Into the void...

2006-08-01

7:39 p.m.

For those of you who haven’t already heard, this has been one hell of a summer for me. I finally graduated with my Master’s degree after three and a half years of chipping away at it course by course, while working full-time. Graduating would have been enough excitement for the month of June, but, a little more than a week later, Rob and I flew to Vegas and got married.

I am now a married woman, but it’s better if I don’t think of it that way.

Rob asked me last summer. It took me until this April to decide. The months in between were filled with maddening mental episodes playing out every possible bad scenario that might happen in a marriage. Seriously, I’d be showering or walking down the street or riding the bus, and I’d think, What if he’s been lying to me about something – anything – for five and a half years? What if staying with me was some sick scheme he’d concocted so he could convince me to marry him before springing some huge surprise on me?

Then I started to ask myself why it wasn’t as easy as figuring out whether or not I love him. Of course I love him. I’ve loved him since October 2000, when he first started e-mailing me. It’s the kind of love that, six years ago, was the kind of love that made me sick to my stomach with excitement. Less than a year after we first met, I moved from Boston to Athens, Georgia to live with him. The whole year in Athens, I’d be at work for a few hours at a time, and I would absolutely feel I couldn’t wait for the end of my shift before seeing him again. The thought of spending the whole day without him seemed like an unconscionable waste.

But he didn’t ask me to marry him until several years later.

Five years later, I was starting to appreciate my alone time more and more. I started wondering if I’d ever have a chance at happiness with someone who is almost always depressed. I started wondering if his love of alcohol was weakening my own ability to refrain from drinking. I started wondering if he was a distraction to my writing, my singing, everything I’d come to think of as a major element of my personality. So I started to think about what would happen if I were to leave.

And that’s when it hit me.

I could never leave him. Until the moment he punches me in the face or gets himself drunk as shit and lost in the middle of the night, I won’t leave him. Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t. He’s become more than the hopeless crush that made me feel like vomiting for the first whole year of our time together. I’ve come to think of him more as family, someone I love, whom I’d do anything for. Someone who really can’t do any wrong. Someone I would walk to the store for in the middle of the night if he had a stomachache and we were out of Tums. Someone I would follow hiking in the Adirondacks if he wanted me there and if that was what he wanted to do.

So I finally said yes.

During my nine months of indecision, I kept thinking of a very specific conversation I had with my mom when I was little. It was almost the same as the “Would you still love me if I got an F on my report card” conversation, but it was the “Is divorce okay if” conversation. I was looking for her very rigid Catholic doctrine to weaken for a moment so she could tell me she’d forgive me if I ever got divorced. I’d ask, “Is divorce okay if my husband becomes an alcoholic?” And she’d say, “Well, that’s something you’d better know before you get married.” So I’d press the issue. “Is divorce okay if I get married and my husband starts beating me after we’re married?” And she’d say, “That’s something you have to be sure of before you get married.”

Well, guess what?

If Rob had asked me to marry him six months after we met, I would have said yes because I wouldn’t have thought about it. When he asked after five years, I thought about it for nine months and realized that if I spent my whole life waiting around until I was sure, I would never get anything accomplished.

I’m never sure.

How can anyone be? You can get engaged and be sure your marriage is going to be perfect, then die in a house fire before your wedding day. Life is unpredictable. I’m through trying to force it to work out my way. The only thing being sure ever did for me was make me miserable when I turned out to be wrong. I’d rather be relatively content and perpetually baffled by everything.

I think.

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