Don’t Get Married: Lusting for Love in All the Wrong Places
Originally published on August 30, 2019; edited and republished November 2021
Thirteen years ago, my friends and I were standing outside of a small-town pizza shop on a warm night in the middle of September. A long-haired, brown-eyed grunge rocker boy with the cutest smile stepped out from his shift, by the adamant request of his manager. Go talk to her and I’ll give you the rest of the night off...
He knew some of the people I was with so he easily joined our little party and introduced himself. I felt instantly drawn to him and it didn’t take long before we were throwing flirtations around. At the end of the night after he went home, I found myself standing twenty feet from his bedroom window with my two girlfriends, trying to muster up the courage to tap on the window and kiss him. It took a lot of time and coaxing, but I finally did it.
We dated for only a month or so, but it was enough time for him to be my first homecoming date and to spend many nights laying under the stars, making out or gazing into each others eyes. I was convinced he was the one, but I was also sixteen and indecisive, impulsive, and preferred to hurt people before they could hurt me. I broke it off, but we remained good friends — yet, there was always an inexplicable chemistry between us; a magnetic pull that brought our lips together every now and again throughout the years. But our timelines were unmatched; the stars never seemed to align.
I suppose it’s the good ones that get away.
From “falling in love” with Stan Marsh on South Park in 7th grade; to long-distance dating my Georgian friend, who started out as a girl named Samantha, but began his transition into Robert; to the later relationships mentioned in Detecting a Narcissist’s Lies and Fateful Affairs, I’d say my relationship history has been more than a little strange.
As a young girl, I didn’t dream of or picture my future wedding, but knew I wanted to get married. At first I figured either Justin Timberlake or Leo DiCaprio would be my future husband, but then it seemed like Daniel Radcliffe from Harry Potter or Billie Joe from Green Day were destined to be. Since those men were out of reach, I created my somehow-more-attainable soulmate, Damon, and wrote stories about our twisted life and love for each other. With time I got a little more realistic and started dating actual people I knew.
For a long while, finding someone to love, who would love me back, was what I really wanted, so much that desperation got the best of me and I chased too many of the wrong people. After a few relationships laced in deception and toxic habits (on both parts), I found myself jaded and disbelieving the idea that true love was out there and that it could last for a lifetime. Not just for me, but for anyone.
You see it all around — infidelity, divorce, lifeless marriages, the like. I’d seen many failed relationships or divorces within my family and friends’ families, and can’t seem to recall knowing a healthy relationship between the couples that were or still are together.
Many of the men I knew or came across loudly ogled over attractive women — models, celebrities, porn stars. The pretty gals were glorified objects that could seemingly turn a married man single for a night. I thought I had to show a little skin and be seductive to grab the attention of guys; it usually worked, but that type of behavior, I’ve since learned, grabs the wrong kind of attention from the wrong kind of guy.
It didn’t matter how I dressed or acted, I felt like there was always going to be someone prettier, shinier and more interesting than me. I’d often get twisted up in debilitating jealousy and intense fear of being abandoned for someone better, as it happened so many times throughout my childhood.
There weren’t many healthy people surrounding me growing up, and I developed a handful of unhealthy habits and thought patterns of my own because of it. I ended up in many unstable relationships and when marriage did cross my mind, it was simply because I figured that only then will I not be abandoned for someone better. Maybe...except one huge example contradicted that thought, and it really changed my perspective on love and marriage.
My friend and I went down to New Orleans a few years ago, and while we were out on our drunken night we stumbled upon a couple guys. The one from Texas took a liking to me and while we talked politics and other topics at the bar, my friend found herself a Finnish man. Texas tried touching and kissing me, Finnish and my friend made out — in time we both discovered that they were married and it dawned on me...
I thought, Everyone sucks, no one’s faithful, and I never want to get married.
Stock photo credit, Freestocks.org
What would be the point? It doesn’t mean anything! People cheat on each other, abuse each other, take advantage of each other; my marriage would just end in lifelong unhappiness or divorce anyway, and who wants to go through the long, expensive headache of trying to get out? I could not wrap my head around the idea that two people could truly love each other forever and stay completely faithful and committed.
Even when I was in a relationship, I had a hard time communicating and trusting the person I was with. At times I wasn’t faithful because I needed to feel desired or important to a man, any man. I catered to their needs so I could be useful, so they would “need” me and not want to leave. Eventually I felt miserable in each of those relationships and ended it or ran away, but was always on to the next one in no time.
Relationships defined me; I was no one without someone. I was so hungry to earn love from another person, the love that is most important got overlooked for way too long...love from myself.
When I moved back home in December 2017, after running from an emotionally abusive relationship in Minnesota, I thought I read enough literature on how to spot toxic men and how to have healthy relationships. I mentioned in a prior post, I stayed true to my patterns and tried jumping into another relationship right away, but then had my breakdown/breakthrough and cut ties. I swore off relationships for a while to focus on my self-love recovery in Codependents Anonymous (CoDA).
I attended meetings, worked on communication skills, journaled, stopped talking to certain guys, spent quality time with myself, meditated, got back into hobbies, quit social media for a bit, started setting boundaries, began recognizing unhealthy thoughts and patterns, etc. It was difficult, but I slowly started to feel better.
In late March of 2018, after leaving a CoDA meeting, one of my good friends, the rockin’ pizza boy from before, texted me, asking for help with a masonry project. Together we labored, fitting stone on a fireplace for hours, then grabbed a beer to celebrate our accomplishment. We kept hanging out after that, whether it was doing masonry, cruising dirt roads and talking, or him walking next to me as I silent danced downtown.
Many weeks later, as he was filling in stone on a house, I stared up at him on the scaffold and suddenly felt something that I don’t even know how explain fully. I smiled slowly as it hit me that I was really starting to like him.
Since relationships were off limits while I worked on my recovery, all impulses to kiss him throughout the following weeks had to be cast aside. We made a habit of going out to a cornfield and relaxing on his truck’s tailgate while the sun set. One of those nights, while we were watching the sky in silence, he turned to me with a familiar look in his eye, and leaned in for a kiss, but I denied him and said I couldn’t. I wanted to, so bad, but felt like I’d be betraying everything I was working towards in recovery. He respectfully told me he understood, knowing about CoDA, and apologized for the attempt.
A couple nights later, we sat on the tailgate again, waiting for the sunset. Grey clouds rolled in and the wind gusts got stronger; he said we should leave before the storm hit and started to get up. My hands nervously shook, my head and heart were in a battle, but I looked at him, leaned in, and the moment our lips met it started to rain. It felt so right, like nothing else before.
Everyone except for me seemed to know it. Long before we started dating that May, my sister told me she always thought we’d end up together because of our “weird chemistry.” His mom and many of our friends will say they called it, too. Pre-relationship, in the parking lot of my apartment complex, out of the blue one night he told me, You’re my future wife, and although I laughed at him, there was a distant feeling inside that it could be true. We’ve always had a close friendship; we could/can share things with each other that no one else would ever know. We’ve been there for each other during happy times and extremely hard ones — no matter the distance between us. Our love didn’t hit fast, it slowly built up over time, as love should.
He proposed to me August 24th of last year and we originally planned to get married this September, but went to the courthouse on January 9, 2019. Some would say we moved too fast, but I almost want to say we moved too slow — I mean, it took twelve dang years!
For a long time, I didn’t think it would be possible to create a healthy, loving relationship with someone and to make a lifelong commitment, but it feels so incredible to have found him and done so.
I never wanted to get married. Until...
I wanted to marry my best friend.
Everyone who is or was in a long, successful marriage has given the advice that you should marry your best friend, and we literally did just that.
Every now and again I run into a post on social media, or hear words spoken by friends, that there are no good men/women out there, and finding true love is not possible. Although I told myself that so many times, I’ve come to realize it’s a bunch of lies and we find it when we open ourselves up to the right kind of love. Take a deep look inside and ask yourself, Do I feel like a good man/woman? Do I feel worthy of love? If the answer is no, there’s work to do. Deep down you are good, and you are worthy, but you have to first see it yourself.
If you hold the same bitter opinion that I once held, know this: I did it to myself and you’re doing it to yourself. It took time to realize it, but that’s the cold, hard truth. We must see our worth and be okay living with ourselves before we can harmoniously live with others. A healthy person to share love with will only come when we start getting healthy, too! You don’t have to be perfect, perfection is unattainable, but you can be more than you are now. When you do the work, you will more easily recognize who is worthy of our time and love and who’s not.
I was tired of being hurt and finally saw that it was me hurting me the most. I was treated how I thought I deserved to be treated — how I treated myself: like shit. The moment I began caring for myself, setting boundaries, and doing positive things for my life, most things started falling into place. While this all seemed to work so fast, not every story is like mine.
The words I love you had slipped from my mouth before, but it never felt like it does now. My idea of love was needing someone else to make me feel whole because I felt like a fraction of a person. It wasn’t an honest, whole love that I uttered to others before.
For the men and women looking for their other half, don’t. Do the work to feel whole and search for a whole person to compliment and balance you, not complete you. Seek a person who builds you up and makes you smile, who takes the time to understand you and work through the tough times. Find a person who loves you for who you are and grows along side of you through change instead of trying to change you. Look for someone who takes it slow and doesn’t rush into something so precious as love. And...
Don’t get married! That is until...you find that person, and be that person, too.
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