(A guest post by my good friend Dreia Melinkoff)
He will never marry you… Here is how I know.
..
He will not marry you because you are unsure. And when you meet the one who will, you will not be unsure. Maybe you wont know. But you won’t NOT know.
You will not call me wondering if you should break it off. Analyzing what he means. Because you know what he means.
You will not stay up all night with a pit in your stomach wondering what he is doing. If he is thinking about you.
You will not break up. And get back together. And break up again. And be back together.
One day you -will- get married.
I will find out that you were engaged or married via your pictures in the life and culture section of the paper. Or Facebook. Or something like that.
You will have been too busy getting married to call me to ask me if I thought he would ever marry you.
You may have been too busy marrying him – from the moment your steps seemed to fall into place together, to the private jokes you shared, to the accidental touch of your hands in the box of popcorn. To the wordless agreement that you would watch his dog while he was with his sick mother and the fact that he never had to ask and that you never, ever had to wonder if he would do the same for you.
You were busy marrying him when he unexpectedly paid the remainder of your rent but did not tell you yet that he had been laid off from his job, and you were marrying him when you found out he’d lost that job, so made a date of television, a bottle of cheap wine and a pot of spaghetti.
You were marrying him when you made love to him because you wanted to. Not because it would hold him to you. Not because he expected it.
You were too busy marrying him to call me, or to update your Facebook, or to blog, when he showed up to drive you to the doctor when you were sick but your car broke down.
You will not call me to ask me if you will ever marry him, because you have already been too busy marrying him. And one day, I will hear from you. It will be when you invite me to your wedding, if we are close. Or when I read your status update on Facebook, if we are not that close. And I will look at your pictures, and tell you that you are a beautiful bride, and smile at how happy the two of you look.
I will smile at how beautiful it is, your wedding on the courthouse steps in the simple off-the-rack pink dress from Nordstrom’s, that you made do with because you were too busy marrying him and forgot to plan a wedding.
And I will smile quietly to myself.
Because I already knew you would marry him.
Here is how.
You called me one time. One time, and one time only. You called to panic because you did not know whether you would see this one again.
After all. He is a little too boring. A little too bald. A little too short, or a little too fat.
The pit in your stomach is not there, the constant ache.
And you don’t know how to live without that emptiness, that gnawing.
I will hear from you that time, and that time only, if I hear from you at all.
And that is how I know he will be the one for you.
So for now -
If you are to call and ask me if the man you are seeing will ever marry you – he will not. If you post sad posts on Facebook wondering what is going on or if you should get back together or you wonder what he is thinking – he will not. If you make love but it holds the slightest tinge of worry and regret – he will not.
I am sorry.
I can promise though that perhaps… One day in the near future… You will love, and be loved.
And it will be another.
Guest post from my good friend Dreia Melinkoff