Recently, the AOL homepage featured one of those wacky questions like…”Do You Regret Marrying Your Spouse?” I’m sure this is due to the results of the TV show, “The Bachelor”, Jason Mesnick backing out on his proposal to marry the perky Melissa, and instead falling back on his “true love” Molly. (There had to be a classier way to handle the end of that show, but then again, who says good television has to be “classy”?)
Anyway, I guess everyone gets a case of “cold feet” once the moment of truth presents itself. I did. And, boy, am I glad I had someone like Larry Sheets to help put me over the top!
Who’s Larry Sheets? Well, he’s a guy I worked with when I was a DJ down in Georgia.
Larry’s dad owned a real estate brokerage, and as a hobby, Larry did some fill in work at the radio station. Larry was what you’d call a sensitive guy….sensitive, but not very decisive. It seems that Larry was in a relationship for a number of years, holding out the possibility of marriage to his girlfriend, but never quite sealed the deal! One day Larry came to the radio station looking as though he was diagnosed with some fatal disease. “My girl dumped me” he said with tears in his eyes. “After so many years that we’d been together, she just decided that it was time. I never saw it coming…..I always figured she’d be the one I’d marry….but because I never popped the question, she just went ahead and told me she’d been seeing someone else.”
I don’t think I’d ever seen anyone take a breakup as badly as that. Just the admission that he needed something like ‘ludes just to be able to function was enough to convince me that there was no way to console him.
How fortuitous for me this little meeting. Not wanting to take any glee or comfort in his obvious misfortune, I told him that it wasn’t but a couple of days before that that I’d decided to give my relationship with my then girlfriend a “cooling off” period. I look back at it now and shudder. I mean, here was someone who stuck with me through all my own indecisiveness about leaving family and friends to pursue my dream…and I actually had the audacity to tell her that we needed a “cooling off”? Just writing this aggravates me…..but enough of that!
Mentioning this to Larry, he looked at me with those tear filled doleful eyes and said in his Garth Brooks like twang, “…..do you think she’s the one you’d be spending the rest of your life with?” “Well, yeah”, I said, unassumingly. “Well, if I were you, I wouldn’t let her get awaaaayyyyyy! “Go tell her nowwwwwww!” Don’t let what happened to me happen to you!
Later that day I was on the phone to the woman who would eventual consent to become my wife, and in my most unromantic proposal, said, “…babe, I think we should do this…..what do you say?”
Perhaps if AOL were asking the question and my wife were to answer, who knows, she might answer differently. As for me, I don’t regret a thing…….and will always be in Larry’s debt, wherever he is. Hopefully happily married and owning most of the real estate in Middle Georgia.
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2 comments:
Good for you, Ray!
The key thing here is that you saw your future wife as "the one" for you. Some of us, however, make the mistake of falling into a marriage with someone who is not "the one".
Maybe they are a good friend, maybe they were there for us when we were needy, and one thing leads to another. We feel obligated. We feel grateful. We don't want to break their hearts. So we propose and they accept. Now we are honor bound with freezing feet.
We should run or at least politely excuse ourselves, for all of the warning signs are there. But we stick it out and faithfully and honorably fulfill our duty. We are loving and selfless, too, giving the impression if not the actuality of being in love. We invest our heart and soul in the family. Then, when children and obligations make it the most devastating, our spouses leave us for someone they are in love with.
So, yes, if you have found "the one", declare your love early and often. But if there is reason for the cold feet, if heaven and earth are not beating the message into your thick head that she is "the one", listen to your feet and let her free to find the one she would have eventually left you for.
Ray, I said it once and I'll say it again. Your blogs are ten times better than Casey's. You should open a blogging company while Casey is stitching shoes in China.
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