Wedding Bells...

I submitted a pitch to a local magazine about marriage and getting married at a young age and they like it, so I got the green light on Friday of last week.

Since I've been (and will continue to be until my deadline) super busy with returning emails, making phone calls, typing, typing, editing, typing and conducting interviews, this may be my last blog post before Christmas.

Tonight I just wanted a break from trying to write an unbiased point of view towards the 'married before I've been alive a quarter of a century' thing and just let out my opinion. Since this is my blog, and I'm not getting paid to do it, I'm allowed.

My first serious boyfriend was a cute little towhead named Nick. Nick was a dead ringer for dreamy Nick Carter from the Backstreet Boys and he made me swoon, too, even if he was a fumbling socially inept dork most of the time. He was a romantic though. He'd write me letters if our parents were banning us for talking to each other (again) telling me how much he loved me, how he worshipped me, waxing romantic about how one day we'd finally make love and that he couldn't wait and that one day he was going to make me the happiest woman alive, and we'd elope somewhere and have the greatest wedding ever. He even bought me a little vending machine ring and told me one day he'd put a beautiful white gold one on in it's place.

He didn't though. One day his mom stopped letting him call me, and stopped letting me talk to him, and it got really boring trying to maintain a relationship solely at high school, among the prying eyes of all our friends and classmates. We broke up, and I was hurt, but considering the roller-coaster 10 month relationship we had, I got over him pretty quick. Plus, I was in grade 10, I was 14 and the world was my oyster. The sea was full of fish, and I intended to catch one who wasn't so tied to their mom's apron strings.

I did. A month later I hooked up with a guy who was his polar opposite. I'm not even sure Ryan knew his mom existed unless she snored too loud in the next room or wasn't using her car. That didn't last either, and he didn't give me any hope to believe it ever really would anyway.

Several years later I met a man in a small little resort town that I was living in after high school. He was all whirlwind-y -- swept me off my feet and made me forget that we'd only known each other for a few months. He was romantic, sweet and for some odd reason - really into me. We'd only been seeing each other for a little over a month when one day he mentioned that maybe I should move in with him, y'know, to save money. That made literally no sense looking at it from that line of reasoning, because I lived in staff accommodations where they deducted a mere $200 a month for my little apartment, heat, water and power. Plus, our cats hated each other, I reasoned. I declined but told him I'd think about it soon.

One day we were out hiking along Maligne Lake with our picnic lunch. He had mentioned that he wanted to show me the most beautiful place in the world, and as we rounded a bend, he pointed through the trees at this beautiful picturesque scene of the lake, capped by a mountain whose mirror image glistened on the lake's surface. It was pretty, but it wasn't really the MOST beautiful place in the world and as I turned around to tell him that, he had bent down on one knee and asked me the very question that almost every girly girl dreams of hearing -- her name, followed by the words 'Will you marry me?'. Caught up in the romance and the heady sensation of it all, I said yes. I forgot that I didn't even know his middle name, how to spell his last name, what his favorite movie of all time was or even that I didn't love him at all.

Less than a week later he revealed a secret to me while we were getting pleasantly buzzed on homemade red wine. The kind of secret you admit to someone you want to spend the rest of your life with before you propose.

He was on steroids, and had been for quite some time.

Now, I don't claim to be ridiculously clean living. I had my 'sowing my wild oats' phase, I smoke like a chimney, I'm from BC where we're proud of our world glass 'green' and like to hotbox to show how patriotic we are, and I've been known to drink 7 too many rye and ginger ales and not notice my boob is hanging out of my shirt, but drugs like steroids scare the crap out of me.

At that point I had been attempting to quit smoking since the day before he proposed. His admission, the large amounts of alcohol and a nicotine deprived body and mind told him I needed some time and wandered off to the hotel I worked to find someone to bum a smoke off of.

I got back to his place an hour later, and immediately he started tearing me to shreds for not having the willpower enough not to smoke when the going got tough.

He called me names, told me to get out and threw me into a wall when I tried to reason with him.

I moved on quickly from him. Mostly because I didn't love him, even if I promised that one day I'd vow to forever, and moved on with my life. I was 18.

Years later, I met another man.

He was again, sweet and romantic and into me. He took me out, wined and dined me, promised me the world and when I finally slept with him, the fireworks were almost tangible. The biggest problem?

He was separated from his wife and had 2 kids. Granted, I wasn't into having a family of my own, so a ready made was probably the best bet for me in case of any sudden biological urges, but it was difficult at first. His youngest, a slightly effeminate mama's boy of 3 would happily crawl into my lap for a snuggle and enjoyed his stuffed animals more than his action figures. His oldest was quite a lot more withdrawn and used to say things that cut me to the bone -- even if he was only 5.

We spent a blissful spring together and come summer, he talked me into moving in with him at his friend's until we could find a place on our own. The cat and I packed up all our worldly possessions and moved into the bedroom he was renting.

That summer was tough for me. I was having a hard time finding work. I felt aimless and useless. And I worried that maybe my boss, my mom, and all my friends were right when they said it was simply too soon to be co-habitating. I went through a 2 month period of insomnia. As he slept soundly in the bed to my back, I chatted to all the other night owls I knew and wrote novels that had no plot. Finally I got a job, and we plunged into looking for a place to live -- together.

By this point, the boys had warmed up to me. The youngest enjoying our stuffed animal tea parties and the oldest happy to finally have someone challenging to play tag with in the park. He had custody of them every second weekend so we knew we needed a place with at least 2 bedrooms so that they could have their area and we could have our own. The summer was difficult when you have 2 kids bouncing on you at 6 in the morning every weekend morning wanting to watch a movie or play with their toys.

We looked at apartments and basement suites, but the whole time I was really holding out for a rental that would allow me to bring my dog from my parent's place to the city.

Finally we stumbled upon one, which is actually the house I still live in.

We wrangled up the damage deposit, signed the contracts and 3 years ago in October, we moved in.

Shortly after we moved in the trouble started. In one bedroom together I made certain exceptions -- we didn't really have a closet, so there were clothes everywhere. His stuff and the boy's toys would always be underfoot, but in a small space, you can't expect much else. I hadn't worked for much of the summer so I usually cooked before he got home and we had supper together. We couldn't really clean, we really just 'straightened up' because it would never really be 'clean'.

Suddenly these things were happening again in our big beautiful new house. Supper was never cooked, even if he got home hours before me. His clothes laid on the floor, on the bed, beside the laundry basket, anywhere but where they should be. Toys were scattered across every square inch of the living room. The floor wasn't swept, dishes weren't done and I started going nuts.

Especially when my coworker confronted me and told me that he had approached her about buying a ring.

A ring?

Those dirty socks on the bedroom floor weren't just socks on the bedroom floor now. They were there now potentially for the rest of my life!

I panicked. If he was serious about us and wanted to marry me, something had to change or I'd kill him or me or both of us before our 1st anniversary.

So I did what every other woman under stress and time constraints does when their S.O. doesn't help pick up the slack. I nagged.

And nagged. And nagged.

The point was, I was so bloody unhappy with our living situation and the state of our house all the time that I needed him to help me out, and he wasn't doing it willingly.

Things started disintegrating between the 2 of us, because the more I nagged, the less he did and the less he did, the more I nagged. It was a vicious circle. I didn't even want to talk to him anymore because he was so utterly disinterested in making me happy.

Then he started cheating. And cheating. And cheating. One woman was for a 2 month stretch. Another may have only been an isolated incidence. The third was never confirmed but I have my suspicions.

We broke up and got back together a dozen times in half as many months. I asked him to leave and there were a hundred different excuses on why he couldn't. Every time I wanted him out, he tripled his efforts at becoming the world's best boyfriend and I took him back almost every time because I hoped things would be different.

Finally when our bickering turned into yelling and yelling turned into violence, I called the police and after they left, I asked him one more time to leave.

A few weeks later he did.

That relationship took a long time to get over.

It was so toxic that it drained me and it took every ounce of my strength just to keep going most days. I wondered what I'd done wrong, and then turned defensive on myself and decided that nothing I ever could have done would have fixed it. It took me awhile, but I finally realized that it was as not meant to be as Romeo and Juliet.


I still had a hard time though. I wondered what might have been if we actually had got married. Would we have been signing our divorce papers before our first anniversary? Would one of us be in jail for voluntary manslaughter?

I was so in love, and so blind to his many obvious faults, and I am truly the worst kind of romantic, that I'm pretty sure I still would have said yes if he had asked, and figured all our problems would just sort themselves out. I was a lot more optimistic then.

I'm not nearly that naive now. Now the concept of marriage scares me a bit. I love a good wedding, because there's truly nothing more fun than all your nearest and dearest around to celebrate you and the concept of true love, but I think I'm a lot more realistic about it now.

That doesn't mean I don't get a little jealous when a close friend announces their engagement, or that I don't sometimes gaze wistfully at a wedding dress display, it just means that when I finally do it, I want to be sure. I want it to stick and be for life -- for better and for worse.


As for all of you who may be reading this and who recently sent me your answers to my questions on marriage and are now worried that I'm going to demonize the young and married -- your fears are unfounded. I would never cast anyone in a bad light unless they deserved it, and none of you do. I will be as unbiased when I write this piece as I possibly can be. I truly hope you all went into it with your eyes open, and that you and your current (or future) Mr. or Mrs. will be able to talk and compromise through anything and have a life of happiness and health and arguments you can laugh about afterwards.

Because that's what I want, too.