Wedding Woes and Alcohol Part 3: The Finale

It is ridiculous how excited I was to post this on Facebook, truly ridiculous.

Oh well...

At the moment I am writing this, my wedding ceremony started  two years ago on this day. It hurts; it literally hurts in my chest. But that is because I miss my husband, not because I joyfully reminisce about this day.

Gemma did an AMAZING job, and I know that a lot of people really enjoyed the wedding and reception. I just wasn't one of them. And that wasn't her fault.

Proposed location of wedding

The day before the wedding, I started panicking. I went to my father and started ranting about all of my frustrations. He asked me if I wanted to cancel the wedding. I said I didn't, and I meant it. I still mean that. As a solution to my litany of complaints, my father proposed that we go up to his hunting cabin (affectionately known as "the camp") and get married by the Green River in front of the waterfall. Only immediate family.

That idea calmed me down a lot, and I spent the rest of the day considering the suggestion. The camp is a place that is very sacred and special to me. It reminds me of my grandparents, being little, having fun swimming and making forts with my cousins, and other fun stuff. The good parts of life. I have many, many fond memories of the people that I love the most, hanging out at that river on the fourth of July.

Fourth of July 2011

Small, private, sentimental, personal. My Dad really had an excellent solution to all of my worries and complaints.

I remember mentioning this suggestion to my husband, and it was met with a lukewarm response. He wasn't opposed to it, but he wasn't a fan of the idea either. And of all the people in the world whose approval I seek (and I literally seek the approval of EVERYONE in the world), I seek my husband's approval the most.

That was where I made another huge mistake.
If I had to do it all over again, I would have said something like, "Look, buddy, this is my wedding day too, and we are going to compromise!"

Fourth of July 2011

But frankly, standing up for myself and drawing some boundaries would have been a little too healthy of a response for me at that point in time. And that is NOT my husband's fault. I had not set any personal boundaries for myself during the course of our relationship, and it would have been odd to start setting those boundaries on our wedding day. Besides, if I set any boundaries for myself, he might decide he doesn't want to be with me, and I would end up a childless, old spinster with an unhealthy obsession with her dog! Wait, Oops, that happened anyway :(

And besides, as a passive-aggressive, I was definitely going to need some grievances from the past to throw at him at some undetermined time in the future, when there is nothing he could do about it, and I could therefore assert that I had been victimized by him in some way. I mean, how am I supposed to bolster any unrelated argument against him if I didn't save up some ammunition? These are some things to consider.

The Betrayal

Truth be told, very early in our relationship I had compromised my boundaries and dignity in order to make the relationship work. My husband had dated a girl named Megan the summer before we met, and he had very strong feelings for her when we started dating. After 3 or 4 weeks of dating, I asked my husband if he wanted to date me exclusively. At that point, he told me that he loved spending time with me, but if Megan ever called, he would most definitely ditch me to be with her. I broke up with him that night.

About a month or so later, I texted him in a knee jerk reaction to some other guy being a lying sack of shit. I thanked him for his brutal honesty, in spite of the fact that I had been crushed by that truth. But, like my Italian ex-boyfriend used to say, "Better the ugly truth, than a beautiful lie." It was his honesty at a difficult point that allowed me to have confidence in thinking that he would always tell me the truth. In turn, I opened up to him, made myself vulnerable, and had strong confidence in his honesty and integrity.

Six months down the road, my husband and I were living together (in addition to all my other issues, I'm also very codependent, so moving in together seemed like a great idea! No unhealthiness going on here!).

Our relationship took a turn for the worse in March of that year. I had just finished mid-terms in grad. school, and I was pretty stressed out, so my husband and I decided to go down to Florida to visit my family. My family is in Florida every March for our family vacation. Initially, it was a fun and relaxing trip until my phone died and I used my husband's to contact my Mom. I was trying to figure out why she was late to the beach. While attempting to text her, I ran across text messages between my husband and Megan. He had been texting her the entire time we had been dating and living together. I had no idea. I was crushed.

Apparently, my husband had decided that he should invite Megan out with all of our friends on St. Patrick's Day while I was home, sober, and writing my mid-term papers. I couldn't go out drinking because I was in recovery, and truthfully, I had more important important things to do that day than drink.

Picture taken minutes before I found out about Megan

The betrayal was palpable. I had been with him and our friends having lunch only an hour or two before he had texted her to come hang out with him. He did this, while I was at home in the apartment we shared, with our dog, studying for my mid-terms. Luckily, she didn't show up because she was in graduate school as well and she had a committed boyfriend. But what if she did show up?

The trust I had for him, the trust that made up the very foundation of our relationship, was gone. He hid things from me, he had no problems with lies of omission. I felt a fool for making myself vulnerable to him, loving him, trusting him...and he had done the exact same thing as the guy before him. I felt like an idiot. I kept choosing men that were settling for me while they secretly had their eyes on other prospects. Better prospects than my damaged self. The boyfriend I had a year prior to that specific day had done the exact same thing. Only he did it with many women, on many occasions. The ex-boyfriend actually strangled me until I nearly passed out in his own parents home when I finally caught him for the last time and broke up with him. A year later, I was in the exact same position--minus the strangling. I was still dealing with the legal fallout of that situation and the cops investigation into that event until just weeks before my wedding. So, on top of all the other stress I was experiencing in the weeks before the wedding, I was having to talk to the cops and the district attorney in the county where that incident occurred.

Picture taken about an hour and a half before my husband texted Megan to hang out

At least the first time, I still had the dignity to stand up for myself and put an end to the relationship. The second time I was just too worn down by life. And in the back of my head was the same little voice reminding me that I was in my early 30's and that it would be unlikely for me to ever get married or have children if I broke off the relationship. So I just shut down. I expressed to my husband my hurt and frustration, but I was still so set on taking the traditional trajectory of a "successful" life (meaning marriage and children), that I put my feelings of betrayal and pain aside. I remember even telling myself: with the kind of life you have lived, this is the best that you are ever going to get: there is no such thing as true love.

So I swallowed my pain and retreated back into my inner world that included only studying, going to classes, binge watching TV on Netflix, and sleeping as much as possible. I was just too tired to try to start all over, so I didn't. I even helped my husband come up with the rationalization for his behavior that he uses to this day. I didn't do it for him. I did it for me. I needed to save face, I needed to make this work, and I needed everything to appear beautiful on the outside even if was nothing but a shit storm on the inside. So, I forged on through. Obviously, appearances are way more important that reality.

Thus, if I didn't have enough dignity and self respect to stand up for myself when that whole situation occurred, why would I suddenly have the impetus to do so on my wedding day--a day that I was in an even more fragile state of mind. My husband had no experience with me actually asserting personal boundaries, so why would he suddenly know how to deal with me doing so on my wedding day. So, like I had done in the past, I put my own needs and desires aside and saved my rage for a later date...the day that things finally went too far.

I still cry when I think about the stress of that wedding. I have ever since it happened. It was the beginning of the end, and it was my fault. I couldn't make one healthy decision in regard to that relationship. But those are stories for another day.

Stay tuned for: "The Honeymoon: How to Have a Drinking Binge in 5 Different Countries," and "Being a Weirdo and Other Wedding Related Blunders"