Tied Up In Nots

I dunno what the universe is trying to tell me but this is freaking me out a bit. Yesterday afternoon a friend and I are walking through the kitchen section of Kohl’s department store, and she says there’s all this kitchen stuff she wants that she can’t afford. I jokingly suggest she marry her boyfriend then, because the only reason I see to get married is for the great kitchen stuff you receive as gifts.

Fast forward to yesterday evening. Another friend is dropping off his guinea pigs for us to babysit because he’ll be on a trip for the next five days. His girlfriend is moving in with him and he starts talking about looking for A Ring. I was concerned because he hasn’t known the girl that long so I gently offered my opinion that he should take one step at a time and see how things go living together before moving forward. I think his biological clock is just ticking too loud.

Fast forward again to 5am this morning. I’m having a dream that Mark and I are discussing what to do that evening for fun when we both remember ‘oh my gosh, we’re supposed to get married tonight!’ Because that’s something people often forget they made plans for. :rolls eyes at self: The same rules of life don’t apply in dreams though, as we all know.

So he goes to do whatever men do before their weddings, and I go to get my dress from another room. While I’m alone in the room I’m thinking I really don’t want to do this and I’m regretting that I agreed to it, but I feel I have to go through with it because the ball is already rolling. People will be showing up any time and canceling a wedding at the last minute is BAD, and I can’t leave Mark standing at the altar like that. I’ve always been very good at making sure other people are happy (even in my dreams), but really bad at making sure I’m happy too.

So I have the same argument with myself in my head in the dream that I’ve had in my head in real life. It’s not that I don’t love him, it’s that I feel marriage is like living in a cage. When you’re married, if the marriage is not working, people feel more obligated to beat a dead horse instead of just calling a spade a spade and going your separate ways. Plus there’s all this extra untangling of physical property and legal issues. Untangling your emotions is hard enough. I believe if you really love someone you’ll stay together because you love Being with each other, not because you have some binding legal agreement, so I really don’t understand what the point of a wedding is anyway. You can plan a party to celebrate your love and even dress up if you want anytime. If you're rich enough, you'll only be called "eccentric" instead of crazy. And who cares if people think you're crazy anyway? If you're having a good time, that's what counts. In a relationship, the spiritual bond means far more to me than any physical piece of paper. You weave it together from love and emotion; you don't write it down and sign in ink like a contract.

So back to the dream: I call my mother on the phone to cry on her shoulder and ask her advice. As happens in dreams, I already know that she’s not coming to the wedding (not because she doesn’t want to), and this is also upsetting me because of old issues about her working so much when I was a kid and only ever being available on the phone (at least that part of the dream was easy to figure out!), but I’m not addressing that issue with her.

I had started whining to her how I hate to be tied down when I actually woke up in a cold sweat. The sheets were damp, my tshirt was soaked, and my arm was completely asleep. I was still feeling all the emotion of the dream too, the anxiety and crying and dread. It was awful. I hate when dream emotions follow you back into reality.

I tried to calm down and go back to sleep after changing my shirt. I’m not sure if I was more disturbed by the dream itself or the message of the dream. I figure I probably had the dream because I had mentioned weddings twice that day. Mark and I haven’t been discussing getting married at all, and have no intention to. Maybe I’m worried about letting go enough that I can move to California. I really do want to live out west again. Like I said, I’m great at making everyone else happy, not so great at making sure I’m happy.

Anyway, just to tie the knot at the end of this experience string, I come into work this morning and make myself a mug o’ chai. In the kitchen there is a notice tacked to the bulletin board that a store in Fairview, NJ is having a clearance sale on ALL WEDDING GOWNS.

At this point I just feel like yelling into the cosmos, “WHAT AND THE FUCK IS YOUR POINT?”