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Sunday, Nov 22, 2009
It's not that I didn't want to get married. I just wanted to make sure that I could take a break from the institution whenever I needed to.
Dec 20, 2004 | I stood on the dark, crumbling front stoop of an apartment building that was not mine at 2:30 a.m., jiggling and cursing this key that I had paid $500 for. But it would not open the front door.
Earlier that night, I had schlepped an unwieldy, overstuffed suitcase onto a bus in suburban Edgewater, N.J., and endured the bumpy half-hour ride to New York. A subway ride and an 11-block walk later, I'd arrived at the building that would be my home for the next week and slipped through the front door with a resident whose key did work.
But now, after a night out with friends in the city, I was alone on this desolate, unfamiliar street. And in the seconds it took me to realize this key was not going to unlock this door, I was stripped of all the excitement and bravado I'd brought with that ridiculously large suitcase. I was going to be by myself! Come home when I pleased, without answering to my fiancé! Eat nachos for dinner every day for a week without facing an inquisition! Watch an entire "I Love the '80s" marathon without fielding complaints!
For minutes I tried to preserve those feelings anyway, while jiggling that damn key and kicking the door. Then I started to cry, sob even. But soon enough I laughed, because I realized this was what I had come here for: to remember that freedom has its price. That sometimes you're locked out with no partner inside to let you in. Sometimes you are sobbing on a stranger's stoop, and no one's there to care.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
I postponed my princess-bride wedding a year ago, right around our 10th anniversary together. My fiancé and I met in college and were lucky enough -- or cursed, maybe -- to fall into that kind of relationship that's so comfortable, so right, you just assume you're stuck with each other. He stole me from my lingering high school sweetheart with a killer combination of broad shoulders, a stunning ability to quote Shakespeare even while stumbling drunk, a passion for politics, and an inexhaustible instinct to take care of me when I'm moody, sick or stressed, which is pretty much always.
After a few weeks of dating, we settled into what would be, presumably, the pattern for the rest of our lives: My fiancé budgets and plans everything, services I desperately need. I drag him out on weekends because otherwise he'd never meet another soul. We work well together, and there's nothing we've ever been able to do about that. Throughout most of our decade as a couple, I've rarely thought that we should do anything about it. When the Navy sent him to California to serve out his ROTC scholarship obligation, I left my hometown of Chicago and followed. When he went back to grad school in Chicago, I went with him. When he got a job in New Jersey, I followed again.
And when he proposed, I said yes. None of these decisions, big as they seem, took much thought. I adored this man, and he adored me. What else would I do with him but eventually marry him?
