I never expected to be getting married. I have very strong memories of the numerous occasions as a kid that I saw kissing on TV and would cry out that it was "Disgusting! I'm never doing that! Boys are ikky!" Of course, my parents would smile at me and tell me that they would remind me of that in a few years time. At which I would protest all the more.
Between the ages of 11 and 16, I attended an all-girls school. For this and any number of other reasons, I was a bit of a late-starter when it came to boys. I didn't have my first kiss until I was 15, and it was quite the traumatic experience. It occurred in the early hours of the new millennium, with a somewhat drunk passerby and bore a stunning resemblance to my washing machine's wet cycle. Perhaps even the spin cycle would have been an improvement.
Undaunted, I told myself that it couldn't always be that awful. So began a string of boyfriends, from the unwashed to the unemployed through to the undesirable and unsuitable. Of course it wasn't all bad, but it was always transient. I never expected to still be with these boys six months later, let alone forever. I didn't feel that these relationships were ever going anywhere, although the feeling was almost never mutual. So I took a break from it all.
I spent a lot of time growing up, and did a bit of thinking about where my life was headed. I figured out that I enjoyed being single. That I never wanted to rely on someone else for me to get where I wanted to be. That if I had a kid, it would be as a single mum, and that it would still be just as rewarding if I planned it well. I became very comfortable with the idea of being single forever.
Two years passed, I had the beginnings of a career, had travelled solo and was in the process of buying a flat, when a friend cornered me in the middle of a game of last-man-standing at a camp. We were both under the influence of alcohol, weed, lots of sunshine and too many hours awake when he felt the time had come to ask me out. I turned him down as nicely as I could, which was quite an achievement at 4am.
A few months later, when I had had a chance to think, we were at another event together, with similar circumstances minus the sunshine! I had taken some inspiration from Dr Pepper, and figured that a fling wouldn't do me any harm. If it didn't work out, well he would just be another casualty in my world-destroying wake. Ha!
So here I am, nearly three years on and less than four months from marrying the one person I can imagine growing old with. I can easily see us as grandparents, giving the grandkids home-made blue smarties (remind me to stockpile whatever that blue colouring is that was removed from smarties...) and then handing them back. I can see us really building a home together, instead of this somewhat student-like mess we currently live in. We already support each other through the hard times, and encourage each other to achieve what we dream of. Even the difficult bits make me really proud of us and the way we manage.
All this is to say that, sometimes ideals change. I never saw this as my future, but now I can't see it any other way. The flux capacitor is broken, and there is no going back to change the past. The hard times will still happen, but the good times will be that much better for someone to share them with. With risk comes reward. Wish us luck.
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