Returning to my much-neglected blog, I realized it’s been almost two years since I’ve posted here. My most recent post gives a hint. In that, I wondered, “Is happiness bad for writing?” Short answer: it’s at least bad for blogging, for me.
Much has happened since the days I sought refuge daily by screaming into this quiet little void of mine here. Not to be too much of a “Charlotte,” as I’m sometimes accused of being, the Sex in the City character most likely to have had a bride doll in childhood (guilty as charged), and to have doodled her boyfriend’s last name appended to her own in high school (also guilty). But of all the things that have happened while I’ve been on blogging hiatus, this one feels like the most transformative: I got married.
I won’t be totally basic by gushing about what a great guy he is (he is), how handsome and perfect for me he is (he is), or how magical the day was (it was). I won’t go into it too much that rain was forecasted all week but the day turned out to be resplendent, as if I’d phoned up the weather gods myself. The sun beamed brightly as we exchanged vows in front of the ocean, with a jewel-box full of wonderful people sharing the day with us. It was all that and more.
No, what I wanted to share is the way it changed me. If you’ve been a reader for a while, you’ve likely read a lot of cynicism and despair about love from me, about being wanted, about what we can expect from the world. And when I wrote those things, they all felt very true. My love life had been a series of mishaps and heartbreaks. I wrote a blog for a while on the impossibility of dating. By the time my now-husband asked me out on a date, I was just checking boxes, sure it was all for naught.
Then… he showed up.
To be sure, it felt inauspicious at the start. The restaurant he’d suggested we meet up at was closed. I wore impossibly uncomfortable shoes, which did not prepare me for the icy march that followed. He failed to check several boxes I thought were deal-breakers: he lived on the wrong side of the Hudson, and I had a rule against dating Manhattan. He didn’t have kids, and I hadn’t had great experiences with finding understanding from men without children of their own. He was younger. The kind of younger that almost made me rule him out before even meeting him.
And yet.
By the end of our first date, I was smitten. By the end of our third, we were finishing each other’s sentences and he was asking me what I was doing months in advance. On our fourth, which was on Valentine’s Day, I wondered if I might be falling in love with him. But he, ever prudent, waited excruciatingly long to say the word, wanting to be sure. By the time the word “marriage” came up, it felt like a foregone conclusion.
But it wasn’t the fairy tale of it all that changed me. It was the quiet parts. The negotiations. The learning to hold my tongue. The way he didn’t buy into my catastrophizing and worrying, but instead shook me out of it with laughter and patience. The way it turned out not to matter that I’m a terrible cook, because he’s a wonderful one and, bafflingly, he loves to do it. The fact that although I was so concerned that a non-suburban guy wouldn’t understand my lifestyle, the reality turned out to be that I loved splitting my time between places and having a pad on the Upper East Side.
So what it taught me to believe is this: you can’t know until you know. You shouldn’t expect the worst, because although some of that comes sometimes, if you open to it, what actually arrives is often full of surprises and wonders. What I learned to believe in is the element of surprise, the fact that life and circumstances and fate will always turn out to be more interesting than the thing you’re trying to force out of fear that nothing better will come along.
Because of this love, my life is immeasurably better in ways I couldn’t have foreseen: professionally, personally, health-wise, family-wise. I am in the happiest phase of my life. All because I made myself go out one cold January night, full of doubts, and left myself open to the possibility that maybe something that had never happened before still could.
And it did. And now I truly believe it can, over and over. That has been the gift of the last few years for me.
May you experience it, too.
