I often have a lot of people asking me how I went from never wanting to tie the knot to getting married, being a part-time wedding planner, then finally being in an open marriage and how they all fit together. The following is a brief version of the road I traveled to get to where I am today.
I was never the girl that grew up dreaming of her wedding. I haven’t yet figured out if that is the result of my liberal parents and watching them realize they didn’t work together, or if I just thought the idea of someone actually wanting to be with me, never mind *marry me* was so far fetched that I never bothered convincing myself it could be a reality.
As I grew older and started to date more, I noticed I was always living in the moment. I learned early on in life that plans can change faster than you can breathe. People enter your life as friends one day, and could betray you for no reason the next. Yes, you may have gathered, high school was an interesting time for me! The idea of something sticking around as long as marriage didn’t make much sense to me.
In college, I was never focused on meeting Mr. Right. I was younger than my friends, so I had a bit of partying catch-up to do. Once I finally bloomed and got over the strange fear of sexual activity that I had in high school (more a self-esteem issue than anything else) … life changed quickly for me. I had grand plans of being in love with my first, and I do believe I was. We had long-distance fun for a year, but eventually he smartened up and realized that college is not the time for stifling long-distance relationships and we parted ways.
After being dumped by my first love, my friends took me out and paraded me around in front of the boys. “This is our friend Sam. She needs to get laid.” A little dangerous, yes, but it worked and suddenly I was enjoying sex just because I could. At some point very soon after that I accepted that sex could just be fun, for fun’s sake. It didn’t need to mean love, it really didn’t need to be anything more than what it was at the time.
Of course I was still naive, experiencing the occasional mental breakdown that comes with being a young girl with slightly low self esteem. Living in a world that encourages slutty behavior but then offers no help on how to deal with the consequences of this behavior; but still I felt relatively good with my realization, even if friends were constantly hounding me to slow down and start looking for Mr. Right.
At 20 when Steph and I got together, I don’t remember ever hearing wedding bells. I had just moved to Toronto a few months prior, and was starting to focus on a career and becoming the “city girl” I felt so desperate to be. I had never had dreams of the white dress before, so why would I start having them now? We were enjoying our time together, although we became serious and moved in really quickly, but marriage was still just something that other people did.
As we spent a few more years together and started to grow up in our early to mid 20′s, we would occasionally talk about tying the knot. I was happy enough, and enjoying our day to day life as much as I thought I could at the time. Being with Steph seemed right to me, despite the fact that I would often feel more like his best friend, than his best friend and lover.
Our sexual drives and discussions were never on the same level, but I resigned myself to accepting it, as everything else between us made sense. There was part of me that was definitely programmed to believe in not questioning a solid long-term relationship, even if there were some areas of unhappiness. Finding Mr. Right or Mr. Good Enough was still planted into my brain, no matter how often I neglected to water that seed. We had our problems, and looking back I can’t say we were anywhere close to being as happy, honest and sexually fulfilled as we are now; but we were committed to each other and would have been able to be so with or without wedding rings wrapped around our fingers.
Then, at age 53, my dad was diagnosed with ALS and things changed. Having no idea what certainties the future would bring, except his passing, Steph and I decided to get married because we really weren’t THAT against the idea. I decided I didn’t want to realize five years down the road that I actually wanted to do it and that my dad wouldn’t have been around to walk me down the aisle. It just made sense.
As it turned out, he passed away one month after the wedding, on Halloween. Sometimes decisions are more right than you can imagine when making them.
And then a funny thing happened that I truly was not expecting. Our relationship got stronger. Where we thought naively we were really happy (with a few problems) before, we suddenly became happier (still with a few problems). Realizing that we had both made the effort to commit to each other started to take on great meaning, as you’d probably think it’s supposed to! Life went on, we were as domestic and boring as anything, but we were happy, enough. (Watch for a follow up post that talks about when we truly became content, as we still had a long road to follow.)
At the time we had a lot of friends who were either married or heading in that direction, both in small towns we had spent time in, or in the city. We never really encountered anyone who questioned our marriage’s necessity, or looked down on us for giving into monogamy.
Then one day we noticed we’d moved on to a new set of friends and acquaintances, many of whom were choosing to not get married, saying “they didn’t need to”, making it sound like a weakness if you did, rather than a choice you might have actually just wanted to make. Marriage as a way of life started to sound like a lame decision, a cop-out, something that you needed to do because you were conforming to societal pressure. Soon, exploring my own openness led me to start to think the same way.
Having never felt that strong desire to get married, I wondered if I had fallen into some slick surburban trap, hidden sneakily in various parts of the city. There to lure us city folk into their suburban dream home neighborhoods, to plant kids and trees and bake pies for each other instead of saying how we really felt.
I was conflicted as a part time wedding planner who was also beginning a journey into open relationships. I felt like a fraud on some days, and on others the biggest supporter of the ideals I was planning parties for.
On one hand, I knew many couple for whom marriage worked. Whether it’s “on the surface” success that is non-existent behind closed doors is for time to reveal. On the other hand, I was beginning to realize how unnatural monogamy can be and questioning the whole idea of marital unions with divorce and cheating rates being as high as they are.
Nowadays, I never wear my wedding ring at home or the office, but I always wear it out of the house. I like when people know I’m married, and yet sometimes I’m strangely embarrassed. Not of my husband. Not of our relationship and the life we’ve made with each other. Not of the connection we now share that is stronger than I could have ever imagined, or the honesty that goes along with that.
But when I see a stranger’s eyes take on that disapproving look when they find out I’m a “w*fe”; it starts to sound like a bad four letter word. I can see that city-folk disappointment as they think they’ve lost another one to the dark side of conformity.
All kidding aside though, I’m proud to be a w*fe more than I’m embarrassed to have “given in”, as some people have put it. I have realized that our non-traditional version of marriage is different than the idea that most of us have been conditioned for years to plan for. It’s highly customized to suit Steph and I, and nobody else. But we’re the ones living in it, so that’s how it should be. We don’t live to please anyone else.
So if getting married is in the cards for you, then be true to yourselves and design your marriage around your life together as a couple. Not someone else’s expectations of you, or what you think society says is the way to exist. Getting married doesn’t have to mean losing yourself, losing your sex drive, or losing your will to live, as a few people I know have occasionally joked. It should simply mean sharing your life with someone you love, support and cherish, as you travel down the many paths life throws down your way.
And for anyone who’s curious … I wore a pink dress … because I could.
You can too. 
