Wedding Bell Bums Part I

The twists of fate converge in curious ways. Like a twist-tie closing a garbage bag, fate can neatly wrap up life's jumbled detritus. I mention this because a former employer of mine recently got divorced. Roundaboutly, the former employer is responsible for my own marriage. Only, at the time, I didn't offer him the thanks the deed deserves.

It happened like this. Several years ago, amid a barrage of hectoring from a girlfriend, I had taken the long step off the short pier of financial security into the bottomless sea of mortgage debt by buying an old (supposedly) restored house (It wasn't.). After the purchase, the girlfriend departed. So much for long-term investments.

Also at the time, I was burnt out and bored of the job I'd been at for a dozen years, from which I earned a comfortable living. Then, I was offered what I thought was my dream job – the catch being that the “dream” included a $15,000 pay cut, which meant cashing out my 401k just to afford to chase the dream.

I cashed out and took the job. A year or so later, a new owner took over the dream job, and shortly thereafter, I was booted out on my ass. Maybe I deserved to go; maybe I didn't. But my feelings then were that I'd gotten a bum deal from a bum boss.

The far side of 40 is no place to be deeply in debt, without income and with writing jobs scarce in this area. “Despair” doesn't describe where I was. I was in a hole so low that the dirt of it clings to me still.

And then there was Dana. We'd known each other for 20-odd, sometimes very odd, years. We had dated in high school and briefly in college, but we'd gone separate ways. We'd recently run into each other again. She was coming out of a divorce; I was just out of a relationship.

We started dating. Dana endured my malaise, my self-pitying, my whining – she endured everything that would have driven away any other woman I'd previously dated. (And there were a lot of them; I went through barrels of bad apples and bushels of good. None amounted to apple pie with me.)

Dana stuck with me. I couldn't understand it. I subtly tried to drive her away, certain I was saving myself from the inevitable heartbreak that must ensue when she finally realized what a loser I was.

But she didn't go. And one intoxicated, intoxicating evening, she said to me, “The first time I saw you, I told my sister, ‘I'm going to marry that guy.'”

Nevermind that the first time I saw her she was 15 years old and dressed as Columbia for a midnight showing of The Rocky Horror Picture Show: How does one respond to such a revelation? From childhood, I never believed in true love, in the sense that there is one soulmate out there for everybody.

The child that I was saw that, if adult marriages were combinations of soulmates, then souls were angry things, mostly. And if those relationships were love-based, well, then, love was a very different thing indeed than what they taught in Sunday school about how Jesus loves me, this I know.

Of course, even the Christ's love came with conditions. But you just don't expect Jesus to be shouting at Mary Magdalene, “If you really loved me, you'd have dinner waiting for me when I get home from a hard day's cross-bearing, you lazy bitch.” My perception of adult love didn't support this soulmate thing.

Besides, as an adult, my experience in “loving” relationships had been that someone wasn't in it for love. People were never with you for you, just for what they could get out of you, or what they (desperately) needed from you, or what they thought you might amount to, or what they were trying to mold you into. Sometimes, “someone” was me.

Yeah, I've been a cynic about love.

And then, here to find, after all this time, this girl I'd known more than half my life, whom I'd met at The Rocky Horror Picture Show, of all places, said she knew all along she was going to marry me?

She was seeing the lowest I could be, the ugly and the true and the commonplace nature of me, and still she could tell me that the first time she saw me, she knew she was going to marry me?

It was the sweetest thing anyone had ever said to me, and there was only one response to it. “You're crazy,” I said.

To be continued…