About That Getting Married Thing

another mundane portal to the divine

A few days a week, around 4 or 5 AM, my neighbor’s kitchen light softly decorates my bedroom wall with the outline of our tall windows. It wakes me, as all light does. I’ll toss and turn a bit before settling on getting up and on with the day.

Here I am now, in the silence of the morning. My rabbit hopping his furry little toosh around the living room’s white shag carpet. The AC kicking on to hum throughout the walls now and again.

Nearly all of the components of my wedding invitations have arrived. They sit in a row before me. I am thrilled. I adore them. It has been hard to get to this place; this marked moment of sending out invitations. Alan proposed a year and a half ago. Now, it’s nearly six months until the wedding itself and time to roll out the substantial stages of planning.

I look forward to the fun, decorative, frilly parts.

The invitations have been excruciatingly hard. The guest list, the various circles of close-ness to put various persons in. I dislike the tiers, but it does force one to really audit the people in one’s life.

And, as much as that gives me the ick, it is a necessary step in all this hoop-lah.

Perhaps (beyond being needed to actually facilitate the wedding), it too is an important thing to do as one sets out to become the matriarch of their own family–sizing up our circles, that is. I find myself questioning so much. Is this person really a friend? Or, if they are… are they a worthwhile one? A supportive, kind, expansive influence on me, my family, and my life?

Or are they self-consumed, petty, and not someone I’d aspire to be anything like?

And how much does it matter? People change. Do I love them anyway? Enough to sacrifice a seat at my table for them?

It’s been a mega headache, to say the least. Weddings are so expensive. Each guest costs a pretty fine penny, and many people have been significant in my life’s journey thus far. Or are becoming noticeably present. Or very well may be influential in years to come.
I wish I could have them all there.

Boundaries for any project are for the best, though. And while the culling takes an emotional toll…and perhaps there have been mistakes already made–of this person instead of them, etc. etc.–it’s all nearly said and done. Thank the holy goodness.

Another lesson in it all is to let the fuck go.
Accept mistakes.

I feel my heart actually clench at the thought of leaving people out or mistakenly including people who actually in no way should be included…or this person having to see this person who hurt them…OH, the human dramas. Alas…it is what it is. This material life has limits, and imperfections will always be present.

It is one of my growth edges to stop being so painfully aware of them all.

I very much look forward to the wedding celebration, but more so look forward to a year from now. To when Alan and I are basking in the memories and gearing up for our first holiday season as husband and wife. We’ll be within our eighth year of togetherness and first year of matrimony.

I can’t say it’s all been cookies and cream. It’s been profoundly challenging at times, our relationship. I am glad, though, that we’ve stuck to us. To our commitment. To our love and respect for one another and to our future together.

Therapy has helped a heap, and we’ve only been recently, and only to a few sessions. I am so grateful for the support it offers. The safe, outside perspective we find there to ground our seemingly unanswerable questions. Questions that fly about like a haphazard kite in perilous, lightening scorched skies of conflict. The storms come in without warning, challenging otherwise rainbow-dazzled views.

Sometimes, these forboding But why But what But how questions hit me square in the face and then zoom back out to tug at my heart in every direction.

The official date in the calendar therapy occupies is like a metal key at the end of said kite’s flying line. A hold on a weight to a connection that grounds these beastly bits of relationship dissonance. So that the ends of them don’t whip me to shreds while departing in a tormented, tangled resolve.

The space my fiancé and I hold for one another there, the guidance we find, and the way in which we show up so completely…it turns windy fears into gentle breezes. In those calm conditions, with our therapist holding out her compass, we can more readily breathe into the quite manageable, albeit daunting, to-dos on how to heal.

Couples therapy has been an invaluable ingredient in helping us complete the circuit. In helping us take all the important, albeit horrible feeling, information that reveals itself within conflict and channel it into activated metamorphosis.

In addition to providing much-needed encouragement for patience in the process.

I am very grateful for this resource.

I find this long-term, intimate relationship to be the most valuable experience in my life. It pushes me to work through all of the things I resent about myself and the world around me. It pushes me to embrace and accept all the things I love or should love about myself and the world around me.

It urges me to a place of divine acceptance and love, loyalty and forgiveness.

I finally understand the families of the typical protagonist’s story in your classic rom-com. The ones who just want their single daughter, sister, or friend to get it together and find their person. The ones always initially framed within the story as basic, ignorant, annoying, and judgemental–outsiders to the protagonist’s life and individualistic world perspective.

I am starting to see the truth behind these characters’ objectives. There is a knowing that they want for their loved one. A wholeness and selflessness that I hypothesize is only achievable within the deep sacrifice of living with and loving someone outside of oneself for a lifetime.

They aren’t judging someone for being single. Nor are they simply wanting them to fall into some unnecessary societal norm in order to blend in and have a perma-date to family events or to be less of an inconvenience and taken care of by another.

That’s all simply the uncommitted lead’s narrative, which is largely why they haven’t settled down yet. Their current state is all about exploring their separateness and not about integrating into their wholeness.

A critical phase, undoubtedly. But I think, for everyone I cherish, I do hope for it to be a phase. One that ends when it is meant to, yes, not rushed or forced to conclude before a person is ready to step off their boat of Me Me Me. But…I pray it be a boat that does dock in due time.

I am becoming the annoying friend, gently wondering if my single friends and family members have met anyone special. The subtext asks if they are ready to inspire themselves out of their perceived loneliness. Their victimized excuses of being the odd one out. If they’re yet ready to release this convenient reason to not have to work through the pain of someone seeing them at their worst. To allow someone to perceive them while they ring into various states of both high and low vibrations.

Choosing to not commit to another doesn’t mean choosing oneself.

In fact, I think it is very much the opposite. By choosing the difficulty of a lifelong love, one is choosing to challenge oneself with continued expansion, to be visibly flawed and to work on bettering oneself in a divine manner for the rest of one's life.

It’s a union that goes above the material experience and soars into transcendent domains.

I have two friends getting married this month. I am so proud of them. Doug, I know, is an incredibly intelligent, kind, talented, skilled, and fun person. Because of the commitment he is now making, I also know he is an incredibly courageous person. One who is committed to working towards being his best self for always. To never allow the bullshit or hiding or excuses or sabotage or shadow shit we all face regularly to override his long-term promise to show up for himself, his wife, or his family.

It’s funny–growing up. All the tropes that one always hears about really do play out.

I do feel an eerie awareness that I am fulfilling irritatingly accurate premonitions by everyone who has ever come before me. The funny part is how awakening and eye-opening such obvious plot points are in my personally fresh experience of them.

Every bit about this material experience of being alive is a microcosm and a macrocosm. It’s all the same, over and over again. We are spinning in a beautifully silly paradigm, and oh boy, is it fun and wicked all at once.

Photos by mi amore, Alan Michnoff

A hui ho,

Julia