Is your life like a soap opera? Or are you just dramatic?
So, I know I’ve told you all about my divorce. Remember, that thing I was trying to figure out how to brand on social media but then never posted about anyway? That divorce? Yes, right.
Well anyway, that was over two years ago now (well the divorce only happened like nine months ago but we were stuck in paperwork gridlock for a long time, live laugh love, etc.), and because so much time has passed, I’ve been able to ruminate and dwell and marinate on other things. Yum!
Most recently, I’ve been ruminating and dwelling and marinating on the person who I really should’ve been getting divorced from because he was the actual person who I was 100 percent convinced I would spend my entire life with, and then didn’t.
That’s how normal divorce works, you see. You divorce the person who you actually really super duper thought you would die with, not just this European blondie who somehow convinced you late one night in an Airbnb bathroom that you should date, and then all of a sudden you’re moving to France but you’re American so you have to get married to live and work there legally.
Anyway, don’t get married to that guy. And if you really need a paperwork spouse, find a friend who’s down to legally-binding-clown and who you’re not involved with romantically, at all.
She did not follow this advice, dear audience. She got married, again, to someone she had been dating for less than six months because she was desperately trying to not get kicked out of the European Union. But, she told me to tell you this: “Live, laugh, love.”
So the guy I should’ve married, because he was the only person I’ve ever dated, and then thought “Wow, we’re going to be together forever, how feckin’ lovely is that,” I did not, in fact, wed.
We weren’t married, but we lived together, we made plans together, we ate dinner together. And it was amazing, because after surviving years of distance in #college, all I ever wanted was to make it to that moment where we lived together, made plans together, and ate dinner together. Forever.
And we made it! To that shining sparkling moment! The one I had always been waiting for! And we lived! We planned! We ate!
And then I promptly packed up and left. I moved to Spain.
The audience gasps and wonders: “But, why would she do that? Why, after all that waiting, pining, longing for a life together, would she pack up and leave? And do so promptly?”
You know, it’s almost seven years later now. And I’m still asking myself those very reasonable and just questions. Sometimes, I have really good answers to those questions. It’s during those times that my self-confidence is skyrocketing, my life is supercharged, and I get so dang psyched that I really did make all of this flying saucer nonsense work for me.
But then, sometimes, I don’t have a single answer at all. Not even a whisper of an answer. And that’s when even more questions pop into my mind, and they’re never the nice ones.
Questions like, why did you pack up and leave? Why didn’t you just stay in your perfectly lovely and in-love life? Why did you decide the unknown was more promising than the life you’d envisaged in your head for years and years?
And, for god’s sake, why did you take that picture the day you left? That picture together, that picture of the two of you curled up on the couch in front of the sunlit window, smiling like you weren’t fully aware that it was the last picture you would ever take in that long-awaited, love-filled version of your life?
In that version of life, I didn’t have to get married to legally live, laugh, or love.
So, you see, if that version of life had ended in divorce, it would have been a real divorce. The right kind of divorce. The kind you don’t see coming, the kind that crushes your belief in true love and lasting relationships, the kind that you never quite recover from.
Even seven years later.
