Happy Unniversary
Nine years ago today, I didn’t get married.
I was supposed to. The church was booked, the hall reserved. The menu was set and the flowers were chosen. The invitations were printed and addressed, but never mailed.
I didn’t exactly leave him at the altar, but it was close.
I knew the Man I Didn’t Marry for two years before we dated. And we dated for three years before he asked me to marry him. I wore his ring for a year before I gave it back, five weeks before the wedding.
Leaving that relationship wasn’t an easy or capricious decision. It was incredibly hard, and made more difficult by the fact that I did love him, and he was (and is) a good man. He wasn’t abusive. Or even mean. He made it clear that he loved me. But in the end, none of that was enough. Sometimes, it’s not.
Eventually I realized that the person I would become if I became his wife was not a person I wanted to be. I couldn’t do that to either of us. Become someone I wasn’t, someone who would make both of us miserable, simply because I wasn’t brave enough to face the truth and bear the consequences. That, much though we both wanted it to be, it just wasn’t right.
So I did possibly the hardest thing I have ever done in my life: I told him I wouldn’t be marrying him afterall.
It was the best decision I have ever made. I wouldn’t be the person I am now, or have the life that I do, had I ignored what I knew to be true and just gone through with it. I like who I’ve grown into over these past nine years. I am very close to being the woman I knew I could be, the woman I knew I’d never have a chance to be if I had said, “I do.” I can imagine my life many other ways, but none of them appeal to me. This, right now, is where and how I want to live. I have no regrets about not getting married. I’m sorry the man I loved was hurt in the process (and that my parents lost their deposit on the hall), but it was the right choice to make. It was so right, it really wasn’t a choice at all.
To quote Norma Kelly in Chicago (which I bough myself as a little present today) : “Oh, I’m no one’s wife/but oh, I love my life/and all that jazz!”