I DID not expect to fall in love at 46, and I did not expect to plan a wedding at 47. Except that I always expect to be surprised.
I would love to say that I don’t know why I never got around to this until now, but that would be a big fat lie. I never got married because who would want to? I was the worst girlfriend ever. And yes, I am the crazy ex-girlfriend you hear about. I had no regard for time of day or time of year or time at all. Perhaps I just had no regard. It’s not like I called boyfriends at 2 a.m. because something was wrong: I did it because I liked to talk in the dark when there was nothing good to watch on TV anymore.
I also called when something was wrong, and something was always wrong, because I could work my way into serious bother about something said in passing between the appetizer and the entree the night before, and that would turn into obsessive thoughts and long, intense conversations that would stretch across business hours and interrupt meetings all the next day. I needed — always absolutely needed — to get things resolved when it was not at all convenient. I called so repeatedly that I was impossible to ignore.
When technology enabled me to be demanding in many formats, my long voice mail messages became longer text messages and the longest emails. I was often hysterically upset or ragingly angry about nothing at all, and entire relationships became about failed communication and no more. I would swallow half a bottle of tranquilizers over a misunderstanding. And I would do this on New Year’s Eve.
I did this to everybody: I held rooms full of people hostage to my foul moods. I was an emotional wreck, and I did not know how not to be. I made men I loved scared of me.
Not that I am all to blame for my messed-up love life. I was in the same relationship with different people for 30 years. I know a bad idea when I see one, and I like what I see. If a man drank Jameson for breakfast and then smashed the bottle into bits on the bathroom tiles possibly by mistake, he was my boyfriend.
I was once meant to meet someone for dinner, and the appointed hour came and went with no sign of my date at the table for two. Sometime after midnight — well after — he called me to say he was in a house at the entrance to the Holland Tunnel, and he needed me to come find him: He was wasted and had to get away. With this minimal information, I trekked all the way west on Spring Street toward the Hudson River, and I located him in a small white condemned structure beside a pileup of cars waiting to head underground to Jersey City. I don’t know what kind of radar I had to have had to find this place, but surely it was the desperation that drew me along and made me feel alive. That feeling dragged me through years of love gone wrong.
If television, movies, novels, songs, blogs and all other available media are to be believed, my behavior was not unusual and my love life not untypical. Our culture is animated by bad relationships and the conversations women have about them while drinking vodka cocktails flavored with lychee and pomegranate. The brainpower necessary to solve the troubles in Iraq and Palestine is instead deployed in the tender analysis of destructive dating behavior. It does not matter that it is obvious we are wasting our time.
Most people get sick and tired of being sick and tired by the time they are 28, which is the average age of marriage in the United States. I was more like 45. I guess I just love a parade. For a while before I met my fiancé, I was just alone. I indulged in boredom; I found it restful.
I cried profuse tears when my relationships failed, which was all the time. I wanted to love and be loved, but I behaved badly, and I had terrible taste. All the people who say they want to be married, but are not, are doing the same thing. All the statistics about how hard it is to find someone to love in this world — in this world of seven billion — do not account for the choices we make. We are the sum of our decisions: It’s not that luck has nothing to do with it, but rather, there is no such thing.
It is difficult to write a published book. It is difficult to get tenure in the astrophysics department at Berkeley. It is difficult to win the Heisman Trophy. But it is easy to get married: about 90 percent of Americans still do at some time in their lives. No self-help industry is required. People who want to get married stop behaving like fools for love and start acting intelligently. It is as simple as wanting to be happy.
When I was ready to fall in love for real, I stopped behaving badly, and I met someone great, and great for me. I got better and my taste got better. My fiancé is smart and handsome and talented and decent. Everything about him is my favorite thing about him.
He proposed this past May, just seven months after we met. I knew I was going to marry Jim the night I encountered him, at a reading in Chelsea in autumn, so it did not seem too soon.
Many romances end after three years because that is their logical limit, which does not mean the time was wasted: Most relationships, including marriages, end, but we continue to have them and it is not because we hate ourselves. I believe that we all know what we are getting into with another person early on, and it is worth it, whatever the duration. A lifelong thing is lovely, but a one-night stand is also lovely. It is my good fortune never to have wed the 374 or so men I dated before Jim. I don’t know how many times I should have registered at Tiffany and celebrated extravagantly for the mistakes I did not make. I would have many remarkable sets of silver, serving spoons included. I would own gravy boats galore.
So I guess I have nothing to regret, after all.
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