The Anniversary Waltz

I had to be talked into this whole getting married thing. That sounds awful, doesn't it? It's NOT that I didn't want to get married. No, I definitely assumed that one day I would marry Phillip and it would be a joyous and momentous event, but I had not yet attained grown up status and only grown ups should get married. The way I saw it, at one year out of college, we should go do something cool with our lives (teach English in China!) and then morph into responsible adults afterwards (get married, get real jobs, learn how to make meatloaf.) Phillip was down for the teaching-English-far-away idea, but he thought we should get married first. "It will just be EASIER," he kept saying. "When we're in China, it will just be EASIER to not have to drop you off at home every night and then go to my own apartment." And after we had a big argument about this in the middle of dark and rainy Ravenna park, I finally decided he was right. Reluctantly. It totally screwed with The Plan. This was raising The Plan high above my head and shaking it until it was a well-blended Plan in a very delicate thin-stemmed martini glass.

A few months after we first started dating, Phillip picked me up at the airport on New Year's Eve. I'd just arrived back in the States after winter break in Italy and I probably slept all the way to his parents' house where he was throwing a New Year's party. I crawled upstairs and fell asleep. Sometime during the party I wandered downstairs and outside. I stood in the driveway looking at the Christmas lights all over the house and all over the other houses in the neighborhood. Phillip snuck up behind me and whispered, "Someday we'll have Christmas lights on our house."

He's ALWAYS known that we'd get married and that ALWAYS freaked me out. We both agreed that dating sucked and we only wanted to do it once, but aren't guys supposed to have commitment problems and be completely frightened to have you meet their parents, let alone dream about your future together? He didn't say things like that very often, but when he did, it was always a big jolt for me. A someday-you-ARE-going-to-be-married-to-him jolt. Not that I didn't ever think those things myself, but I would have died a thousand deaths before I said them OUT LOUD. Are you KIDDING?

I've had some friends going through their own should-I-get-married processes and they've asked me "how I knew". But I am so the wrong person to ask about that. I don't believe in 'soul mates' and "you know when you know" is a stupid answer that tries to romanticize most people's truth: that you choose the person you're with. My first memory of Phillip is him standing in the middle of the McMahon dining hall playing saxaphone with the first incarnation of his band. And I thought to myself, "Hmmm. I do like boys who know an instrument." Every day after that I got to know him a little bit more, someone who was so much more than a saxaphone scholarship, someone who was so much like me and so annoyingly different from me. There's probably a guy out there who reads poetry journals and wants to live in a highrise downtown and is a cable news addict. And I'm sure there's a girl out there who loves jazz and can drive stick and doesn't have sleeping problems. It's entirely possible we'd get along much better with these people than we do each other- but we decided those people didn't matter. I think that's how you know.

He's the only person who ever disrupted The Plan- and the plan doesn't really exist anymore. Once you add another person to your life, it's hard to stick to the timeline you've plotted for yourself. I knew this when we were dating, but there's nothing like being married to show you how self-centered you are. When I take time to think about it, I'm amazed at how confident and right Phillip was about being married. I think that whatever else we do in our lives, we won't make a better decision. I probably don't say it out loud enough.