When I got engaged everything seemed perfect. It began, as all fairy tales ought to end, dancing under the stars in a park while Louis Armstrong crooned "Dancing Cheek to Cheek." He held me tightly and kissed me softly. As the music swelled, he got down on one knee and looked up at me with his clear blue eyes. "Will you marry me?" he asked and I whispered, "Yes, yes, yes…" and fell into his arms. How hard can this be? I wondered.
In the following months, I managed to break my cell phone and my computer and smash my finger in a coffee grinder. Not to mention I couldn't print on my "print your own" response cards and my wedding dress came with a small manufacturer's flaw and the company refused to issue me a refund. The night I found a bat in my room I was on my last leg. I managed to trap the bat in a trashcan and take it outside, where it insisted on staying in the trashcan. I grabbed a stick and beat the trashcan hoping the bat would fly out. It didn't move. There I was at 3 o'clock in the morning, outside in my pajamas, with empty juice bottles and wadded Kleenex scattered around me, crying and beating a trashcan.
"Are you okay?" asked a well-meaning passerby.
"I'm fine!" I screamed, blindly swinging the stick while tears poured off of my face onto my pink poodle pajamas. "I'm fine!"
The next time I talked to my fiancée, I was a slobbering mess.
"How can I be a wife, when I can't even be a functioning adult?" I sobbed. "How can I plan a wedding when I can't even get the wedding dress right? Is it a sign? Should we not be doing this?"
"Is this worth it?" He asked.
I grabbed a tissue. Is it worth it? I wondered. Is all of this worth it? Dealing with parents, relatives, card companies, and caterers. Moving to Iowa and living near a John Deere Credit Union for him instead of my dream of New York? Is it even worth it? In that moment I began to understand why I was the only one of my friends getting married. They were living in the city, where they had jobs and no one to regulate their spending habits, while I was desperately trying to negotiate two human beings into one. Was it worth it?
I learned the answer, two months before the wedding. I still hadn't received a refund for my unprintable "print your own" response cards, so I called the company. After three rings, a man named Juan, who patiently explained that he worked for an answering service based out of India, the company was out of business, and I would never get my money back. I began to sob."Ma'am," Juan said, "I suggest you eat some won ton soup and feel better. Have a nice day."
He hung up.
I lost it. I beat my pillow and sobbed, I sniffed and snorted.
When I finally got out of bed, I called my fiancée and told him the story. He laughed. "It's not funny I told him. I can't do this. I'm losing it. I'm crying over won ton soup, right now. I'm a basket case."
"Is it worth it," he asked, "Can you live with out me?"
"Yes, I can. I can live without you." I answered. "But, that's not the right question. The right question is, do I want to live without you? And the answer is no."
At that moment, two months before my wedding lying on my bed, my eyes throbbing from crying, I felt far from perfect and I ached, not for shiny rings or pretty dresses. But I ached for him. We got married and it wasn't quite perfect and I wasn't quite a princess. But I marched toward that altar with a huge smile on my face, knowing that a lifetime waited for me at the end of the aisle and it was worth it.
We've been married for three years now and in that time together we have faced death and heart wrenching tragedy, we've screamed, cried, and hung drywall together. But it's also gotten better. We've laughed until Coke came out of our noses, stayed up until 2AM on a work night just talking, and I wake up every morning with his arm wrapped around my waist. And whenever things get a little dicey and I start to lost it, he tells me to eat some won ton soup—it always makes me feel better.
