Intellectually I know this but honestly, my thinking is still pretty juvenile. If I can get past my need for perfection in others, then I still have to address all the bullshit in my head that 50 some years of negative messaging has put there. I’m not young, thin, and beautiful anymore. That’s all men want, right? And if you’re not that, then you have no value. It makes me so angry that these ideas seem to be part of my DNA even though I don’t believe them anymore. But as a woman, I feel invisible these days and that’s the way I like it, honestly.  Someday, hopefully soon, I’ll believe that I’m enough exactly as I am right now and I’ll be able to claim space in the world. It’s a daily effort trying to undo the yuck and not discount the good. But I persist. I surround myself with people who see me, all of me, and love me no matter what. They feed my soul and nurture my light. They encourage me to shine. They just all happen to be women. I am incredibly grateful for each of them for loving me until I can love myself.