Anything that could possibly have gone wrong at our wedding did. My fiance had gotten home from Iraq a month earlier, but had to go through weeks of reintegration before being granted leave time. He was scheduled to come home the day before Saint Patrick's day and we had plans to see one of his favorite Boston bands, the Dropkick Murphy's, on what might have been his favorite holiday. New England had other plans for us though, when it dropped more than a foot of snow in just a few days. His plane was re-routed to Bangor, Maine, a place famous only for being the birthplace of Stephen King. He called to tell me he was going to rent a car with some people he'd met on the plane and drive home in the blizzard. When I called to tell my sister-in-law his plans, she couldn't believe I hadn't tried to talk him out of it. In my frustration, I said something that I would immediately regret. She hung up on me. Moments later my mother-in-law called to yell and say that because of me, he was going to end up dead on the side of the road somewhere. He ended up aborting his plans to drive down and got on a flight to Boston the next morning. I waited for hours in the airport as his plane was repeatedly delayed and detoured due to the weather. He eventually got in later that night after we had completely missed the concert.
We had only invited eleven people to our wedding-- our immediate family and two of his friends-- but after the blizzard I was worried that no one in his family was going to show up. I called to apologize to my sister-in-law. We had both spoken from a place of fear and frustration and, had we thought twice, would never had said the things we did the night before. We forgave each other, but as we stood watching the Saint Patrick's Day Parade that afternoon I could feel the tenderness of the newly formed rift that wouldn't ever close all the way.
A week later, we were married on a 40 degree day in the mud of the melting piles of snow left over from the storm. Part-way through the ceremony, the Justice of the Peace dropped our vows in the mud when a strong wind passed by. I couldn't slip my husband's ring over his finger since it was too small to pass by his knuckle. I'd had him try it on as soon as he was home and suggested we have it sized. "It's fine," he said. It wasn't. Everyone in attendance complained about the cold that morning even though they were all bundled up in sports coats and winter jackets and I was wearing a spaghetti-strapped dress. My mother-in-law sipped an iced-coffee and complained she was freezing. She is clenching her hands into fists and looking away from the camera in every picture. Everyone clustered 40 feet away, barely within earshot, as we exchanged our vows.
I planned the entire wedding while my husband was in Iraq. I bought our wedding bands, booked the reception hall, found a dress, planned the menu, hand-made seat markers and centerpieces, and baked piles of cookies and a three-tiered carrot cake. The reception room was on the second level of the function hall, the bar was on the first floor. Our families spent the majority of the two hours they lasted there walking downstairs to smoke cigarettes and buy drinks from the bar. The only time everyone was in the room together was when the food was served. The only thing that I asked my husband to do for the wedding was bring his best friend's ipod and dock so that we could play music. He didn't bring it, so the reception area was filled with a stoney silence, broken up by the scraping of forks and knives on plates, the clink of ice in empty glasses. We didn't have a first dance, we didn't have a good time.
The only gift we received that day was from the parents of one of my husband's best friends. They hadn't wrapped the pair of crystal flutes etched with claddagh symbols. My mother-in-law had given us a small Precious Moments trinket with the Stop and Shop price tag still on the bottom a few days prior. It came with a card and a handwritten note about how she didn't think we should get married. Without music or gift-giving, there wasn't much to do to pass the time. My husband's two best men hadn't prepared a speech for the toast and refused to say anything after the waitress filled our champagne glasses with white wine. I asked my father if he would give us a toast, he might have been the only one that day who was happy to see us get married. He nervously stood up to say something impromptu. I swallowed the wine as if it were a shot glass in a single gulp, hoping it would start to numb my senses.
The reception ended two hours early after my husband's mother and sister got into a fight in the bathroom. They didn't talk to each other for four years after our wedding. After my sister-in-law left in tears, everyone else started going home too. I helped box up the center pieces and food as we waited for the town car to come pick us up to take us to the hotel in Boston my father had insisted on paying for as a "honeymoon." We were married on a Saturday, I was back in college classes that Monday and a week later my husband returned to Germany.
We'd planned on having a second wedding with more people and music for our fifth anniversary, but after the first disaster I didn't want anything to do with a second celebration. The week before our first wedding, we'd stayed in a secluded cabin in New Hampshire. I wanted to book the same cabin for our five year anniversary. When I told him of my intentions he said, "What are we going to do in New Hampshire for three days?" "Be together, like we were before," I answered. "I don't have time for that," he said. "I have to work." Just being together was no longer enough to pass the time, to make us happy. When I learned a few months later that he was seeing someone he worked with I wondered if that was why he didn't want to go. I pressed the cabin idea for weeks, but he was adamant that he didn't want to go. "If you're planning something special as a surprise tell me now because you're starting to upset me," I said. "I'm not," he answered. He was being truthful at least.
My husband worked late on our five-year wedding anniversary and stopped at CVS on his way home to pick up a card and a bar of chocolate for me. My gift-- a pair of boxing gloves-- hadn't arrived in the mail yet. He ate the entire bar of chocolate himself and for a while after I couldn't face the chocolate display in CVS without getting teary-eyed. We decided to go out to eat to a restaurant we both liked on route one. The line was almost beyond the entrance door-- it was a Saturday night. "Let's go. I'm not waiting," he said and stormed back toward my car. The only other restaurant option we could both agree on was thai food and he said he wasn't in the mood for it. We spent 40 minutes driving around, trying, unsuccessfully, to find another restaurant to go to. We went back to our original choice and were seated at the bar where a live band was setting up to play so that we wouldn't have to wait for a table. So much for a quiet, romantic meal.
We stopped at the supermarket on the way home to check Redbox for movies. We couldn't agree on what to watch and a line started to form behind us. "Nevermind," I said and we left. Once home, he turned on UFC fights, all he ever seemed to want to do when he was home. I fell asleep on the couch, trying to be interested in the fights. I can't even recall kissing him once on our five-year anniversary. I knew it would be the last one we celebrated together.
Two days later I wrote him a letter. I've always found it easier to express myself in writing than face-to-face. I told him that our marriage was ending and that if we didn't do something to try to save it that we weren't going to be together much longer. I said that I was willing to do whatever it would take, even go to counseling, to try to save our relationship. I expressed my concern for his anger. He would yell, clench his fists, and get a distant and fiery look in his eyes that set my heart racing all too often. The slightest things, like a long restaurant line, would set him off. I was afraid of what would happen, what had happened when he got like that.
When he got home from work I gave him the letter. He laughed when he read it and said, "You ain't tellin' me nothin' I don't already know." "So," I said, "what are we gonna do?" "I'm not goin' to counseling," he said. "They're just gonna tell us to bond or some shit. I already know what's wrong." He went on to say that we had nothing left to offer each other.
Another tense month would pass before he said he was leaving. I started to hope that I would find out for sure he was having an affair just so that I'd have a reason to walk away from the broken marriage. I was afraid of where he was mentally and what it might do to him if I left or asked him to leave, so I stayed around, waiting for an opportunity. I knew in my heart that he was seeing someone else. While he was at work one day, I discovered he had a Twitter account and that he followed mostly pornography sites, including one for "hooking up" with local singles. He'd told me since we started dating that he didn't look at pornography and he'd told me recently that he didn't have a Twitter account. I discovered too that he'd made a facebook account under a fake name. One of his friends stood out to me when I saw her picture, and I knew immediately that she was the woman he was seeing, although I didn't have any evidence of it, my intuition was confirmed months later. I confronted him about the Twitter and the pornography when he got home. "You lied to me," I said. "So," he responded. "So, it hurts that you lied to me. I can't trust you." "So," he said. I finished loading my laundry into the wash machine and walked away from him. An hour later he declared he was moving out and although I was devastated a part of me was relieved that we didn't have to drag out this painful relationship or pretend that things would work out.
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