Same Penis (or Vagina) Forever, Act Like a Lady

Newsflash: When you pick your forever person, you’re never going to feel like you 100-percent made the right choice. You are going to have to tell yourself over and over and over again that you made the right choice. If you told us that we could have our dream handbag, it would be a Hermès bag. It’s the most expensive, luxurious item we’ve lusted after our entire lady lives. But, if you tell us that’s the only bag we can carry for the rest of our goddamn lives, no matter what the occasion is, we’re going to question our decision constantly. What if we’re going to a funeral? Or a mud race?! We’d need a CamelBak for that! Finding your lifelong partner is kind of like finding your Hermès bag. Do you want to carry him around every day into every adventure? Not really, but guess what? That’s the trade-off.

The person you’re sitting across from on your first date is going to be innately the same person sitting across from you on your twentieth wedding anniversary. You can change his shoes and make him grow his hair out, and you can change the way he goes down on you in Sexico, but you’re never going to change the fact that he has a wandering eye, or has no ambition, or lashes out at you for no reason. You’re never going to change the fact that he never learned how to do laundry or that his mom enabled him to be a lazy slob, or that he’s not adventurous and outgoing, or that he doesn’t want to take responsibility for his actions.

So, if you are a Jac and you are an experience-driven person, you want to be out and about doing all the Jactivities and seeing the world. If you choose to be with an antisocial partner who wants to be inside his little cocoon all the time, at home playing video games, you can’t expect him to change what fuels his soul to accommodate you.

So, what’s our advice? When you pick your forever person, don’t look at them and imagine what your life will look like in five or ten years. Look at what your life will look like in forty years, when he’s old and bald and wrinkly and his balls are sagging to his knees. Look at what your life will look like in sixty years, when you’re wiping his ass because he can’t go to the bathroom on his own. Will he still make you laugh? Will you take care of each other when life gets hard? Will his hand on your knee still make your heart happy? There are a number of people who could be a good match for you, but you choose your forever person because you want them around, not because fate brought them to you, and definitely not because you “can’t live without them.” Barf. We think the idea of soul mates is bullshit. You have to be realistic. You choose your partner, so choose wisely. And the truth is that you will choose the right person at the right time, and it’s never going to be how you thought it would be.

And we don’t care how old you are or how many of your friends are married with kids. Do. Not. Settle. We would rather die alone than end up with someone who doesn’t deserve our greatness. If you have to spend every day for the rest of your life with one person, make sure they’re worthy and that you’re not with them because you’re scared to be alone or you feel like time is running out. There’s a lot of pressure from society to be on the correct timeline of life. High school, check! College, check! Then you get your internship, get engaged, married, and then it’s time to have a baby. Life ends up feeling like this daunting to-do list, and before you can come up for air, you’re spending all your free time at Chuck E. Cheese’s, wondering where you lost control of the steering wheel. Don’t let yourself get desperate and make sloppy choices just because your life doesn’t seem to match up with society’s plan for women as a whole. And guess what? Technology is pretty great these days. So if you feel your biological clock ticking, but you haven’t met your partner or aren’t ready to have kids just yet, freeze those eggs, girl (if you can afford it)! Never marry someone because you feel like your eggs are dying. Take the power back and rewrite your own timeline.

Also, don’t marry the best sex of your life. This is the guy who will literally rock your socks off in the bedroom, who you will think about when you masturbate years later, and who is probably having sex with someone else while you’re reading this right now. You don’t want to marry that guy. You want to marry the guy who you have great sex with, but who (more importantly) treats you nicely. Because even the craziest, most passionate, kinky sex eventually turns into married sex at some point. There’s not one single person, unless you marry a sex addict, who’s gonna stay as hot in the bedroom with you as he started. Even Kanye probably gets sick of sleeping with Kim, you know?

I’ll never forget what my mom said the day after my first date with my future husband.

She was right. Chris is the opposite of the kind of guy I’ve always gone for. I had spent all my life cradling injured birdies and trying to fix them. I always went for the artistic guy who wrote poems and songs and who texted prose at 3:00 a.m. I think in my twenties I pretty much exclusively dated some sort of musician. I loved a guy who didn’t have his life together. It took years of therapy for me to realize that I acted this way for two reasons.

First, musicians are hot. Talent is hot. Dark rooms and tour buses and tight jeans are all super hot. But what makes a great front man isn’t usually what makes a great human being. Second, I was hard-core codependent and I had such low self-esteem that I handpicked men who really needed me and my killer organizational and life skills, because somewhere deep down inside me, I didn’t feel like I actually deserved to be loved just for me. I have a long list of red flags that have made me swoon, including but not limited to: drinking problems, always being late, forgetting I exist for days at a time, drug problems, and lack of knowledge of how to do laundry and pay bills. It was a real bonus if they were ousted from their families, didn’t have families, or had bad blood with their families. I loved a man who had been arrested, asked to borrow money, then disappeared. Get me a guy who lived with his mom, didn’t have a real job, made jewelry part-time, or was a “DJ.” It was a bonus if we could fit in the same size pants.

My mom’s advice to me was always “Marry someone who loves you more than you love him.” It’s harsh, but it’s actually true. I have obsessed and watched enough of my friends obsess over impossible loves. There is nothing more thrilling on earth than the person you can’t fully have. It’s hard to break the cycle of how addictive and fun it is being with a bad boy. It’s a thrilling ride to never know where you stand with someone and to live your life on the edge. It feels good to be needed by a lover, and for it to be an all-encompassing, addictive, can’t-get-enough rom-com.

But I know for sure that I wouldn’t have the life I have if I hadn’t married the good guy who wanted me in return.

I met Chris three times before I remembered him. He was persistent, to say the least. I went to his birthday party with the full intention of trying to hook up with a different guy I thought was on the guest list. That guy never came, but a slightly tipsy Chris walked across the room with his arms flung over two girls and said hello (it is pathetic that he had to act like a douchebag for me to take notice, but it worked). The next day he asked for my phone number and then, get this, he CALLED ME ON THE PHONE to ask me out. He picked me up for our date in a nice shirt and a clean car, and he had made a proper reservation for dinner. He didn’t kiss me until our third date.

When I first met Chris, I had some major trust issues, so he would let me look through his phone whenever I wanted for the entire first year we dated. He was a former musician with tight jeans and good hair who had switched over to managing the next round of superstars.

On our first trip together, the water in the shower was so salty that my hair wouldn’t untangle, and he washed my hair for me every night with bottled water. I once got stuck in a landslide on a work trip, and I called him crying, and he got in his car at 1:00 a.m. and drove north for five hours to come save me on the roadside. He has never called me “Keltie.” He just says “my love.” My parents love him, and he texts them by himself to check in. When I can’t go to birthday dinners or events with my friend group, he goes alone and hangs out with all my girlfriends. He gives me tons of space to be a crazy workaholic, and when I’m in work mode, he makes me tea and kisses my forehead and then leaves me alone. He has a file on his phone of all the details about me, including my shoe size, ring size, social security number, parents’ birthdays, etc. When I say I like something, he will take notes and then, months later, surprise me with that exact thing. He goes on the dance floor with me at weddings and holds his own.

How to Get the Ring You Want

Show him the ring that you want. Don’t let him get creative. NEWS FLASH: Men are stupid. If you are picky and you want a specific type of ring, then you should tell him exactly what you want. Men are morons, and the chance of them getting it right on their own is slim to none. Also, don’t copy your friend’s ring. It’s tacky and very Single White Female. If your guy presents you with Grandma’s family heirloom ring, you have to accept it. Turn it into a necklace pendant and then get a new ring on your ten-year anniversary. DON’T FUCK WITH GRANDMA. She’ll start haunting you from her grave.

He hates drama and noise, like me, so we rarely fight. When we do, it’s a grown-up discussion about why we are fighting. One time, I was mad at him and he made a poster-board presentation of his love for me to make up for it. He knows how to cook, clean, and do laundry. He can figure out the hard and confusing things about taxes, paperwork, and mortgages. He has the appropriate grown-up clothes to wear to any event, and a section of his closet is grown-man suits with proper shirts, ties, and dress shoes. He is my biggest fan, and although he is very private in his own life, I will often come home to find him watching my TV show. He will always turn to me and say, “good one tonight.” He’s just really great to me.

I owe a lot to Chris because he gave me room to grow into this version of myself. He’s let me change and has never held me to being one woman. I have hundreds of different sides to me, and he’s been along for the ride.

When I stopped being busy trying to save someone else, and I got to focus on my own life, really amazing things started happening to me. My advice is to choose the good guy. The guy who calls you back and wants to spend time with you. The guy who makes things like grocery shopping fun.

Our marriage is simple. We love each other and make the mundane days of working adult life fun. We choose each other as often as we can, and we don’t make it a big deal when we can’t. I let him do his thing, and he lets me do mine. We trust each other. We are nice to each other. We have a similar set of goals for the things we would like to see and do in our lives. We have similar outlooks on the way the world should work. We have the same values at our core. We both love our work, we love music, we love our little life together, and we also love to get completely wasted and make out like we are in high school.

I DEFINITELY didn’t grow up dreaming about my wedding day, and only occasionally did I think about having a forever husband. Husband, yes. Forever? I doubted it. One of my biggest role models was my Granny June, and she was married four times (twice to the same man).

Quite frankly, I think I was a little intimidated by marriage (and at times grossed out) because of my parents’ obsession with each other. They met when my mom was fifteen, and they have been happily (and sexually) together ever since. Yes, my parents are still boning after forty-one eight years of marriage. How do I know this, you ask? My father alludes to it regularly. Thanks for the night terrors, Dad!

Growing up, I would go out to dinner with other families and notice that the other dads weren’t very shy about hitting on the perky-boobed waitress at the local LongHorn Steakhouse, and it was always so shocking to me. In my thirty-four years of life, I’ve heard my dad say that only one other woman besides my mother was “attractive,” and that was Teri Hatcher (obviously, in her Lois & Clark days). We have spent the last two decades roasting him for it because it was incredibly out of character. Tom Tobin set a high motherfuckin’ bar. That asshole…

My dad instilled a very impactful lesson in me with his deep devotion/sick obsession with my mother. The lesson was that you should choose a man who not only respects you but WORSHIPS you from damn near the beginning. Because of this, I have never really chased men. Don’t get me wrong, I would get pretty bummed out if the hot guy in the bar showed zero interest in me, but that’s usually where it stopped. I very rarely put myself in the position of impressing some uninterested guy or “getting him to fall in love with me,” like so many of my girlfriends who would lust after men who were simply not into them and were never going to be. I would always think, Why play a game you can’t win?!

Of course, there was a downside to this mentality because, in my twenties, it meant that I ended up with guys who adored me but who I didn’t necessarily adore back. And, if I’m being completely honest, I loved the way that made me feel. I always felt like I had the upper hand in the relationship AND was constantly (usually subconsciously) putting out the vibe that I could live without them…and nothing keeps a man loving you more than aloofness (I’m dead serious).

However, after about a year of being with that kind of guy, I would get to a place where I would rather rip off his head and shit down his neck than actually sit across from him at a dinner table and watch him chew. This sort of solidified the idea that I would never meet a man I wanted to spend more than a year with, let alone the rest of my life. I was certain my life was headed toward Granny June status.

In recent years, I started to observe my parents a little more closely, because I was stumped. I didn’t understand how my mother stuck around through all this smothering!!! And not only did it appear that she was sticking around, but she was still putting out (like I mentioned earlier), and that was a sign that she still held a candle for good ol’ Tom Tobin. How was this possible?!

Well, just like Jane Goodall, after years and years of observation of these two primates, I realized that I was missing something all along! I noticed that while my dad worshipped my mother and thought she was the most beautiful human on planet Earth, he still challenged her. And she him. It wasn’t the same kind of crazy sick love like I had for my Maltese, Sophie, which I had always mistaken it for. It was sort of conditional. There was balance. And over the years, I have realized that unconditional love and adoration are reserved for your kids and your pets, not for your spouse.

When Zach and I started dating, I still sort of expected him to think every little thing I did was spectacular, even when I was on my worst behavior, but that was certainly NOT the case. He challenged me, and this was something new and (kind of) exciting for this self-obsessed actress. Don’t get me wrong, there was still a very healthy amount of adoration there. (He will kill me for writing this, but before we started dating, anytime he would see our mutual friend, he would ask where I was and if I was single. This went on for a DECADE.)

Here’s the thing: Zach Martin really adores me at my best and accepts me at my worst…but he doesn’t let me stay there too long without showing me he’s slightly disappointed, and I think that’s a great thing (especially for a monster like me). It sounds cheesy, but his expectations of me are what keep me constantly working on being a better person and a better spouse. He can only get away with this bullshit because, deep down, I truly believe that he is a fantastic fucking human, and I respect the shit out of him, even when I want to suffocate him in his sleep.

Let’s try a little exercise. I want you to think of a super strong woman in your life (possibly a little narcissistic and extremely opinionated). Does she primarily date men who are doormats? Did said woman end up marrying a doormat? She probably did, right? She’s with a man who worships her and lets her get away with murder, correct? Now, if she’s been in this relationship a while, has she gradually become even more self-centered, less self-aware, and pretty much horrible to be around? That’s because she didn’t marry someone who would check her ass when she was being a pig. And, by the way, this is not me being judgmental. I’m fully aware that in the wrong relationship, I am capable of becoming this woman.

Before all the feminists come after me, I married someone who puts my ass in check only when necessary. I still act out, I still say inappropriate things at parties, I still share way too much information about my bodily functions at the dinner table, and he simply shakes his head (mostly) lovingly. I still Dutch-oven him almost every night, and only once in our five years together has he ever suggested we stop farting in front of each other. After all, he knows who he married, and he never wanted to change me. In fact, a lot of things about me that most men couldn’t handle, he takes in stride, and he may never admit it, but I believe they are some of the reasons he married me.

Here are a few other important reasons why I will be with Zach for as long as he can put up with me—and ladies, if you’re smart, you’ll find someone similar.

I married the man who will show up for anyone in his life when they need help, whether it’s for a flat tire or life advice. I married the man who loves his family more than anyone else I know and genuinely enjoys being around them. I married the man who knows how to grill and lets me sit around and drink when we have people over instead of helping him in the kitchen. I married the man whose heart explodes every time he sees our goddaughter, Frankie. I married the man who plans the greatest vacations and knows how to make a plan in general. I married the man who laughs at me when I’m silly and who makes me laugh when he is. I married the man who doesn’t seek out the spotlight (thank God…there can only be one star in the family), but when he’s in the spotlight, he is a bonafide leading man. I married the man who supports my dreams and thinks I’m hot when I’m naked no matter what. And, most important, I married the man who is VERY discreet when he finds another female attractive, and for that I love his dumb ass.

The world has made divorce seem like the ultimate failure. But the truth is, statistically, most of us are going to have a happily-ever-after that involves at least one, or possibly two, divorces in our lifetimes. There can be a ton of shame in going to Splitsville. But the truth is that most people’s heads are so far up their asses dealing with their own drama that they will barely even notice your divorce. We barely cared about your significant other, and we’re certainly not judging you for your divorce.

Are your parents going to be disappointed that they spent all that money on your fancy wedding? Sure. Is sadsturbation going to be the only thing in your bed for a few months or years? Most likely. Do you change your name back? If you want—we don’t care. Are your long-lost friends from high school gonna see you change your relationship status on Facebook? Maybe. But, again, they’re more interested in who commented on the video of their kid eating lemons to notice. All of it is slightly cringey, and of course it all comes with a mini backpack full of humiliation, but the bottom line is that you don’t have to live your life in a relationship that doesn’t serve you.

You can split up the plates, you can split up the furniture, and you can make a clean break and not have a trashback haunt you for the rest of your life. You can co-parent your kids and roll your eyes in secret at husband number one. But after the dust settles, you can and you will have a second (or third or fourth) marriage that is happy, fulfilling, and everything you’d wished the first had been.

Divorce is like a paper cut. It’s annoying and it hurts like hell. You can’t really see it, but it bothers you so much and it stays with you, until one day it magically feels a little better. And the next day, even better than the last. Hang in there and look on the bright side: divorce is very “in“ these days. Half of the population (and one-third of the LadyGang) has tried it at least once.

As the sole divorcée of the LadyGang, I’ve been asked many times to talk about my first marriage, how it started, how it ended, and why.

I met my first husband shortly after I accepted my first adult job as a “showgirl” aboard a world traveling cruise ship somewhere between Cancún, Mexico, and Juneau, Alaska. I was a fresh-faced and very overwhelmed eighteen-year-old who had somehow convinced herself and her parents that she was ready to go off into the world all alone. I was being paid $1,842 in American cash dollars every month to sing and dance my heart out, in a blue sequined thong, while singing “Sea Legs Circus at Sea…Tonight!” three times a week.

As far as love went, I didn’t know myself at all, but I did understand that my self-esteem could be directly reflected by the interest I was receiving from the opposite sex, and it had been that way my entire life.

It started in the first grade when a boy named Darren threw up on me in reading circle, then left me handmade crayon hearts in my pencil box the next day. Swoon.

When I was in fifth grade, I spotted a boy from my class walking down my street. I promptly ran to my bedroom, pulled my last-place dancing trophy from my shelf, and brought it outside to yell aggressively across the street, “Look what I got!”

I was now eighteen years old, and I had never been the first choice for anything or anyone. I had grown up throwing myself into a “dance career” that consisted of 2 percent natural God-given talent and 98 percent grit and “make-it-work” mentality. I had also grown up throwing myself at boys who ignored me. I wore outlandish clothing and put on shows to draw attention to what was clearly the raw sexually attractive qualities of my killer dance moves to anyone who would watch. I’ve always been the type of person who believed and lived inside the belief that my achievements made me desirable. That if I was “famous,” “the winner,” and “a star,” somehow that meant people would love and adore me.

When I completely surprised everyone in my small Canadian hometown, as well as myself, by booking a big fancy *American* dance job, something in me changed. All of a sudden my very secret, almost impossible lifelong dream of moving to New York City to become a Radio City Rockette and dance on Broadway seemed somehow…possible.

So there I was out in the world, with my guts, my courage, and a passport. When you come from a town like mine, and you’ve lived in the same house since you were born, where your dad only let the entire family drive used cars, where you had the same best friend since first grade, where you could get anywhere in the town without using a map, where you could go out for dinner and order without even looking at the menu, being launched into a rocket ship of newness and change was almost debilitating. I consider myself a pretty brave person, but I forced myself to become an adult overnight, while all of my friends were still picking up their yearbooks from graduation.

Living on the cruise ship, I was all alone for the first time in my life, completely cut off from the world. This was all happening to me in a time before cell phones. I would have to stand in line at a port to buy a long-distance calling card once a week, and then wait in line again to get to an available pay phone. Each time, I would enter my parents’ or friends’ home phone numbers in the hopes that, through the time differences and lack of caller IDs, they would know it was me and answer the phone. If they didn’t answer, it would be another week before I could talk to them. This was a time when the internet was something very new and barely understood, when you could go online with a dial-up connection for only ten minutes at a time. I was someone who deeply needed the validation of people around me telling me it was going to be okay, and there was no one around me that I even knew.

But this is an essay about divorce—so let me introduce you to First Husband, a man who shall remain nameless.

First Husband and I met while I was doing my fancy American dance job on a cruise ship, where it was really, really normal for complete strangers from completely different countries to “couple up.” Relationships usually lasted as long as a ship’s contract did. Some couples followed each other from ship to ship, some broke up when one half left for another ship, some left the ship but left behind herpes as a parting gift to a final one-night stand. The fun, passion, and adventures that the passengers on board were having on their dream vacations was absolutely nothing compared to the real-life soap opera that was going on below deck. Beer and wine were $1 at the crew bar. Loneliness was free. The whole bottom two decks of the boat reeked of desperation.

His six-by-eight bunk-bed room, complete with a stranger roommate, was just two doors down from mine. It was normal for everyone in our hallway to leave our doors open as we got ready for work. For the dancer cast, this meant gluing giant eyelashes to our eyes and pinning in big chunks of fake hair for our nightly shows. The others would be having a fresh shower and shave after a long day on the beach before putting on their suits to head to deck to help the passengers.

That was one of the things that I remember falling in love with about First Husband. He wore a suit, every single night. I had just graduated from high school a few months before and had gone to a prom where all the scrawny boys in my class, who I had known since they were little turds in first grade, rented oversize suits from the suit store at the mall. They looked like pseudo-men, all standing in a line with us girls in our gowns.

First Husband was different—he was a MAN. He wore a suit (that he owned) with dress socks and dress shoes! He listened to Frank Sinatra as he shaved! He owned fancy store cologne, not drugstore body spray! First Husband also hailed from New York City, the city that had been my obsession since my aunt had taken me to see the touring company of Cats in my hometown. Broadway: the magical, mystical place where theater nerds like me went to sing and dance and jump on tables à la “La Vie Bohème” in Rent.

Not only that, but First Husband was Italian. He was strong in his conviction that Italians were the best people on the planet and that New York City was the best city in the world. He swore that baseball was the only sport that mattered, Sinatra was the only music worth listening to, and chicken breast was the only acceptable healthy food available on the ship. He was so sure of himself, so unbelievably confident. First Husband was also my height (5'6"—not his fault), balding (also not his fault), and someone who generally thought he was better than everyone else, including me (definitely his fault).

As for me, I was so completely afraid and unsure of myself that it was the easiest thing in the world to slip into believing everything he liked was what I liked. I had been ripped away from my home and had made him my new traveling “home base.” I quickly began turning my back on everything that made me myself. I was suddenly embarrassed to be from Canada, and that I had a funny accent that made me sound “dumb.” I was embarrassed that I liked hockey, and even though I hadn’t eaten meat since the eighth grade, I started eating giant chicken breasts at dinner beside him. I wanted to be perfect for him. I wanted to not be alone.

Falling in love with First Husband looked a lot like this: sneaking away to see each other during our work hours (his at the diving shop and sports adventure desk on Deck Five), and then him sitting with the other show boyfriends (see? everyone was doing it) in the second level of the theater for the second show of the night in that damn suit, drinking a grown-up cocktail, and clapping for me. All it would have taken for me to become obsessed was the clapping, but the fact that he liked me back was awesome, too.

On days we were not working, we would sneak away to the most beautiful beaches in the world and swim, sit out on the rocks, and tell what little life stories we had to each other. We would spend time in line for pay phones to call our families and watch coveted VHS tapes of Friends reruns in one of our tiny cabins.

We had actually worked out a pretty good deal for a while. First Husband’s roommate was knocking boots with MY ship roommate, so we split rooms, and First Husband and I shared one while the roommates took the other. It was like being an adult and living together, without any of the actual grown-up responsibilities. We didn’t pay rent. We didn’t have bills. We didn’t pay for food. We didn’t have car payments. We were literally being paid to travel around the world and work for maybe three hours a day. It didn’t matter that we were the same height because we barely wore shoes!

In the middle of all this—losing myself and pretending to everyone back home that I was living the life of my dreams—I got “fat.” I was always the tallest and thinnest dancer in class—the girl who always got chosen to be lifted in a pas de deux and who constantly reveled in people grabbing her shoulders as a kid and saying, “Oh, you are so thin, my dear.” The combination of living on a floating hotel and never having to walk anywhere, the change from dancing four to five hours per day in high school to dancing three to four hours per week on the ship, becoming a chicken-breast devotee, and spending all my free time either lying in the sun, on a bunk, or on a beach and drinking meant that I gained twenty-five pounds. This sent me into a disastrous spiral.

My dance contract had weekly weigh-ins as part of our job. Every Thursday morning, the female dancers would be lined up in their pajamas and have to step on the scale to record their “show weight”; each week mine got higher and higher and sent me into a tailspin of depression and obsession. I would do what any dancer girl would do: I would stop eating for two days, go to the gym for three hours a day, and then, on day three, secretly run down to the crew shop to buy three candy bars and run to my room and devour all three in one sitting before First Husband got back from work. Then I would hide the wrappers in the garbage cans away from our room so that I could act confused about why I wasn’t losing the weight.

After a while, I got into the messy stuff when my roommate and I discovered Diet Fuel and diuretics. Diet Fuel was actually so bad for you that I think it’s now illegal, but we would pop two pills before each of our shows every night and be completely wired on caffeine in the hopes of burning “extra calories.” Then, on Wednesday, before weigh-in day, we would stop drinking water, take handfuls of Ex-Lax and diuretics, and hope that we could somehow shit out twenty-five pounds before the morning. It never worked.

The clincher in all of this, and the reason for what happened next in our relationship, was that First Husband loved me anyway. I was unlovable, miserable, a complete psycho, and I hated myself. I was full of doubt, fear, confusion, and dread. But he loved me in spite of it all, and that’s all I needed. That was the only question that mattered. We never talked about our hopes, dreams, or future. He just loved me. I was at my lowest, full of hatred for myself, and he still wrote me cute cards and called me “principessa.” I was so immature that I didn’t understand the importance of self-love or of being okay with myself. I couldn’t stand myself, but he wouldn’t leave me.

It makes sense to me now, why I woke up one freezing Alaska morning and said yes to his proposal. I remember it so perfectly. As I got out of bed, I found a note card on our tiny room desk with clues for a treasure hunt. This treasure hunt would take me all over the city of Ketchikan, Alaska, in a helicopter and lead me to the edge of a mountain cliff. There he was, waiting just for me. As he got down on one knee and asked me to marry him in that irresistible New York accent, I meekly answered, “YES!”

However, I also remember one incredibly heartbreaking detail of that day that I am beyond embarrassed to admit. As we walked down the mountain a now newly engaged couple, I thought to myself, “Well, it’s just an engagement, I can always call it off.”

But I didn’t call it off. Instead, I moved our relationship ahead at lightning speed. I made scrapbooks, and plans, and bought wedding magazines, and called my parents. I made lists and I checked off the lists. I made my parents take out an ad in my hometown paper congratulating me on my engagement with the words “New York Wedding Summer” underneath. I’m not sure what I was trying to prove, to others or to myself, but it was all one big farce. I had no idea what I was doing. I guess in some weird way I felt like I was proving myself to everyone who ever doubted me.

Eventually, First Husband and I left the ship and moved to New York to set up our big fancy NYC life together. Actually, it was a city called East Meadow, which was technically in New York State and on Long Island, but impossibly far out from both Broadway and the big city. We rented an attic in a totally average suburban house. First Husband’s stepdad bought us a car that I couldn’t drive (I didn’t drive stick). I was too far away from the train to Manhattan to walk to it myself, so I had to ask First Husband to drive me anytime I wanted to go anywhere. I was teaching dance at some local dance studios, and every week, when I got paid in cash, I handed the wad over to First Husband. In order to go into the city to take a ballet class or audition, I would need to ride one hour on the rail and then walk thirty-three blocks to the dance studio on Fifty-seventh Street, because I was a tiny little human in NYC for the first time and I couldn’t for the life of me figure out the difference between uptown and downtown trains. Every time I would ride the subway in Manhattan, I would, without a doubt, end up going in the wrong direction and missing my class.

In addition to feeling completely stuck in my own life, I was also attempting to morph into the “wifely” version of myself that my soon-to-be husband wanted me to be. I was constantly at family events with his oversize Italian family, and I quickly learned that a woman who didn’t know how to cook, didn’t go to college, and ate pasta sauce out of a can had a long way to go before being accepted. It’s crazy to think now, but at no point in this process did I stop to wonder if the life that I was building was the life I actually wanted. I felt so much pressure to succeed in this new world that I ignored every single little rumbling in my gut that said everything about my world felt wrong.

I remember one night when I invited the huge Italian family over to our one-bedroom attic for dinner, a dinner that I was going to cook. I walked myself to the store, lugged the groceries back, and began the process of burning everything and having all my dishes come out at completely different times. When we finally sat down at our tiny table, the family began giving me feedback on my cooking: “It’s cold,” and “You should make sure the dishes all come out at the same time.” It was a complete disaster. It seemed that my soon-to-be in-laws, my soon-to-be husband, and our soon-to-be city all had it in for me. I was failing miserably at trying to prove to all of them that this is where I was supposed to be.

Over and over again, the universe sent me messages that I completely ignored. I ordered a wedding dress from my hometown bridal store. When it arrived, I took my future mother-in-law for my fitting, and the look of disappointment on her face when I walked out of the dressing room wearing my gown choice was palpable. Making matters even worse, the hometown bridal mart had hemmed and cut the dress four inches too short, and there was no way to fix it.

When my mom arrived in New York City ahead of our wedding, she slept on the couch in the attic for a week to help me with final preparations. One night, I found her hiding alone in the closet, crying. My future in-laws had made her feel completely inferior, too.

The day of our wedding, more red flags appeared. First of all, I knew maybe seven people at our wedding, and not by choice. I was just twenty years old, and this was years before any of my friends had their lives figured out enough to purchase flights from western Canada to New York City.

It was an aggressive wedding from the start. We married in a huge church in Queens, with a full Italian church service to appease First Husband. I remember standing outside the gates of the church and getting ready to walk down the aisle with my dad and crying my eyes out. I had dug the hole so deep that it was now a $20,000 hole, complete with a white dress and a father who, as we stepped around the corner to start the service, said to me, “Here we go.” Now I am convinced that he meant “You don’t have to do this.”

We had a big, tux-wearing, four-course-meal reception. I danced with the uncles who hated my cooking. Those same uncles got in a fistfight in the lobby during the speeches. I was married in a too-short dress, wearing a pair of flat shoes from the little girl section of Payless ShoeSource and a tiara. I was exactly what everyone wanted me to be, and I have probably never felt less like myself. I don’t know why I did this. I guess I was afraid to be alone? Or I thought I somehow owed it to First Husband after spending those years with me during my terrible weigh-ins and the tear-filled days after. Maybe my entire life had become another one of my giant checklists. Now that getting married and moving to New York City were checked off, I could continue to race against the imaginary clock already haunting my heart daily, setting unrealistic goals that no one, besides myself, had asked me to make.

To be honest, our relationship wasn’t all bad. I knew in my gut it wasn’t exactly right, but I was determined not to fail. We ate Italian food. I taught dance classes. We did the big Italian family thing. I eventually learned the difference between uptown and downtown and took the subway to dance class. I started working as a dancer more and more. A commercial here. A music video there. Shockingly, just six weeks after I became a Mrs., I was asked to become a Radio City Rockette at Radio City Music Hall. When I got that magical call, I was so excited because this had been a lifelong dream for me, and in addition to that, the Rockettes were a New York institution. So what if I couldn’t cook? I was going to be a “World-Famous Radio City Rockette,” and I imagined my new NYC family and First Husband radiating with pride.

But there was a problem. I learned that as a first-year Rockette, I wouldn’t be dancing in Manhattan. Instead, I was being placed in the touring company of the Rockettes on a four-month out-of-town deal. When I walked proudly into the kitchen and told First Husband the big news, I expected that this person who was my ride or die, till death do us part, good times and bad would be happy for me. A hug? A tear? Even a happy dance or words of pride? Nope. Instead, First Husband looked at me with evil in his eyes and said, “So you’re just going to leave me here all alone then?”

My heart broke. It was crushed into a million little pieces. My failure flashed in front of my eyes and ripped through my veins. I knew in that moment that I had picked the wrong person, picked the wrong life, and that it didn’t matter how many meatballs I learned how to make—I was never going to be what he wanted. More important, I realized that I was never going to be what I wanted, with him in my life trying to control me and fit me into the perfect housewife mold that I was clearly never going to fit into. But I held on.

We traveled to Canada to visit my family, and it became clear that First Husband suffered openly from something he could not control. He thought he was better than everyone else. He thought Canada was stupid. The money was colored? Dumb. Everyone drank beer? Fattening. Our accents? Dumb. The airport didn’t have moving walkways? Dark ages. We ate at restaurants that weren’t organic? Criminal. In fact, while out for dinner one night with my friends, First Husband ordered a salad without dressing because he was sooo healthy, and our “stupid” Canadian eateries didn’t have healthy options. So there I am with my closest friends, trying to act like I was happy, while my holier-than-thou husband was munching down on a giant bowl of lettuce. Lettuce. Nothing else.

So it all fell apart. It fell apart so quickly and so dramatically. My dad came to NYC to help us fix up our place, and First Husband yelled at me one night in front of my father. Honestly, I was lucky my hot-blooded dad didn’t punch him in the face right then and there. I could see it in my dad’s eyes while he shrugged his shoulders, and I tried to stay busy in the kitchen in order not to cry, but the jig was up. The facade I was showing everyone in my life, that I was happy and that everything was working out, was deeply flawed.

I wasn’t perfect either. I was selfish in the pursuit of my dreams. I left and went on tour, and then I left again and moved across the country for another gig. I stayed out late in the city go-go dancing for money to pay rent, and I hid my wedding ring when I found myself sitting next to cute New York stockbrokers on the train. I was hungry for any kind of positive attention and a glimpse at what my life could look like if I had made a different choice. I daydreamed about my next life, in which I would be living alone in my dream city, a girl doing it for herself, without the constant guilt of having to explain myself to this militant fun-sucker of a man. I turned twenty-one and I drank like a fish. My eyebrows were thin, and my liver was fat with vodka. I was broke, afraid, and miserable.

So now to the actual divorce. At some point, around eleven months in, I decided that I was done. I came home. I sat on the end of our bed and I said straight up, “I am not in love with you, and I am leaving you.” Next I called my parents, who I had mostly avoided for those eleven months, and I told them. Then I took off my engagement ring and I left it on our tiny kitchen table. I slept at a girlfriend’s place nearby, and since this was in a time before Instagram, cell phones, and being able to track anything and everything a significant other was doing, I didn’t really think about him. I listened to sad music, drank a bottle of wine, and smoked a pack of cigarettes, even though I was never a smoker.

But I was not sad. I did not feel lonely. I did not feel alone. In reality, I had been alone the entire time. I had been weak, scared, and codependent. I had married the first guy I met out in the big real world because on paper he seemed like a good idea. When we split and I left, what I felt was an overwhelming sense of sweet relief. I knew that I was unhappy, and that he was unhappy, too. I had been trapped inside a hell of my own making, and I had spent so many hours trying to figure out my escape plan. Once I actually told the truth and ripped the Band-Aid off, it was liberating.

To this day, I have never missed First Husband. I have never once since that day regretted that decision or wondered about him or his life. I simply wished him happiness and silently thanked him for what I had learned. (Still, I made an entire decade of mistakes following the breakup.) I think it was shocking and weird, but there was never an opportunity for our divorce to get really ugly. I ghosted this man before ghosting was even a thing. I was just gone. Poof! I can’t imagine what I put him through, how hard it was on his side. What he felt or what it was like for the perfect son to tell his perfect family that his choice of wife had been imperfect. I don’t know what it was like to go back to our house and see half the plates missing, and (weirdly—not sure why this was the thing I took) my side of the IKEA nightstand set gone.

I called him months later to let him know I had filed for a $35 divorce online. We signed the divorce paperwork.

A few years later, he called me asking for a copy of the papers. I assumed it was because he had located a perfect Italian wife who would love to live in his trap of perfection, so I happily sent them along. I never heard from him again.

On what would have been our ten-year anniversary, I wrote him a big apology letter and sent it to the only address I knew, his perfect parents’ house. I admitted to being messy, and drunk, and hurtful, and not the right person for him. I never heard from him after that, and I do not know if he ever received my letter.

I realize that divorces are messy. That feelings are messy. That when kids, and houses, and twenty years or more are involved, it adds to the level of drama and mess. I know that things like cheating, new girlfriends, stepmoms, abuse, and money (or lack of money) all make divorce a very horrible thing to go through. I know that not everyone can walk away so easily.

But what I also know is this: You don’t have to be unhappy. You don’t have to stay in a relationship that doesn’t serve you. You can make a really important life decision about someone and then change your mind. You can fall in and fall out of love. You can also love someone and hang on to them far longer than you should. That deep truth that sits in your gut is your compass! You can spend a ton of money on a big fancy wedding and a year later call it off without being a terrible person. You can disappoint your family, and they will still love you. People will talk about you, hate you, judge you, and misunderstand you, and it will have nothing to do with you. You can say vows to someone and then take back your vows, and then years later make vows to someone else and really mean them. I learned that marriage and partnership exist to make your life better, not whole. You have to be a whole person before you can possibly figure out how to be a duo. Getting engaged, or wearing a ring, or being married, or moving in together don’t mean that it’s your forever love. Just because someone swears they will love you forever doesn’t mean that they will.

Was I pissed that I had invested all my saved cruise-ship money into our life together and didn’t get any of it back? Sure. Did I hate him a little bit? Absolutely. But I knew that being righteous in our goodbye would just make it harder, and I just wanted to wipe my hands of the entire thing.

My biggest mistake was dragging out the whole thing so much longer than I needed to because I didn’t want to be the bad guy or let other people down. I didn’t want to be not perfect. I didn’t want to have this history against me. I had to walk through life as a failure, a “divorcée,” and that stung. I was paralyzed by what everyone was thinking and saying about me. I spent many evenings imagining the dinner table conversations First Husband was having with his family and what a horrible person they would all be agreeing I was. Of course, people talked about me and made up lies about me somehow tricking First Husband into marrying me so I could live in New York City, as if I was smart enough to hatch such a plan at twenty years old. I learned to drown out their whispers.

But the truth was that no one who actually mattered to me even cared. Not one person. My real friends hugged me. My realest friends laughed at me, because all along they knew I was an idiot. My family, though confused by my soap opera of a life, supported me. I knew in my heart that never once had First Husband and I discussed getting married before he surprised me by asking. I should have been brave enough to say my truth that very first day, but I wasn’t. I was immature. I was a people pleaser. I now had an ex–First Husband. I wished him well. I continued to pursue my dreams. I put myself first. And, eventually, my cold, black, disappointed heart came to life once again. Fun fact: I ended up doing all the things he never believed I could do and more—but by the time I did, I had someone in my life who would run into a room with balloons and hugs to celebrate even my smallest victories.