It's Not Me, It's You: Subjective Recollections From a Terminally Optomistic, Chronically Sarcastic and Occasionally Inebriated Woman (15 page)

That’s when all hell broke loose. Two drunk sorority girls started crying and their boyfriends put their arms around them to shield them from the cruelty while secretly stealing glances at the potential carnage.

I couldn’t take any more and yelled at Jon’s video camera, “What the fuck? What’s wrong with you? Two birds are going to fight to the death and you are fucking videotaping it?” Jon finally lowered the video camera and looked at me like he just found a filled prescription for lithium in my medicine cabinet. Through gritted teeth he said, “Listen, I don’t want
to be here any more than you do but, unless we swim for shore, we’re stuck here. What exactly do you want me to do about it?
Jesus
!”

What I wanted him to do about it was run up on stage and either set the birds free, or kill them humanely and then roast them to make up for the horrendous dinner; I wanted him to take me in his arms and say,
“Baby, right now this feels like the worst thing that’s ever happened to us. We made a horrible mistake and I can’t wait to get off this Godforsaken hell cruise just as much as you! And the second we hit land and get back home we will laugh about this, but in the meantime, let’s just try to get through it. Together. I love you. Marry me.”
Instead, he completely ignored me. So I broke up with him right then and there in my head. I was halfway back to drunk and furious. I mentally packed my bags to move out of his apartment despite the fact that we didn’t exactly live together. Once we got back to his place, I’d get my toothbrush, the couple pairs of underwear I kept in a drawer, my scrunchy, oh, and the Pyrex dish I left there from when I made him a turkey lasagna. He was going to miss me. Was another girl going to make him turkey lasagna? Doubtful.

We didn’t speak for the remainder of the cruise or in the cab on the way back to our hotel. Screw him, I thought as we lie in separate beds in the hotel room, still not speaking. I cried softly. I would be fine. I had friends. I had a great life! I had work, plus my friends would make me margaritas and tell me what an asshole they always thought he was. It would be just like
Sex and the City
, minus Charlotte because I didn’t
have any friends that boring. But I’d be great. Single but great! I couldn’t wait to get back into the swing of things.

“Come on. Get over here,” Jon growled from his bed, extending his hand out like a bridge back to dry land. There was no time for pride. In one second, I was wrapped up in his arms, which still smelled ever so slightly of the ocean, and just before we fell asleep he whispered gently in my ear, “ARRRRR.”

T
he morning after Jon asked me to marry him, three and a half years into our relationship, he woke up with ugly black bruises all over his upper arms. As it turned out, those bruises were the result of me punching him repeatedly in an effort to pummel him into proposing. In my defense, I had
a lot
of Pinot Grigio in me, and he kept taunting me, snarling, “It doesn’t hurt…Is that all you got? I couldn’t even feel that one. Wait, did an animated fairy just tap my arm?”

I had been dating Jon for just over two years when I started a full frontal assault to get him to marry me. I broke all the rules that have ever been written to help women like me, women with no impulse control, women with no shame, women who need a clearer understanding of the line between expressing affection and stalking. The rules I’m speaking of are anything uttered by Dr. Laura, any article ever published
in
Cosmopolitan
that doesn’t involve an orgasm, and mainly the ones in the book
The Rules
(written by two women, one of whom is now divorced). On closer review, I’d been rule breaking with wild abandon since we had started dating:

But once Jon and I moved in together without being engaged (yes, I know, another huge rule shattered to bits), my rule breaking took on a new ferocity. Having once lived with someone before that didn’t end happily, I let Jon know under
no uncertain terms
that I would not be moving in with him unless we were at least engaged.

“But I’ve never lived with anyone before.” He whined like he was still in his college dorm instead of in his mid thirties living alone in an apartment. I should stipulate that it was an apartment with at least twenty dusty baseball hats lined across his curtain rod, a sure sign of maturity. If that wasn’t enough of a clue, there was always the lamp made out of a wine jug on the nightstand next to his bed. At that point, why not just walk around with a hat made entirely out of Budweiser cans? Really get the message out there as to where you are emotionally.

“That lamp was a gift from my sister! She made it!” he snapped defensively when I innocently pointed it out. Hey, my mother once got me a pair of Indian-style feather earrings that were all the rage
never,
but they “made her think of me” when she saw them. That didn’t mean I had to wear them.

“Well, I
have
lived with someone and you know how
that turned out, so I want to be absolutely sure where you’re headed with this,” I said, digging in.

“I just never saw myself getting married without living with the person first. That’s just how it’s done. I don’t want to miss a step.” Miss a step?
We’re not putting together a desk from Ikea. There are no step-by-step instructions. We’re in love, asshole!

“Okay, but you’re moving in with me because at this point you plan to marry me right?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, okay then. As long as we’re clear.” What the hell was I talking about? Clear on what? He wasn’t promising anything. He was just saying that yeah, at some point in the future, possibly after I reached menopause, or maybe after I’d been in a tragic accident, fallen into a coma, and he sat by my bedside playing me John Mayer songs and reading me articles from
The Onion
trying to bring me back to consciousness, he would realize he was ready to tie the knot. I didn’t have that kind of time; that could take months. I needed a better plan.

Living together was actually pretty great. Being with Jon day in and day out, grocery shopping together, and making my own special dent in his couch had only deepened my feelings for him. And with the new level of commitment, I calmed down quite a bit. I rarely even
thought
about needing to get married. Sure, I made the occasional remark every other week or so—just a little nudge to make sure we were moving in the right direction.

“So, you don’t feel like there’s something you need to get out of your system before you get married, right?” I asked one day over our morning coffee.

“Like what?” he asked.

“I don’t know, like hiking through the Himalayas or backpacking through Europe—staying at youth hostels the whole way or banging a Czech model?”

“Nope. I’m good. I’m not like Emmett.” Emmett was Jon’s best friend who Jon swore would have to sell a screenplay before he committed to any woman.

“Okay, cool. So there are no real holdups. Good to know.”

“Nope,” he said, popping a piece of toast in the toaster—a toaster that I had brought with me when I moved in. Yeah, if it hadn’t been for me, he would’ve just been eating plain-old cold wheat bread. There’d be no delicious warm crust for the butter to melt on. Just dumb, stupid, uninteresting
non
toasted bread! Could it be any clearer what I was bringing to the table here?
How could he not see that we needed to be married!

And this is how we went along for a while until Emmett, who’d known his girlfriend, Sarah, for all of six months, called up one night and told Jon he was engaged. When Jon gave me the news, I was less than thrilled. I really liked Emmett’s girlfriend; in fact, I’d made out with her one night after we all drank way too much Cabernet and the boys promised us La Perla lingerie (which we never got) if we kissed with tongue. And I figured they’d get married eventually, but I didn’t think it would be before us.

“Really? Which studio bought his screenplay?” I asked, trying to keep any sign of pissiness out of my voice.

There’s no reasonable explanation for why I wanted to be engaged so badly. I know many couples who are perfectly happy living together forever, people who believe that marriage is “just a piece of paper” and that if two people are meant to be together they will stay together and if they’re not meant to be, the mere act of saying vows won’t change that. There are people who feel secure and happy just living “in the now.” I’m not one of those people. And I have a strong feeling those people smoke a lot of dope.

I started picking up steam in the No Shame department. In fact, one night, I proposed to him in our carport after a night out with Emmett and Sarah. “Jon,” I purred. “I think we should get married. I want you to be my family. I want to be able to visit you in the hospital if you’re sick, you know, be your next of kin and all of that, the whole package. I want to have your last name. So marry me. Just say you’ll marry me and then we’ll be engaged. Look, you can always divorce me if it doesn’t work out. It’s not like getting a tattoo. And hey, we could have a double ceremony with Emmett and Sarah!”

“I do want to marry you. But I want to ask, when I’m ready.”

“Okay, so can I take that as a yes?”

It’s not that a woman shouldn’t propose to a man; in fact, I’ve seen it done successfully. But it’s probably not exactly attractive to see a woman
beg
a man to marry her, especially when said man has made it clear that he is on his own course,
which is more difficult to chart than storm systems, tides, or weather. I’m not a meteorologist.

The problem was, I was in a hurry to marry him and he…was in no huge hurry to do anything. The man spent the better part of two years buying a car. He’d been driving a Honda Prelude that had more mileage on it than Jenna Jameson but with none of the cosmetic upkeep. Seriously, two years narrowing down his options, checking and rechecking
Consumer Reports,
test driving, negotiating, talking it over with friends, getting close to a decision, but then second guessing. At one point, he finally decided on an Audi, negotiated his best deal, and then took so long to pull the trigger, someone else bought it out from under him. Eventually, he committed to a three-year lease on an Acura. This was not a guy to choose a bride in a timely manner. And in spite of having always seen myself as independent and a bit free-spirited, I had set my sights on spending the rest of my life with this guy and didn’t want to end up as that Audi. But much like a car dealer, I couldn’t fathom why it was taking him so long to sign the pink slip. In fact, it was starting to piss me off. What was the holdup? He was thirty-five when I met him and now he was thirty-seven. Did he think he was going to meet someone else better? Because I, for one, knew I wasn’t going to meet anyone half as great as Jon.

This was not a matter of just wanting to be married; in fact, there was a big part of me that before meeting Jon never wanted to get married at all. I was never that teenager who got a tingly feeling down there from pawing through bridal
magazines with sweaty hands, dreaming about my wedding to Scott Baio, trying to decide if I’d be going with an updo or if I was more of a long hair with flowers type of bride. Even now, I wouldn’t know which fork to eat salad with unless one had a little picture of a salad on it to help me out.

I wanted to marry Jon. I wanted to marry him because I honestly couldn’t see myself waking up next to anyone else besides him ever again. I wanted to marry him because every day he lost his keys and every day I knew exactly where they were; because he always brought me a bottle of water to put by my bedside at night; because he’d never, ever used an emoticon in any email; because he wanted to stab the character Aiden from
Sex and the City
through the throat; because I’d never met a sweeter smart-ass; because he’d never,
ever
been inside a Color Me Mine do-it-yourself pottery store. I wanted to marry him because he didn’t have potential; he was perfect. And…okay, maybe I wanted to marry him so I could be on his health insurance, but…still…I’d kissed enough addicts, new age enthusiasts, men who thought yoga retreats were a great idea, men who believed the homeless problem could be solved if they’d all just “go get a job,” and men who wore overalls to know better.

So I made a decision: I wasn’t going to be issuing any ultimatums. Maybe that made me some kind of sucker, but I didn’t care. I refused to be one of “those girls”—the ones who couldn’t wait to be engaged so that they could run up to other women who were engaged and scream, “Ooooh, myyyy Gawd! Look at my ring! It’s
huge
!” I wanted to be with Jon
more than I wanted to be married. I knew for a fact that if I gave him an ultimatum, and he didn’t propose to me, I wasn’t going anywhere. He was stuck with me. Soon after, his perpetually single friend Jack (who had such bad luck with women that his last girlfriend could only climax if she got punched in the stomach) finally met the love of his life and within months promptly proposed. I was unfazed, even when Jon flew to Vegas for the bachelor party and got lap dances from strippers—one in particular whom he swears to this day only got his repeat business because she was giving him great real estate advice. Meanwhile, I was sentenced to the boring-ass bridal shower, where we played “guess who knows Marley the best?” After four brief meetings, here’s a guess:
not me.
There are very few get-togethers I hate more than bridal showers. But women seem to love ’em. These ladies were so excited by the cake, I could’ve been in the corner giving myself a breast exam and no one would’ve noticed. So, I ate a ton of guacamole, drank a mimosa, and hit the road, barely, I mean
barely
at all, tearing up to a George Strait song on the twenty-five-mile lonely ride home. But seriously, I was fine.
I didn’t need to be married.