Lost and Trapped, part 4: lesson 2

Lesson 2: Wedding vs. Marriage


The second mistake I made was willfully confusing a wedding with a marriage.  As I mentioned, I met X in June, was in DC in July and he proposed when I returned in early August.  Now this felt, at the time, like Twilight Zone time - it seemed forever.  But obviously, it was very rushed.  He had begun talking about marriage in June, just weeks after we'd met.  And we were apart in July, so I could fantasize all I wanted about him and our life together without fact and reality interfering.


And here's what I fantasized about: what kind of ring would he buy?  What would my girlfriends say when I asked them to be bridesmaids?  Where could I start looking for a dress?  


Here's what I gave no thought to whatsoever: how well do I know this man?  Am I giving up too much to be with him?  What will I do with my life when I am back in Connecticut?  Would he sacrifice as much for me?  What will life be like with him in ten years?  How will I cope with how messy he is?  


So many of us girls dream of "getting married."  What we refer to in that dream (or, at least, what I meant by that) is the wedding day and the fact that we have a man who wants us.  Too few of us think long and hard over whether we want the man.  And what life will be like day after day, year after long year.


Some women fantasize about a doctor, lawyer or politician - someone with a job they admire or desire because of the associated wealth and power.  They want someone who will take care of them financially, buy them a house or take them on glamorous vacations.  Someone who will impress their friends or family.  Someone who will open up a social world they may desire.  They want a hero who will sweep them away to his castle on a hill where they'll live "happily ever after"  (whatever that means).


Too few women, I think, focus on the qualities they desire in a man: trustworthiness, loyalty, support, kindness, sense of humor.  Too few think about whether the man will expend his energy trying to make their lives better, happier, more fun, more fulfilled.  Whether he will fit in with the life they already have.  Whether he will support their dreams, or whether his focus will be solely on his own career and dreams.


Too few think about what kind of father the man would make - will he be an equal partner, or will he kiss the kids on the head after he arrives home late from the office or before he rushes off for another international trip.


We get caught up in the moment - the romance, the excitement of being loved and wanted, the status we might think it confers upon us.  We don't think about the substance of what we truly need to be happy.  We don't think of what we want in a partner.  What kind of a man do we want by our side in 5 years, 10 years, 40 years? 


The wedding lasts a day.  It is (or ought to be) an acknowledgement and celebration of a relationship - a lasting state - that exists between two people.  Not a goal in itself... not an end.  Because the wedding day does fly by... but I can't begin to describe how long life can seem when you are unhappy in a relationship and can't see any way out.  When every day is a small scrape of a disappointment, embarrassment or frustration.  When some days are a huge and painful battle. When you realize you've sacrificed your youth, your career, your children, yourself and must start try to start over at a time when you thought everything would be settled.


After, I learned that if ever someone were to propose to me again, I needed to pay attention to the following:  my gut reaction - was I filled with joy and happiness or was I a bit queasy?  could I see myself in love with this man when he is old, wrinkled and drooling?  could I imagine wanting to be with him in our home every day?  did he understand what I want from life and would he help me to achieve it?  did I understand what he wanted and could I support his dreams?  could I imagine always being attracted to him?


I thought of none of those things when X started talking about proposing.  I thought of wedding... not marriage.  And it was not long before I learned the difference and how serious my mistake had been.

Lost and Trapped, part 4: lesson 1

So I've told  the story of meeting and marrying my X, describing it as a significant (though necessary) mistake in my life.  The four years that followed were, in many ways, dark, lonely times.  Before I describe anything that happened during the marriage, I think it's important to identify clearly the mistakes I'd made to this point and what I've learned from them since.


1) The mistaken notion of love at first sight.
Don't get me wrong, I believe it's possible to see someone and know that they are going to be important in your life (that goes for friendship as well as love).  Intuition exists and can be very powerful.  In fact, when I first saw the amazingly wonderful man to whom I am now married, I was captivated.  Was it love?  Maybe not... but I lost my heart right away.


I think one can be "in love" at first sight; but that love - real, lasting, true love - takes time to grow.  I was certainly "in love" with X at the very beginning, to the extent that I knew what that was.  But we did not know how to love each other.  I did not love him for all his foibles and flaws; he did not love me for all my dreams and ambitions.  His world was centered around himself and he wanted to fit pieces into it that he felt he needed: wife, child, home, etc.  He did not expect to have to give anything to those responsibilities.  This isn't to say that he didn't care for and about me - just that he never really understood me, knew what I needed or how to give it to me.


For example, in the days before our final separation I tried to explain to him that it wasn't enough for him to tell me he loved me - to say the words.  I needed him to show me with his actions.  He didn't understand how to do this.  He sent a rosemary plant to my office ("rosemary for remembrance").  This was a nice gesture, but it didn't take much effort.  I suggested he could start by cleaning up our condo - allow me to live in an environment that I found pleasing, rather than one full of clutter, dirty clothes and a kitchen counter compost pile.  He said he couldn't do it - that he could never make the place as clean as I'd want it... he wasn't even willing to try.  He wouldn't pick up his dirty underwear to save his marriage.  This is what I mean... 


As for me, I didn't bother to get to know who I was marrying.  I was so ready to dive headlong into the idea of love without understanding what it meant.  I had no idea what real commitment was all about.  I truly believe that X went into the marriage with the intent to remain married for the rest of his life.  I think he was oblivious to much that was going on around him (on one of our last days together, he said with sincerity, "I thought we were happy."  I was flabbergasted as through the years he had suffered from alcoholism (probably caused by the strain of our relationship), had once physically attacked me, I had attempted suicide and been on anti-depressants, we had stopped speaking and spending time together and we hadn't had sex since the year we were married).  Blind to our "shortcomings" though he may have been, I believe he never wanted the marriage to end.  And I, who had been so careless about entering the relationship and the commitment, hurt him terribly by ending it.  For this, I have to take full responsibility.


If we had taken the time to get to know one another... if we not rushed into the engagement and the wedding (which was just as much my doing as his)... if we had spent a few years as a couple, learning about each other... I am certain we would have saved each other a great deal of heartache.  I am certain that we would have learned that we did not truly "love" each other - that we would have fallen out of love and would not have gotten married.  We might have been "in love" at first sight... but not the kind of love that grows and lasts.  


Love at first sight can't be trusted.  It can be acted upon... it can drive us to the right relationship.  But that relationship should be given time to grow in the light of day beyond the wooing period, without rose colored glasses.  Two years became my guiding time frame.  If you are still "in love" and do love each other whole-heartedly and without reservation after two years, you have a good chance, I figured. 


I believe a lot of women get caught up in first (often false) impressions created by the wooing period (trick themselves into believing it's "love").  Just before I met H (husband), I met a Frenchman (the Frog) in Washington Square Park.  It was Saturday morning, around 8:00 am and he was sitting across from me at the dog run.  His dog - a rather ugly Boston terrier with only one eye - kept running over to play with me.  The Frog moved to sit next to me and we ended up talking for hours.  When it was time to leave, he walked me most of the way back to my apartment, asked me to come to his place Sunday night so he could make me dinner, then kissed me.  It was only 11:00 am on a random Saturday and I was being kissed on a street corner by a handsome, rich, almost famous, very intellectual Frenchman.

I was certain that was the fairytale beginning of what would be a beautiful romance.  Only it very much wasn't.  I soon discovered he had a girlfriend in CA, he would only ever see me in his apartment and wasn't much interested in anything having to do with my life.

For several months I struggled between the fantasy my little brain had created upon our first meeting and the reality of my visits to the Frog's pad.  I had such trouble letting go of my initial romantic impression, no matter how often and in how many different ways he proved that impression to be wrong.  On paper, he was who I could see myself with and our first meeting was the story I wanted to tell.  But nothing that followed resembled a relationship about which I could be happy.

Why do we do that to ourselves?  Rather than thinking the initial meeting was an anomaly, I spent months wondering what I'd done wrong to change our dynamic.  Tried to figure out what I could do to get it back to how it was the first time we met when he was pursuing me.  Thought I had somehow screwed up and could change things if only I could figure him out.  Thought I could make him want what I wanted.

What I should have said after the second "date," was "that meeting in the dog run was a lovely New York moment, but it was just a moment.  This man is not who I thought he was that day.  Time to move on."  Because you can't live on one moment.  Too many bad relationships develop and continue because we make excuses for the other person; we remain hopeful too long; we refuse to see the truth about the person we are with.  We see them how we want to see them, not how they are.  Or worse, we keep hoping they will become who we want them to be and allow ourselves to be continuously disappointed by who they actually are.

Had I not rushed into an engagement with X, I would have seen fairly quickly that our interests and expectations were not the same.  Without the pressure of an "engagement" to call off, I might have had the courage to call a spade a spade and move on.  If I had known how much a relationship can change when the initial "wooing period" ends... when you stop trying to impress one another by being someone your not... I might have known X was not "the one."  

Relationships take effort, but that effort should make you happy much more often than not.  If you are not happy, secure and uninterested in being with anyone else, you are not in the right relationship.

It may have been love at first sight... but that's not love for a lifetime.

To be continued with Lesson 2

Lost and Trapped, part 2: The Wooing Period and The Engagement

The Road Not Taken

By Robert Frost

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,

And having perhaps the better claim,

Because it was grassy and wanted wear,

Though as for that the passing there

Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black,

Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I –

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

***

I love this poem.  I'm not sure if I have taken a less traveled road, but in looking back at my life - at the roads I have chosen - I know I would not be where I am today if I had not been where I was - if I had not followed wrong road after wrong road.  If life's journey is through a labyrinth, it's as though I had a map at the beginning, knew just where I wanted to head and thought I knew exactly to where it would lead.  But at the moment when I turned down the job at US News and World Report, I dropped the map and became utterly disoriented, having no idea where I was or where I was headed.  In order to write about that time, I have to remind myself that all that blind and tortured wandering led me to a far different place than I'd imagined, but probably also a far better one.  

But then, at that cross-roads where I chose my path, I could not have known the way ahead for many years would be governed by the tyranny of a mind that spoke a primary language of  disappointment, hopelessness, fear, ugliness and regret.  Breaking away from that government was a journey in itself.  And a story for another day.

To be clear, this was not X's fault.  He was and remains a good. if a bit odd, man.  I do not blame him for anything that I suffered at that time.  He did not cause it.  Another woman in my situation might have been perfectly happy.  He could not have known that I was not meant to be with him and that despite what we both initially felt, the relationship was a mistake.

Of course, even the word "mistake" is subjective.  Some lessons are incredibly difficult to learn... incredibly painful.  No, I wasn't supposed to be with him, but if I hadn't been, I would be a different person today.  When I think about this it always seems to me that there was only ever one path I could have taken - the other roads are illusions.  They were never really choices at all. 

I am grateful for the hard lessons.  If I not had those experiences, I might still be wandering about fantasizing that depression is somehow "noble" or a window to enlightenment.  I might still be romanticizing the idea of suicide, which is the only way to fail at life; after all, if you wake up in the morning, there is still something for you to do... a reason for your life.  

But I digress.

In part one of this post, I had skipped ahead almost to the wedding.  But I think I should backtrack to how I got engaged and the warning signs I should have recognized.

When young people are in the first throws of infatuation, it’s hard to make them see the pitfalls and cliff edges ahead.  And often those hazards are masked by the “wooing period” of a relationship.  The wooing period is when a guy who is normally an ambitious workaholic takes the weekend off to stroll around a lake holding hands, and a woman who has no interest at all in sports happily spends a sunny Sunday afternoon parked on the couch watching the game.  It’s when we are on our best behavior and no little personality foible can annoy us.  When we refrain from nagging or farting or showing unease about anything.  When we are who we think others want us to be… for the most part.

Unfortunately, the wooing period is unsustainable, lasting (in my experience) anywhere from a few minutes of the first date to a few months.  One must recognize this truth if one is to keep from making terribly false assumptions about the object of our affection.  Who we meet in the beginning is not necessarily who we will end up with over time.  I have come to the conclusion for myself that it is necessary to know someone two years before one can be sure one is clear of the wooing period and is seeing the true person without rose colored glasses.  This, of course, varies from couple to couple.  But what I can say with absolute confidence is that one should know someone for longer than a month before one makes any life-changing decisions.

My first date with X was not particularly noteworthy – nothing especially romantic or exciting.  Just your typical happy hour get-together at a local town bar.  The only thing I particularly remember was that towards the end of the evening, an acquaintance from high school – a guy who was a few years ahead of me – sat down at the bar next to us and joined our conversation as though we were not obviously on a date.  Eventually and obliviously, the guy went so far as to ask me out.  I replied without hesitation or thought, “I’m a lesbian.”  To which he replied, “Can I watch?”  That seemed like a good time to pay the bill and leave.  It was on the walk back to our cars that I suddenly realized the man beside me did not know that I am not a lesbian and I awkwardly had to try to explain my “speak first, think later” self. 

Despite that slight hiccup, our dates became more frequent.  Soon, I was invited to his apartment for the first time.  I cannot state emphatically enough: infatuation is blinding.  I hardly noticed that he had shoved clothing and newspapers under the couch cushions in an attempt to provide me a place to sit.  The situation was similar in his room – his mattress was directly on the floor and covered in clothing, papers, CDs and other miscellaneous items.  The kitchen counter was also difficult to find underneath the mail and scraps of previous meals.

I’m not a particularly clean and tidy person, though I generally keep things in a state where I wouldn’t be embarrassed to have people drop by unexpectedly.  I was rather unimpressed with the state of his home, but as I said, this was the wooing period during which one tends to overlook such small details as the way a person keeps house.  What was it to me if he didn’t care about his living space? 

If you think a person’s housekeeping habits (whether they are neater or messier than yours) will not impact the long-term happiness of your relationship, think again.  I strongly recommend anyone considering a commitment ensure housekeeping is an area of compatibility.  Either you both care and make an effort or neither person cares and you live happy as pigs in… a sty.  In any case, while there is always some room for compromise, this is an area of a relationship that really can and must be addressed in the earliest days.  If you walk into someone’s place and the sight of it makes you quiver with fear (either because they show symptoms of OCD or they strike you as the kind who, fifty years hence, might be found dead in their home buried under a six foot wall of old newspapers and garbage), you may want to reconsider the next date.  It will be important in the course of a relationship.

But I was twenty-two and that was a lesson I had not yet learned.

Another signal that might have raised an eyebrow or two among the objective observers was when, one night, after about two weeks of dating, X found a gray hair on my head.  I was, of course, mortified.  But as he plucked it out he said something rather unexpected. 

“I think we should dye our hair gray now so we can start getting used to how we will look when we are old.”

They say, “You’re as old as you think you are.”  With hindsight, I can perfectly well recognize that this was an indication of how old X thought he was – and that’s about 84 years.  I didn’t put together all the pieces at the time – the gray hair comment, the fact that almost all of his friends were at least twenty-five years older than he was and that his closest familial relationship was with his grandparents. 

As, at the time, my emotional age was about thirteen, all I heard was, “when we are old.”  And my happy heart spun images of a wedding, followed by a long life being loved by this man.  Never again having to worry whether I’d end up alone; having the security I’d always tried to squeeze (to the point of suffocation) out of every boyfriend I’d ever dated.  It never occurred to me that one’s twenties could be a time of fun and freedom and that would still leave many, many years for a committed relationship.  I was ready for the fairytale “happily ever after,” and this guy was offering it.

Days later, with a sort of “understanding” that this was “forever” between us, I left for the dream job in Washington.  No longer enthusiastic about my great chance to make my way in the world, all I was thinking about was the love I was leaving behind.  We had talked about whether he would ever move to D.C., as I had not really enjoyed my childhood in my hometown and was not enthusiastic about living there permanently.  But he said he had a good job (more than I had) and wanted to be in close proximity to his grandparents for as long as they were around.  After which, though, he would consider moving anywhere.  Made sense to me.

When I turned down the full-time gig with the magazine, I headed back home.  I had met X in early June, moved to DC in late June and was back in early August, certain I was sure what I wanted for the rest of my life. 

X picked me up from the train station upon my return and presented me with a beautiful bracelet.  I was enchanted!  A gift!  And it wasn’t even my birthday!  This was something that had never happened to me before… this was romance… this was love!

I pause here to comment that another example of “wooing period” behavior is unexpected gifts.  If you are given a gift for no reason in the first four months of a relationship, it is a lovely gesture, but it does not necessarily signify that you are seeing a true romantic who will make every day a special occasion by turning up with a token of affection.  Date for awhile.  See if those gifts keep coming a year or two later. 

But again, I didn’t know this at the time.  As it turned out, I think that was the first and last unexpected gift I was given.  However, just a week or so later, I was to receive another piece of jewelry.  The one that almost every girl dreams about from the time she can make a veil out of toilet paper.

X had to pick up a package at the post office.  He was nervous and excited, which made me nervous and excited.  We were there when the doors opened at 9:00 a.m.  The day was all blue sky and puffy, white clouds.  I stayed in the car while he collected what he claimed were school supplies.  He emerged with a mischievous grin and refused to let me see what he had picked up, but I had a pretty good idea.

We went to a local diner for breakfast and I ordered pancakes, as usual.  We giggled a lot, both us aware of the smoke coming from his pocket where the package was burning a hole with its desire to be revealed.  Midway through our meal, we overheard a conversation two older gentlemen at the neighboring table were having, describing how they had met their wives.  They reminisced with loving anecdotes about the days they had proposed and the lives they had led together.  X and I looked at each other and smiled that “young love” gooey smile. 

At last he cleared his throat and said to me, “Will you do me a favor?”  Feeling the moment was upon me, I was breathless and nodded.  “Will you be my wife?” he finished, as he pulled the ring box out from his pocket. 

This wasn’t exactly how I had imagined a proposal – over pancakes and bacon, trying to avoid the sticky syrup on the table.  But, nonetheless, I said “yes.”  The ring was lovely, vintage 1940s, white gold filigree with a small, but pretty diamond.  I slipped it on my finger and it twirled around like I’d just won the ring toss at a carnival.  “It’s a little big,” I commented, giggling. 

“I asked what size I should get,” he said, embarrassed.  “I was told it should match your shoe size.  You’re a 7 ½.”

I giggled some more, “Yes, well, I guess I was meant to have smaller feet or larger fingers.”

What frustrated him the most was that the ring had initially been a size 5, which is what I wear, but he’d had it made larger because of my shoes.  Now he would have to resize it down to its original size.  Ah well.  We didn’t dwell on it long.

I assumed he had planned the day around this event.  We were having perfect summer weather and as a teacher, he didn’t have to work, so the world was our oyster – the beach?  New York for a show?  A hot air balloon ride?  What would it be?  I couldn’t wait to leave the diner and find out how we would celebrate.

After breakfast we went for a walk along the town’s linear trail.  This is a small and silly pet peeve of mine – linear trails.  I like circles.  I like following a trail that leads me back to the beginning so I don’t have to pick a spot and double back on myself.  The park always annoyed me.  But, well, that’s my own little neurosis so not fair to blame anyone for that.  There we were walking along the trail and the first person we come across is one of my former high school teachers.  My very least favorite teacher.  The teacher who made me hate science with a passion and abandon all fantasies of becoming a marine biologist or a primatologist.  Masking my feelings, we smiled happily as we approached her and I showed off my ring, thinking how very odd it was that she should be the first person to know. 

Shortly afterwards, we returned to his apartment and I waited for what I was sure would be the next part of my surprise.  The surprise, it would seem, was on me…  X took a nap.

Napping would become a very sore spot with me.  I had stopped napping somewhere around six months old and had never looked back.  There was too much to do with every day to waste it sleeping.  But for X, naps were a daily ritual.  A necessity.  They took precedence over what others might consider important activities (like picking your wife up from the police station after a car accident).  Ever after, I have considered napping to be a relationship deal-breaker.

So there I was, 11:00 a.m., on a bright, sunny August morning, standing by myself on the back deck of X’s apartment overlooking a cemetery, staring at the ring dangling from my finger and wondering, “What did I just do?”

The thought was there…  I know it was.  There was an opportunity to change my mind.  The problem was a twenty-two year old (or, to be fair, this twenty-two year old) looked at the situation as an isolated incident.  It was the disappointment of this particular moment.  It was enough to make me question what I was doing, but it didn’t seem like a big enough problem to make me second-guess my decision to spend the rest of my life with this person.  The “rest of my life” was an abstract and unimaginable concept.  I had a ring and a wedding right before me.  These I understood.  These excited me.  In my naivety, I didn’t understand that wedding and marriage are two very different things.  And that of the two, “marriage” was significantly more important than wedding.  A wedding lasts a day.  A marriage, well…

I did not look ahead and consider that if this is how I felt on the day of the proposal, how would I feel on other special occasions?  I did not stop to think whether I would be similarly disappointed on every anniversary, Valentine’s Day, birthday, Christmas, etc.  I did not think of the future at all.  I just thought that on this particular occasion, I was sad and I didn’t think I ought to be.

I stormed into X’s bedroom and kicked his feet.  Grumpy at the abrupt awakening, he grumbled at me, wondering what was wrong.  I whined something about having thought he might have made some small effort to make the day special.  Sleepily he rubbed his eyes and asked what I wanted to do.  But the wind was out of my sails.  I didn’t want to have to tell him what I wanted to do.  I wanted him to have made the effort to think of something. 

Amazing how clear the warning signs are in retrospect.  It seems so self-evident that the indications of all that would make me unhappy were right there in the first six weeks of our relationship.  I just didn’t see any of it.  I was living in the present.  I was carried away by the fairytale of “love at first sight” and the romance of giving up what I thought I wanted for myself to be with the man I loved.  I didn’t know that often the little things that bother you at first are actually likely to get worse as a relationship develops.  But someone who graduated with a double major in government and history should have known: the past is prologue.