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28 Jun 2010 2 Comments
in Love, Wedding Tags: Dreams, Love, relationships
One of the first things I said after my divorce was, I’ll never get married again. And I really believed that. Mind you, I didn’t plan to grow old alone, but I wasn’t comfortable with letting the idea of being “married” and all the stress it put on my previous relationship happen to me again. Then slowly, I started to discover that neither the pomp and circumstance of a wedding, nor the vows of the marriage had dissolved what my ex and I had created. We did. We never talked about our feelings, we only yelled when we were angry. We didn’t hear what the other was saying, we just planned our next rebuttal. We were proud people, who forgot to build OUR team. We forgot to put each other first. We grew in different directions. When life handed us circumstances that made it easy for us to grow apart, we didn’t put our efforts into building a stronger US…we put our efforts into making ourselves more independent. We erased the need or desire to lean on the other person. It wasn’t marriage that did that, it was little choices that we made along the way. Unintentional choices, that chipped away and eroded our foundation.
So when Mike and I were first dating, I made some stupid off-hand comment about never getting married again. And for just a split second, a look of hurt flashed across his face. I never said those words out loud again…although, there was still a part of me that thought that. Then months later, we were arguing about something small, and we both recognized early on that it was me…carrying my baggage of my past relationship. He said to me, “I’m not him…let me make my own mistakes.” And it hit me, like a ton of bricks. Just because I’d failed once, didn’t mean I was destined to fail again. In fact, I was now armed with experience and knowledge of what can happen.” And so I let him be him…and he failed and I failed, but we did it together. And when we fail, we talk about it. And when we hurt one another, we talk about it. And when we are feeling lonely or needy, we tell one another. I learned to be vulnerable with him. That if I tell him my feelings, he will listen and he will HEAR me. I learned that a relationship is never cemented, it’s one day at a time. Every day a blessing, every day a battle, every day important. So Mike and I, we talk, every day. We talk about little things, we talk about big things. We share our frustrations of work. We share our successes at work or fitness or parenting. He and I, we’re a team…every day.
So when he asked if I would spend the rest of my life with him, the only answer I could have possibly given was yes. (Well, actually I said, sure…which led him to ask me about 6 more times over the next 4 days until he heard the answer he truly wanted, but that’s a story for another day.) Because, together we will build a marriage, one brick, one talk, one kiss, one day at a time. Never forgetting that to say I do, is to say I will, each day for the rest of my life.
Anxiously Engaged,
Angi
