Part 4: Wedding Season
This post is Part 4. If you want to read from the beginning (which I recommend)... go back to Part 1: The Beginning and then read Part 2 and Part 3.
My twenties (and thirties) were filled with weddings. Bridal showers, bachelorette parties, rehearsal dinners and nearly every kind of wedding I could imagine. Big ones, intimate ones, courthouse weddings, ballroom weddings, weddings at ranches and museums and on top of mountains. Weddings across the country and across oceans. More than one person made the reference to me that I was like Katherine Heigl’s character in 27 dresses. My single, unattached self was always on my way to one or prepping for one or celebrating a newly engaged couple. And similarly to Katherine Heigl’s character (if I remember correctly), I did not feel bitter at all that I was continually playing the role of the excited friend. I actually loved it.
I loved the celebrations and the trips and the parties and the excitement. I loved the gathering of old friends, meeting of new friends, reunions at family weddings. Friendship and relationships were (and still are) extraordinarily important to me and I felt honored to be included in so many weddings as a guest and often a bridesmaid. My husband once asked me if I regretted spending so much of my disposable income for so long on weddings and I thought about it. My honest answer: not at all. It was important and fun for me to show up for friends in that way. If I was completely honest, I felt regret about the weddings I had not been able to attend. I know not everybody feels this way and not everybody should feel this way. But for me, it was true. I was a wedding person. Which is why it is fairly unsurprising that I met my husband at a wedding.
The wedding where we met was outside of Orlando, Florida. I was there with a few girlfriends (we were friends of the bride) and he was there with his family who were friends of the groom’s family.
Nikhil and his brother were seated at the same table as us– I think it’s referred to as the “singles table”–and I guess we started talking. It’s a shame we don’t realize life changing moments are happening until after they happen- I would love to remember what we first said to each other. I think it was a lot of jokes and banter. I do remember on the dancefloor he started following along to a dance routine I had learned at my sister’s wedding a few years prior. A friend took a video of us dancing so we have that for life. N was living in New York (while I was in Boston) and so when we parted ways it was kind of “oh, let me know if you’re ever in (my) city”. My creative, extremely “what if” mind had the thought “maybe he’s the one”, but if I’m honest, I would say that I didn’t really think I’d ever see him again. As I said…I was on the circuit and had had plenty of flirtatious encounters /phone number exchanges/social media followings from weddings that led to absolutely never seeing each other again. In fact, I had been to a wedding a few weeks prior where I had given my number to a guy I met who lived in D.C. and, sure enough, I never saw him after that.
I ended up not even exchanging numbers with him at the wedding because he was standing right next to his family when I left and I did not know how to casually drop my information off. But I found him on instagram, sent the video of us dancing that my friend had taken, gave him my number and a “let me know if you visit Boston…” and within five minutes, we were texting.
I had never met someone like him. He was more open and vulnerable than I had ever known a guy my age to be. He would say things that were not “cool” but that were just the way he felt. He wore his heart on his sleeve. After texting for maybe a week he started calling me on the phone. And after weeks of that, he suggested maybe he should come visit Boston. I panicked. It was fun and so easy to talk but what if we met and it was awful? I lied and said I forgot to tell him I was visiting a friend in New York in a few weeks so maybe we could meet for dinner then?
So a few weeks later I got on a train to stay with one of my closest friends who had a newish baby and (I think) was thrilled to see me/not have to spend that much time with me.
We met at a restaurant in Chinatown, were seated at a table in the basement where we had our first kiss. And from then on, we were *kind of* together. There were a few more visits, an almost end to our relationship before it started when we both announced we were not moving from our current cities, a decision to try exclusively dating for a few months to take the pressure off of having to make a decision one way or the other and then an eventual continuation. We are both over sharers and had told everyone we knew that we were dating but had a deadline where we were going re-evaluate the long distance situation. When the date had passed many of our friends tentatively asked…”so…what’s happening?” And we were like “oh yeah…we’re still together”.
From my perspective, the thing that kept us together for a year and a half before he (yay!) moved to Boston, what made him decide to move, what kept us together until now despite both of us being extremely stubborn people who hate compromise is that we (as trite as this is) are the greatest of friends. We love spending time together, we love doing things together, we love talking about things. Not that we love the same thing because we definitely have a lot of very different interests. But each of us love to be part of how the other experiences joy and we get joy out of seeing it. Like, I am not a history buff. He is. But I love going to history museums with him because he’s okay that I walk at my own speed, and then go get a coffee and wait for him. I love that he’s having a good time and will come tell me what he learned after.
He is more of a homebody than I am. But when I plan something out in the world, he will be excited (even if he complains at first) and then ends up squeezing everything out of it that he can. He is amazed by life and I love that about him.
Meeting N, of course, impacted my entire life, as meeting one’s future spouse does. I’ve written about this a little bit in the first post in this series. Nikhil is someone who loves to have conversations with people about following their dreams. He is a dreamer and from what I saw when I was getting to know him, not embarrassed in the least to tell people his big ambitions. Meeting someone like this, becoming close to him and eventually the closest person to him, changed my attitude toward making my dreams come true. Even though my mother raised me to feel like I could do anything, as an adult, I still felt pretty embarrassed to share my creative ambitions. I thought saying things like “I want to be a writer” would be met with distracted gazes and confused looks. “That seems like an unrealistic career choice,” I could hear people saying.
The way Nikhil talked about his own dreams, despite being in the process of closing down a start up when I met him, changed the way I thought about vulnerability. I could announce my dreams, say them out loud proudly even if most people rolled their eyes, because my new boyfriend would not.
Instead of rolling his eyes, he would say things like “I love it, what’s your plan to make that happen?” I started thinking differently about my “creative goals that had no end”. If I told him I wanted to write a novel someday and randomly would work on it when I was feeling burnt out, he would reply with “it doesn’t seem like you really care about it.” It annoyed me and we got into plenty of fights but it also made me take a hard look at what I wanted my future to look like. Did I really want to have a safe creative hobby that no one could judge or criticize, mainly because, nobody knew it existed? Or did I want to boldly follow my dreams?
And so began the next chapter of my life.
(More in two weeks)