I have dreamed about my wedding my entire life. I would play bride by wearing my flower girl dress from my uncle’s wedding. I would buy old wedding dresses at garage sales and consignment shops for my dress-up box. When my grandmother was sick she would buy bridal magazines and we would flip through, cutting out the gowns we loved. I have been a flower girl twice, a junior bridesmaid once, and a bridesmaid four times so far in my life. I love weddings, and I have had mine planned since I was probably 7, though many of the details have changed along the years (puffy sleeves and tiaras had to be nixed). I had no doubt in my mind that I would get married someday - because that is what you do. You fall in love, get married, and have lots of babies; at least that is what I was always told.
When I went to, or was in a wedding I would think about when I get married … but now I think about IF I get married. The idea of meeting someone, falling in love, and getting married used to seem just so natural to me, since family members, friends and the hundreds of characters in movies made it seem so seamlessly effortless. Now, as an adult, I see people on Facebook getting engaged and married and I think “How does that actually happen?”. I mean it, how do people find love, or how does love decide who is worthy enough to have it. What makes someone lovable?
I have shed my delusions that I will 100% get married some day. Trust me, this has been a hard pill to swallow. Unlike what I was told as a girl, not everyone gets a chance to be a bride and that is ok. Not everyone finds the love of their life, or at least not everyone gets to marry them. Not getting married is not life ending, because I would rather be single than marry someone just to get married. I don’t want to be the kind of woman that gets a little older and settles for a relationship that is lacking something just to be in a relationship. I never want to have to give an ultimatum to receive a proposal. IF I get married, I want it to be to my partner and equal on every level, someone who cannot imagine going a day without me in their life.
I like to think I was raised to want more than just a husband. I think my mother sometimes regrets telling me I don’t need a man to be happy because she just assumed that one would fall in love with me anyway. Now that I am 27, she is worried she was wrong. She sees the people I grew up with moving back to our small southern town, getting married, and having babies. What she doesn’t see is that I chose a different path. I chose the big city, the career, the path less traveled by the women where I am from. I have built a life for myself that not only doesn’t revolve around a man, it doesn’t even have a man in it. Arguably I have built a life that might not even have room for a man, but that is an entirely different post. The truth is, I have built a life that I love, with people that I love. It hasn’t been easy, and I haven’t always been happy, but that is life, and especially for someone who struggles with depression.
Yes, I sometimes get lonely and crave the physical attention of a man. Yes, my hopeless romanticism sometimes gets the best of me. Yes, I sometimes panic that love will never find me, meaning I will never have the opportunity to be a mother. The thought of never getting the opportunity to shop for a wedding dress with my mother or having that dance with my dad at my wedding makes me sad. Thinking that I might never know the look the love of my life has on his face the moment he sees me walking down the aisle breaks my heart. But, at the end of the day, if I never get married I will be ok. Don’t mistake me, I want all of those things, sometimes so bad it hurts, but if they aren’t in the cards for me I will do more than survive, I will thrive.
I believe, and maybe it’s because I come from the girl power generation, that your fiends can be the loves of your life. Maybe it is because of the Spice Girls, Now and Then, and Sex and the City that my real friends are my family, my soul mates. If I marry or if I am an old spinster Chloe will still be my perfect dinner companion and the most important opinion; Lisa will still keep me grounded in my southern roots; Connor will always help me defuse my mother; BethAnn will still be able to talk me down; May and Farah will always be there to make me laugh; and Bee will always be there to remind me of how far I have come. On other occasions I have told you about The Many Loves of My Life, but the real loves of my life are those listed above. They are the people that know my every flaw and love me more because of them. They know what I look like when I ugly cry; that I get a lazy eye when I am really drunk; that hanger is no laughing matter; and that my confidence is so easily shattered.
I might never get the chance to say “I Do!” to some dashing man who loves me. I might never get to put on a beautiful white gown and walk down the aisle. I might not ever know what it is like to hold a child of my own in my arms. That doesn’t mean that my life is not valid, that I can’t be happy, and that I haven’t really lived. I know passion, I know success, I know loyalty, I know love, and I can not think of anything that could make a life more valid, more fulfilling than a life with those things.
