EDITOR’S NOTE: I wrote the following post, like another I posted recently, back in September before I got married. So you will get to enjoy knowing that what you’re reading about as “upcoming” has actually happened. Oooo irony!)
Chapter 1:
One is the Loneliest Number… if You’re Over 25 in a Small Town (And Even Kind of Makes You Feel Like You Smell Bad)
I’m the last of all my close friends, and the last by several years, to get hitched. (The last time I was asked to be a bridesmaid, George Bush Junior was in office and I still went “out” on Saturday nights to some place other than the video store.)
For a long time, before I met Chris, being single made me feel like a pariah.
In Sex and the City, being a singleton is sexy. But in rural America, I felt like I’d been cursed with some strange disease–one that some people had heard of, and assured I would eventually get over, (but for which they had no recommendation on getting cured).
When each one of my friends “married off,” (a phrase I’m putting in self-conscious quotes because I hate it, but can’t think of a better way to say it right now), I’m ashamed to admit that my happiness for them was tainted by a serious case of self-pity.
It wasn’t that I wanted to get married, per se. For most of that time I wasn’t even in a relationship, let alone dating (because in the sparsely-populated area where I lived, there was seemingly no one to date. Insert “keeping it in the family” joke about rural people here, I know you want to).
But I just didn’t want to keep reliving the nightmare of K-12 P.E.
In other words, every flip through the Engagements column in my hometown newspaper, every perusal through the Class Notes section of my college alumni magazine, felt like a personal stab, like I was back in the gym and dying a little bit with each team captain’s selection of kids who actually possessed eye-hand coordination (until eventually the coach would have to forcibly put me and one other sad straggler onto a team).
So, all of this is to say, sometimes during all the stress and petty issues involved in wedding planning, I have to stop and take a moment to remind myself how I lucky I am that the emphasis is on “I’m marrying a wonderful person!” rather than “I’m (finally) getting married!”
It’s kind of sad that I got to a point in my twenties where I honestly believed this would never happen.
In fact, I probably would never have met Chris if it weren’t for the fact that, when I was already into my 30s, I started hanging around with a group of much younger people: a group of early-to-mid-twenty-somethings with whom I was enrolled in a graduate program in English (them full-time, me a “townie” taking classes at night after work).
They didn’t introduce me to my future husband, though–at least not in a direct way. There were maybe a total of two guys who would hang around, and, (in addition to the fact that they both had girlfriends “back home”), I felt a bit maternal toward them, knowing that I’d once babysat kids born in the same year as them.
But I benefited just from being around people whose status in life was a bit more open-ended. In other words, when two of my girlfriends in this group would get emails from guys on an online dating site, their responses were more “Hmm, should I click on this guy?” than “If I don’t click on this guy, am I wasting my last possible chance at love and maybe marriage and of not dying alone with my cat?”
Being around them made me feel less pariah and more Cool Older Chick Who Can Drive Us Around Campus in Her Car.
So I went from obsessing about the self-imposed SINGLE sign around my neck to being somewhat spunky about my single status–or at least thinking a little more liberally. So I get online myself, with the goal of doing nothing more serious than getting a coffee with some local guy.
(Instead, I ended up emailing and then talking on the phone with, and then meeting face-to-face, a guy who treated me like a best friend, and three years later we’re getting married.
But he still lives two hours away in a small-ish city. So my sad assessment of the rural dating pool–or puddle, if you will–remains unchanged.)
Chapter 2:
Old-y but Good-y
Perhaps it’s obvious for me to point out that wedding traditions and expectations–and the bridal mega-industry–are geared toward much younger women.
When one of my childhood friends got married, we partied so hard at her bachelorette party that I was hungover for what seemed like a week afterward.
Yet when she contacted me recently about hosting a bachelorette event for me, she pointed out that two of the four women on the guest list (including her) are breastfeeding, so they may not be able to stay the night out of town, let alone tie one on.
So I will not sugarcoat it: the truth is, it’s more than a little weird to just be getting married at an age when some of my closest friends have not only given birth multiple times, but have already made reproduction-related decisions involving outpatient surgeries.
I know plenty of people who felt certain in their love when they married in their early 20s.
(One of my closest friends is married to her high school sweetheart, and they are one of my favorite couples. Sometimes when I’m having dinner with them in their farmhouse with their three kids, I have to remind myself that they got together when we still had a curfew.)
But what I’ve had to stop and soak up is the wonderful feeling of certainty, as a bride on the “other side,” i.e., past 30), that I’ve found the right person to be my partner.
I can say for sure, because I have the benefit of hindsight, that if I had gotten married at 24 instead of 34, I would have been taking the biggest step in my life but doing so from what was–for me–a less-than-healthy time, emotionally and mentally.
Having said that, I won’t deny the fact that things like being “given away” by my parents at the beginning of the ceremony have given me pause. Participating as a grown woman in a tradition designed to feel very “Daddy’s little girl” seems like trying to stuff myself into a little pink tutu.
There’s definitely some strangeness of entering into marriage at an age when I could or (“should” by some folks’ standards) have a daughter getting married not too far into the future.
But at the same time it’s cool to think about the fact one of my close friends’ little girl–a third-grader already–has known me all of her life and will remember being at my wedding.
I like knowing that, because Chris and I are a little older, our friends’ kids–ranging from infants to one high schooler–will be part of the day, and that instead of throwing a bouquet at them, I’ll be tossing them candy.
Chapter 3/Conclusion:
The One and Only Perk of Aging is Giving Less and Less of a F#$% About What Other People Think
Aside from being mature and centered enough to know that I’m marrying the right person, the other big benefit of being an older bride is in knowing that all the little details of the wedding planning–details I watched friends fret so much over–aren’t going to change the way people already see me, (or cause the world to end, for that matter).
I want the event to seem thoughtfully and creatively planned, and I desperately want people to have a good time.
But when it comes to things like not wearing a veil, or not spending money on gold-embossed monogrammed napkins ,(or, um…not getting married in a church), I’ve reached an age where I know that if people don’t like the choices I’ve made, there’s nothing I can do about it. And furthermore, if they’re the type of people to disapprove of our somewhat offbeat wedding, then they weren’t invited and can go jump in a lake (but not the one where we’re getting hitched).
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Tags: adulthood, column, dating, essay, marriage, memoir, milestones, non-traditional, rural_life, single life, tradition, weddings
