Here's the Thing

I was not the little girl who daydreamed about getting married, or the one who had every detail of her wedding planned prior to the age of ten—instead, I fantasized about taking a boat to Antarctica, summiting Mt. Kilimanjaro, spending months wandering through Eastern Europe or exploring South America. I was also the little girl who wanted to know why boys could pee standing up and I couldn’t—I asked my mom and she told me (with what I can now see was a look of knowing) to, “go outside and try, let me know how it goes.” As you would expect, it didn’t work out too well. I had a vague idea that maybe I would get married at twenty-six or twenty-seven (which at the time I thought was old), but only if I happened upon it as I explored and adventured through life. Long story short, I was in absolutely no rush to find myself betrothed to someone who wanted me to settle down in suburbia (aka purgatory).

So, I arrived at my small, Christian liberal arts college, not knowing a soul and without a desire to date. But, two weeks into my freshman year, I found myself with a boyfriend—which was absolutely not the plan.

We dated all four years of college, and then, Christmas of our senior year, after a run on the beach in Florida, as sweat dripped down my face and pit marks swelled on my gray t-shirt (romantic, right?), he got down on one knee and proposed. So, here I was, engaged before the age of twenty-two, and currently destined to spend the remainder of my life in a Chicago suburb with a man who wanted to work for an insurance company—and the worst part was, I had convinced myself that this is what I wanted.

As luck would have it (or more likely, God), five months after his proposal (and five months before our wedding day), I found myself sobbing in my kitchen because my fiancé had told me it was God’s will and called off the wedding. I don’t believe in the flippant use of the phrase “God’s will,” because I think it leads to a lack of ownership and predicates the idea that we are without fault. But, when I cerebrate on my broken engagement and where I’ve found myself since, I can see that God really was present in the midst of all of this.

And just like that, the Christian fairytale I never actually wanted was over—I would no longer be fated to drive a minivan, exclusively wear J. Crew, and live in a home that looked exactly like the fifty other families in our suburban development.

But, here’s the thing, I’m not saying that living a life of comfort and settling down somewhere is inherently a bad thing, or that my ex-fiancé was a bad person (he’s a wonderful guy)—it just wasn’t for me at twenty-two. And, when I reflect on the eight years since my harrowing breakup and broken engagement, it’s easy to see how deflated I would have become, the way the light in me would have dulled (hindsight is 20/20 after all). There was something in me (something that had been there since I was a little girl) that needed to explore, that needed to adventure, that needed to be untethered to the constraints of gender roles or the Christian ideal of the submissive wife.

That’s not to say that I don’t desire to love and be loved, or that I don’t think marriage is a beautiful, magical thing, because I do. But, I also hold firmly to the belief that marriage is not a prerequisite for being a whole person, and loving someone or being loved by someone should never mean one person is required to shrink or become opaque.

What if the connection we so deeply desire is really a commitment to willingness? What if love is a freeing (for yourself and for others)? What if it’s a way to magnify the light in someone else? Maybe I’ve got it all wrong and that’s not what love truly is, but it’s what I’m holding out for.