Marriage Material: Part 2

*If you haven’t yet read Part 1, go right ahead. I’ll wait.

I was laying in bed in some stage of undress with the boy I’d been seeing for about two months. I really liked him. Really really. He was sweet and handsome and ambitious and smart, and he called when he said he would. I mean, the fact that he called at all was a welcome novelty, and so my highest hopes were impossible to ignore no matter how hard I tried to temper them.

As we lay there in the afterglow of still-getting-to-know-each-other sex, I could tell he wanted to say something. There was tension begging to be broken, and I lay silently waiting beside him… dying a little. This would be the moment he finally pulled away. He’s about to say he’s got something going on early in the morning, so would I please get the hell out? I sat up to leave and beat him to the punch when he finally spoke the words, “Do you want to be my girlfriend?”

This is sad, but I had honestly never been more shocked in my life. No one had ever formally asked me to be their girlfriend, and I was nearly 30 years old. Until that moment, I believed I would always be the fun girl that everybody just loved, but didn’t want to build a life with, and so I leaned into it. I did whatever I wanted with whomever I wanted. I had multiple affairs with married men as a way of cutting marriage down to size. I wanted to prove to myself that being chosen was a joke, and to take control of the narrative that I was absolutely not marriage material by my own choice. The real joke was my cavalier attitude towards sex and love. I wanted the Real Thing more than anything in the world… I just didn’t think I would have it until this shining opportunity presented itself.

And when it did, I was immediately chastened. After I became his girlfriend, I set about becoming his wife. Now I wanted to show that, in spite of my colorful past, I was in fact marriage material. I wore my new title like a badge of honor, not wanting to let either of us down. I kept score with myself. I’d inventory all the thoughts and actions that made me worthy of his love and trust, and all those that did the opposite. A painful way to exist, let me tell you.

All the people you date are mirrors. He was as afraid of my past tendencies as I was, and he made it known. So I worked harder and harder and harder to prove myself until six years later, in the same bed, he asked me to be his wife.

Even as the ring slipped onto my finger (it was a perfect fit), part of me felt like an imposter. We had something of a don’t ask don’t tell agreement about the past, but whenever anything salacious made itself known it was a whole thing, so I couldn’t help but wonder… if he knew everything, would that ring still have made its way to my hand? By then I was a lot more aware of my inner world than I had been in the beginning stages of our relationship, so I launched an investigation. Why did I feel like I wasn’t worthy of someone choosing me? I actually was a great partner, even when I wasn’t trying to be. And I’m really not that ashamed of my past. I have my regrets, but my experiences taught me way more than any self-help book ever could. And honestly… I am fun. I connect with people easily and have an knack for frivolity that many people need in their lives, and yet I am able to happily respect the bounds of a monogamous relationship. So what the hell?

It’s like there was a very intense church lady in Victorian dress living in my head admonishing me every time I said or did anything that was “immodest.” And she had a roommate. A 50’s housewife with perfect makeup that she wakes up hours before her husband to apply, looking at me in silent shock each time I did something “wrong” or let the house get insanely messy or fucked up dinner or wasn’t being of service to the man I loved in some way. These bitches are EXHAUSTING.

And yet. They are a part of me which, like my affinity for risk-taking behavior, must be alchemized and expressed in a healthy way. But none of it- NONE of it- means I’m not “marriage material.” I’ve reframed the meaning of that phrase in my mind. Rather than it being about finding ways to be pleasing to a partner or to prove my own inherent worth, it’s about healing my own shit so that if/when I do decide to go down that path with someone, I won’t always feel like I’m on a hamster wheel just trying to keep up.

The new rhetoric I see in the dating advice world is more along the lines of “love yourself first,” and “choose yourself.” Good advice, but most of us don’t even know where the fuck to begin. So why don’t we start here: let’s forgive ourselves for not being “marriage material.” For all the parts of ourselves and our past that are not pleasing to us, let alone another human. For the times we said yes too soon and no too quietly. For all the scars we gave ourselves and those inflicted upon us. For every time we disrespected our own life, and for not loving ourselves.

It’s been nearly a year since my engagement ended, and it’ll be a while longer before I approach the doors of the dating arena. But when I do, it will be from a place of knowing that what I have to offer- all of me- is good enough even if it’s not perfect. Messy, ridiculous, so wrong and so right. A walking contradiction. A moving target. A hurricane. A madonna. A whore. A cheerleader. A quarterback. A princess. A cowboy. “Marriage Material” is a box I had always tried to shove myself into or blow up completely, and now I’m going to set it on a shelf in the way way back of the closet to be forgotten about. The raw material of me was never going to fit in a box, and thank Sky Daddy for that.