Two friends of mine got married today.  I didn’t go to the wedding because I had to work, but also because weddings give me anxiety.

I know, I’m an asshole.

I’ve always been averse to  marriage.  I guess I just rebelled against the idea that good little girls grew up and got married and had babies and were good wives and mothers and that’s all that society wanted from them.  I was always the girl who was the nonconformist, the one who marched to the beat of her own drum.  I wanted to be respected and to be known for more than being just some guy’s wife.  Mrs. So-And-So, like my own name didn’t matter anymore.  The idea of being a Mr. and Mrs. Blahblahblah and losing the ability to be identified by my own last name freaked me out.

Disney, however, gave me the inner confliction of being someone’s happily-ever-after and so in a way I wanted all that marriage crap.  I wanted to be loved and have someone who wanted to spend the rest of their life with me.  In fact, all the way up until I was 20 I thought that I would fall hopelessly in love with the first guy I fell in love with and he would be The One and I would get married and BAM, happily ever after achieved.  End level, character power up and max score bonus.  Easy peasy, right?

WRONG.

Got my heart broken by my first “love”.  Got knocked up and left to be a single mom.  Got up after a few years of inner healing and got back in the game.  I’ve never been a huge dater and can count my boyfriends on a single hand.  Dating and all the shit that comes with it just never appealed to me.  I guess I’m not the average girl.  I don’t know.  But I do know that I hadn’t found anyone that I wanted to spend the rest of my time on this planet with–and that I wasn’t buying into society’s shit about finding “The One” because it seemed like they thought they found The One and it turned out that they were The One Right Now But Not Really.  You married someone and then got divorced and got married again and repeated the cycle as many times as you fell in love, thought you found your soul mate, fucked up, and started again.  It seemed like a very expensive and painful way to date.  Like a really unnecessary iOS.

And for some reason, I’ve always tended to gravitate towards older guys.  Maybe it’s because my mom and dad are twenty years apart and made it work for the past thirty.  Maybe it’s because I thought perhaps older guys had their shit together.  I’m starting to think that maybe I’m wrong and maybe they’re as impossibly fucked up as the 28 and 29 year old guys that surround me on a daily basis.  Maybe the older guys I dated are just out of the norm and are fucked up–like a defected version of an adult…or maybe as I’m getting older I’m seeing that we never leave behind our younger selves with all our quirks and fucked up-ness and immaturity.  Maybe.  I mean, I dated a guy fifteen years older than me and he’s as fucked up as my friend who just turned 29 last month.  Maybe.

Weddings make me sad because they make me realize that I can’t keep it together in the way that society expects me to.  I can’t keep a boyfriend, and the last guy I dated had me over the moon and completely and totally head-over-heels…like I finally saw myself maybe marrying someone.  And what happens?  Oh, you know…he just goes back to the ex-wife he was never really over who really really resembles me–and she lives a state away and he lives eight streets from me.  I make them want someone six hundred miles away.  Just the typical, usual, fucked up shit that happens in my life.  If it wasn’t so comical, I think I would be really sad a lot of the time.  Weddings make me think that maybe I’m just not capable of finding someone who wants to be with me and doesn’t use me as a pale imitation of The One that they never fully let go of.  I think I make them want to go back to the The One They Never Fully Let Go Of.  And then they put a ring on it again and spend the rest of their lives with that stupid person, while I sit around pretending I’m okay even though I’m secretly, quietly wondering what the hell is wrong with me.  Le sigh.

I had a player at the casino today say, “You’re so nice.  Why don’t you have a ring on your finger?”  Well, Random Nice Player Guy, I am nice.  I’m pretty damn awesome.  But being nice and being awesome doesn’t mean that I need to enter into an expensive and potentially lifetime agreement with a guy, you know?  I don’t think a band of precious metal and a rock measures my worth as a human being.  I’d like to have a guy come up to me and be like, “You are pretty and funny and smart and awesome and wonderful and quirky and you are perfect just the way you are and I would be honored if you would like to share your awesome life with me.”  Just.  Like.  That.  No crazy baggage or brokenness or hangups or issues or fucked up-ness.  Just a great awesome guy who is hot and funny and smart and isn’t hung up on their last girlfriend or ex-wife or someone they dated ten years ago.  Maybe that guy doesn’t exist.  He sounds a lot like a unicorn.  Covered in hot pink glitter.

Weddings make me measure up my own failures as a human being with an imperfect heart and I don’t like the way I feel when I think about marriage or weddings…it makes me feel inadequate and unable to relate.  I guess I’m pretty certain I’m just going to end up alone, a spinster lady who can’t knit or sew and is allergic to cats.

Congrats to my two friends.  I wish them many years of happiness and that this is the only marriage they participate in.  Have tons of kids and cookies and anniversaries and grow old together and all that sappy wonderful jazz that they talk about a lot in greeting cards.  Good luck!