My Next Leap: Gagging to the chapel

The fact is, I am not a wedding girl.

I am also opposed to giving grown women teddy bears as presents and roses on Valentine’s Day. I turn beet red when I think about the mix tape I was given in eleventh grade that began with the song, “Hello,” by Lionel Ritchie (and was titled the same.) I am similarly allergic to dinner-and-a-movie dates, the word fiancé and girls who wait for guys they like to call them.

It isn’t that I am anti-love. What I am is anti-cliché.

By Joselin Linder, author of The Good Girl's Guide to Living in Sin, and Game-based Marketing.

It’s tough because post-coital eye gazing sometimes feels really good. And who doesn’t love slow dancing to 70’s easy listening under a summer moon? I love both activities. Even if sometimes it’s all a little gag-me-with-a-spoon.

So, I knew my boyfriend was The One the moment he emerged from the post office carrying the package no one was fooled into believing was “pickles from his stepdad” and in a panic, opened it up, pulled out his grandmother’s engagement ring and handed it to me with a statement vomited out with a velocity akin to a burp:

“Do you want a pickle? Do you want to get married?”

No knees, no candlelight dinners—no scavenger hunts ending with knees or candlelight dinners. Instead my foot was on the brake of my very old Jetta—Proposal—then a phone call to our respective parents at the next two stop signs. Done, done and done.

As we barrel toward a future together, I keep wondering, is this the kind of leap a girl like me makes?

Do girls like me pick out white dresses and paint their fingernails shades of pink named “Cotton Candy” and “Princess Pony Ride?”

God forbid someone tries to throw me a shower, then attempt to incorporate “games.” I have been to events like these and there is just no dignity for an adult woman wearing a wedding dress constructed out of toilet paper.

However, recently I bought a dress that its seller has given the moniker The Vanessa. I know a Vanessa and she definitely wears Princess Pony Ride on her nails.

So, there it is. There is a momentum this wedding has taken on that I cannot seem to reign in.

I’d blame my sister, but I don’t remember saying no when she suggested we get married at the top of a mountain under a July sky. (I did however draw the line at pink ribbon—generally.)

I am leaping full tilt into a wedding—an event so cliché that it is paramount to a play that everyone has seen with different actors. There will be a photographer and I will probably borrow something blue—or whatever that tradition is. I will walk down the aisle, and maybe even “get walked” down it as though I were an excitable three year-old or a confused octogenarian.

I believe in a future with my (gag) fiancé, even if I am totally unsure of the path most people seem to take when getting there.

But even that is a leap that raises its own set of questions. After all, we’ve made it unmarried for so long, how will we know we are doing it right?

And if we do it wrong—Oh man. Then comes that whole other cliché called divorce. That’s the one where you play Sinead O’Connor on repeat while crying in a fetal position and drinking tequila.

I am not even remotely prepared for that leap.