Wednesday, April 27, 2011

Who is "The Girl Who Cried Wedding?"

Who am I? That's a fair question.

I'm 25, a sophomore at a branch of Kent State University, and I'm just now getting my feet underneath me.
I'm also a 25-year-old divorcee. Yuck.

So here's the story. In high school, there was a guy. I really liked him, but he always seemed to have a girlfriend and I was much too intimidated to ask him out because he seemed pretty popular amongst my group of friends. This term is relative because my group of friends were the "goths" or "punks" or whatever other term you might wanna use for us. Either way, we knew each other, but that was it. But somewhere after high school, we got to talking, and eventually revealed our feelings to one another. By this point though, he had moved 4 hours away from our hometown. We started dating, and then shortly after, my housing situation fell apart, and he asked me to move down and live with him. I said.... "Yeah ok." I was in college, but it wasn't something I felt super serious about, and I had wanted to move away from our town for years now, so even though we'd only been dating about a month.... we'd been friends for years, this would be fine right???

So I moved down there. Started my life anew, in a couple months I landed 2 part-time jobs in retail. One at a video game boutique and the other at a popular teen clothing store. I had it pretty good, I liked my jobs, things seemed fine....
We hit a rough spot. He broke up with me. Then went & slept with someone else a week later. Fast forward a couple months, finds out she's pregnant. Then begs me to take him back. My self-esteem was low enough that I did it. Some more stupid stuff happens, and then a couple months after our reunion, he proposes (in a pretty lame attempt) and I accepted.

You might be asking yourself "WHY??!?!?!?!?!?!1111"
That's a fair question.
I don't have a good answer.
My usual thoughts is that for the longest time in my main group of friends back home, I had been labeled the immature one, the annoying girl, the spaz. I was someone most people felt they were "dealing with" or "tolerating." And these are fair assessments of myself at the time. But because of the way these friends had treated me and described me to myself, I had adopted this view that the best I could expect in a mate was someone who could "put up" with me. And well.... this guy did. Sure, he called me names and made fun of me in front of his friends in order to make me angry and look like a bitch. But he seemed to put up with me right? Who else would ever want to put up with this???

In June of 2008, on a hot hot hot stormy day, we got married. Our wedding was a blast, I put so much work and thought into it. We were both big gamers and nerds, so our cake was Hyrule Castle from Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, and there were no bouquets or flowers, the bridesmaids and myself carried parasols instead. We played Rock Band at the reception, and everything was beautiful. One of our wedding pictures looked like a sweet old zombie movie poster.

The following winter we began to argue nonstop. Then in February I got laid off from my full-time job at the local cable company. We had been making plans to move to Seattle the following summer, so we decided I would look for jobs out west. I got an interview, so we packed as much as we could into my (new/used) 2003 Mitsubishi Eclipse (manual, of course!) as well as my beloved cat Chibi, and off I drove to live with some friends. 3 weeks after I arrived in the Seattle area, he calls me on the phone.

"Giselle, we need to talk." "Ok, let me go in the other room." "Giselle I want a divorce."

My world was shattered. It was only 10 months into our marriage. I didn't know what to do. A week later, I packed up everything once again, and a good friend from out there made the drive back with me to make sure I was ok. My ex expected me to just stay out West and give up. I'm sure it would have made everything easier for him. But I couldn't handle all this on my own, jobless in a strange place. So I moved back to our hometown and started over once again.

Our dissolution was official in August of 2009. Since then I have picked up where I left off. Almost literally. I reenrolled in classes at Kent State, and have declared my major as Applied Communication. I spent the summer of 2009 having a blast, living off unemployment (I was looking for a job, but times are hard!), playing DnD & kickball with some of my best friends, learning about myself and how strong and beautiful I really am, and regaining my own footing.

On New Year's Eve I had a date with a guy who is now, most assuredly, the love of my life. We've been together almost 16 months now and are currently living together with our 4 cats. Alan doesn't "put up" with me. He treasures me. He laughs at my silly insecurities, and then reassures me that I'm being silly. He also teaches me new things all the time, and is helping me grow into the person I want to be.

He's also kind of a neat-freak, and I'm not, but he's helping me become more tidy, lol. I feel so free in our relationship, and I'm so freaking happy.

Which leads us to the reason I started this blog.
While we are not yet engaged, it is on the horizon. No clue when, but the serious talks about it have already been going on for a while. I'm very certain that by our next anniversary, we'll be engaged. We've already started the talks about how soon we'd like to have kids.
So how does a young divorcee plan a wedding????
I feel like the boy who cried wolf, only I'm the Girl who cried "WEDDING!!" once already. I know there have to be other young people out there, like me, who feel this way. So I'm going to start this blog, and until an official engagement happens, this will all be hypothetical, or finding resources that help people in my position. And hopefully I'll help others like myself.

Until next post!
Giselle

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