ONE MAN’S JOURNEY TO MARRIAGE

In many ways I am a stereotypical guy. I like sports, cars, beer, burgers, golf and swearing. On any given weekend you can find me combining the swearing part with a few of the other likes. But there is one aspect of my life that has been anything but typical. I’ve never been married. Not even engaged. If I were writing this as a 24 year old, talking about never being married would sound stupid and you’d probably tell me to shut it. But I am 40 years old. Did I expect to be 40 and unmarried? No, not a chance. I have bounced between lots of short term and long term relationships over the last 20 years but nothing ever took. Which is good – I dated alot of nutcases! But all that is about to change on June 1st when I finally tie the knot.

I have been dating my fiancé for about 4 ½ years and we bought a house together a year ago. I have affectionately called her my “Lady Friend” over the years because I had a hard time being a guy of a certain age, dating a woman in her mid-30s and calling her my “girl” friend. Sorry, it just seemed weird. But this is officially the longest relationship of my life and the first relationship where I could truly say without a doubt that I have no desire to ever date anyone else again. So I’m taking the plunge.

We are having an extremely small ceremony. How small? Including us there will be a total of seven people in attendance, our parents, the minister, and us. And as far as I’m concerned even some of the seven are optional. This is partly because of our age, as having a huge wedding at 40 seems a little silly. But it’s also because she was married before and went through the big production that time. And as they say, the wedding is really about the bride. If she wants it to be small – it’s going to be small. Even though I usually enjoy attention and have a healthy ego I have always thought a smaller wedding would be better, so this suits me just fine. And it’s CHEAP.

Even though it’s going to be simple, small and short (similar to my sex life) we are still having it in a Lutheran church. For those of you unfamiliar with us Lutherans we actually outnumber Catholics here in the Upper Midwest. We’re a lot like our Catholic brothers and sisters, but without all the stupid rules about when and what you can eat at different times of the year. As if God cares that I throw down a burger or two on Fridays. I’m guessing he has better things to worry about. But since the wedding is in a church we get to go through something called Prepare-Enrich. It’s basically a relationship test followed up by a handful of sessions to talk about our “compatibility.”

Last week we took the test individually and it included a lot of generic personality assessment crap that you’d expect on find on this type of test. It seemed like an attempt to weed out crazy people. And not just any crazy people, but that special kind of crazy person who is also dumb enough to answer honestly – thus exposing themselves as a crazy person. Believe me, I was tempted to have a little fun with this thing and make myself out to be a little crazy. But I played it straight. My Lady Friend likes to goof with people herself so I think there is a chance she did NOT play it straight. We don’t know each other’s answers and won’t find out any results until we have our first session with the assessor in the next few days.

I think I’ll save my goofiness for those sessions. Might as well have fun with it right? I’ll fill you in on all that next time. Stay tuned!