relationships

Well, that was easy. After a 30-second ceremony at City Hall, Ben and I are officially life partners. I can’t tell you that it feels all that different, but I can tell you that it feels good. I’m not comfortable with the whole “wife” and “husband” thing, but we’re slowly getting the hang of it - and, to my surprise, we didn’t suddenly fall into predictable gender roles or start having domestic disputes. At least not yet.

I thought I’d post a few pictures of the evening - although not nearly the full collection. I’m somewhat certain that you can’t spot the two mustard stains on my dress that I worked for hours to remove. If you can see them, please don’t tell me.

After the marriage itself, we ate cheese burgers at a local pub (it was, after all, our special day) and then walked over to our favorite hole-in-the-wall dive bar, Rudy’s, where many a man is drinking away their pension, no matter what time of the day it is and where every seat cushion is covered in a copious amount of duct tape. We then spent the night hanging with friends old and new and ended the evening with some take-out Chinese food. I couldn’t have had a better wedding if I were given a huge budget and many months of planning.

Still, we are planning a more official event in a year or two that will include our far-away friends and relatives. Until then, though, every time I have a $6 pitcher of domestic beer and an old hot dog, I’ll think about how much I love Ben.

There are more pictures located here. Ben obviously wrote the captions.

I’ll update again tonight with the terrifying adventure known as our winter cabin honeymoon/brush with death. It was really romantic, almost dying together in the snow.

Ben and I are getting married. To each other!

I know I haven’t really told many people, but I feel kind of strange talking about it - it seems a little private, not to mention that my least favorite beast on earth is the rabid bride-to-be. Don’t worry, I don’t want to talk about my dress or my date or my ring or my attendants.

Well - I suppose I will mention the date. We’re heading over to City Hall tomorrow, where we will be married in the eyes of the city clerk, our best friend Dan Brooks, God, and about half a dozen immigrants who are entering loveless marriages in exchange for a green card. After the ceremony, we’re heading to our favorite dive bar to celebrate with a few close friends.

Although we’ve been engaged for months now (again, I mostly didn’t know how to bring it up), we decided that this was the right time - why sit around in an emotional waiting room? We already live together, we already know we want to spend our lives kicking ass together, not to mention my health insurance runs out at the end of the month.

It’s been funny - whenever I tell someone about the upcoming wedding, they say that they didn’t guess that I was the marrying kind. And although I’m not always into some of the roles and connotations and history of marriage, I am very comfortable - no, I’m very elated - to marry Ben. I’m pretty sure he feels the same.

We’ll probably have a bigger, more traditional party/reception in a few years for all of our friends and family, when we’re more settled and when we have a greater need for flatware. Right now, though, this simply feels right.

All of this hullabaloo paired with my new job also explains the lack of updates - for example, today I spent hours and hours writing copy about personal injury lawsuits while also trying to get a stain out of the dress I want to wear tomorrow. I’ll try to post a few pictures tomorrow, but then we’re off to a wintery cabin in the Catskills where we will spend the weekend sitting in front of a fire, staring into each other’s eyes, and drawing up our initial divorce papers.

…Okay, okay, I’ll post a picture of the engagement ring. My aunt, who knows much more about these things, helped me find it and I love the thing.

There should be a special word for the feeling one feels upon getting a “nice rejection.” It’s kind of like a combination of the back-handed compliment (I love that skirt - I barely notice your hammish thighs!) and the it’s-not-you-it’s-me breakup (I want to focus on my career. In fact, I want to focus on anything that isn’t your hammish thighs.). It’s like being on the waiting list when I was looking at colleges (We’d love for you to join us, if a certain number of people we’d love to join us more than you decide to go to better universities).

I say this, of course, because I got a kind rejection in the mail yesterday - this time from Meridian, a mid-level lit magazine. It’s hand-written and signed by the editor, which is good. However, it is a rejection, which is bad. It says, and I quote, “I regret the delayed response. I was trying hard to find a place for this in our magazine, but it hasn’t worked out. Please try us again. Best of luck.”

Granted, these always make you feel better than the dozens and dozens of blank photocopied mass-mailed business-card-sized rejections, which make me picture the magazine’s submissions readers reciting sentences from my piece out loud and laughing at how outrageously bad it is. However, can’t they think of a lamer excuse than, “I couldn’t find a place for it in the magazine”? How about on a series of blank pages? Why not just tell me that you think we’d make better friends and should take a break from one another?

It always makes my heart feel… something confusing: they almost wanted me. They almost did, but they didn’t. Le sigh.

I got it - it’s the same exact feeling when you get picked not exactly last for a team sport in gym class - let’s say basketball. Sure, it feels bad to stand there for so long while the girl with the glasses gets picked, followed by the girl with the skin thing, followed by the girl who wets herself. But then you hear your name right before the very last girl is picked and run to join your team, giving them high-fives one after another, thanking god that they built that wheelchair ramp to the gym so that Margaret could participate.

I stupidly didn’t realize that weight issues are probably right up there with politics and religion when it comes to sensitivity, feather-rustling and strong opinions. (This is probably not the time to mention how much I hate musicals. Yes, I even hate Rent. Yeah, I know. Is anyone still reading?) And while I think it’s okay to talk about these hot-button issues (probably even vital to communicate these issues to one another) a blog probably isn’t the best place to do so - certainly no where near as good as talking to people face to face.

And doing just that this morning with my cube-mate Liz, we had a pretty great conversation about how the best way to express your opinions on touchy subjects is to talk from your own experience (and also about how depressing basement gyms can be).

So - I’m going to drop the weight part of the issue and talk a little about something that I feel strongly about that I don’t think I expressed well yesterday, this time talking a bit more about myself.

I’m very wary of self-love and confidence and acceptance. I know that sounds weird. Nannying over the last eight years or so, I’ve seen a trend of telling kids, especially girls, to love themselves no matter what, to be confident, to trust your feelings. To laugh at all of their jokes, to praise and support everything they do. I’ve also read it on a lot of magazine racks - be yourself! Love yourself!

And, to a point, this is great. So often, our culture tells us that we aren’t perfect and not good enough and women are being asked more and more to be everything - have children, have a career, still look perfect, etc. It’s a lot of pressure and, besides that, it’s just plain impossible to be everything to everyone.

But has the pendulum swung too far? Sometimes I think so - that the line between loving and valuing who we are (and we should all, down to the very last one of us, be loved and valued) and knowing when there are parts of you that you don’t love and that you can change.

As corny as it sounds, I think this goes back to the framed needlework art that probably hangs in one of your aunt’s bathrooms: God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change courage to change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference.

My own struggle has been with shyness and social anxiety. It’s in my genes, it’s something wrong with my brain, it probably had a bit to do with my environment growing up, and it’s part of my personality. Now, while I can’t change the way my brain works, for whatever varied reasons it works that way, I can change the way I think about it and the way I act. Just like any other struggle, it never ends or gets easier - I can only understand it better and work with it.

My mom helped me with this a lot growing up (when I was younger I couldn’t even make phone calls) and as I’ve gotten older I’ve read a lot about it and gotten some help. I still have to force myself to do things (call people, attend parties, act normal in meetings, meet the parents) but the experiences and relationships I get from pushing myself and deciding to simply be uncomfortable have been more than worth it.

So is my social anxiety something I can’t change and should accept, or is it something I can work on? I say, even if I’ll never be “normal,” even if it means I might cry a little before I can ask someone to the movies, I’d rather end up in the movies with a new friend than alone in my house, not crying, having “accepted myself.” Just because shyness is an innate part of me doesn’t mean I have to like it. If anything I hope it’s made me more outspoken than someone who doesn’t worry constantly about social situations.

On the other hand, there are things I can’t change, like my diminutive height or laughable breast size. In these cases, I have to put away any dreams I had of being a basketball center or a successful stripper and come to terms with it. I mean, at least I can jog without a sports bra.  

But going back to the original argument, I wonder what would have happened if, while I was growing up, my mom (who also struggles with shyness, although you’d never be able to tell) taught me to love myself exactly as I was. Would I still have forced myself to join the improv troupe in college or try out for a spot in the opinion section of the newspaper - two things that I truly valued and enjoyed? Would I even have been able to follow my dream of becoming a writer?

And I think this links back to self-criticism and self-doubt. I think they are integral in being open-minded and improving yourself. It was hard reading some of the responses I got yesterday, but a lot of them had good points in them. Yes, it wasn’t any fun to beat myself up about what I had written or to admit to myself that I had not considered certain aspects of my argument, but it’s a lot better than blocking out the criticism and saying “I believe what I believe and I love myself.”

Perhaps it’s just as important to teach our daughters to listen to others as well as listening to their own hearts and to teach them that it’s just as important to accept the constants in life as it is to fight for anything they wish if they have any kind of a fighting chance.

Ben and I often talk about how it will be important in our futures to always be a little uncomfortable. To keep pushing ourselves and to question everything.

Settling with every aspect of who you are today is a very comforting thing to do. And here I am filled with a lot of self-doubt and even more self-criticism. But it’s these doubts and criticisms that will, hopefully, keep me thinking, keep me refining the way I see the world, and keep me moving forward.

And, I swear to God, my next post will be a light-hearted collection of humorous observations about life.