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- I married my college sweetheart and we divorced two years later.
- I was left wary of marriage and said I’d only get married if I had kids. Then, I met Craig.
- We knew we wanted to be together, and years after having two kids, decided to get married.
My first marriage imploded two years in. Looking back decades later, I realize that I just wasn’t ready. I married my college love at 25. We were together for six years before we got married. Two years later, our marriage was over.
I met Craig in December 2002. I was separated at the time, and I wasn’t looking for another relationship. Of course, life doesn’t always hand us things when we’re ready for them. Before our first date, I asked the grandmother who raised me what she thought.
“I think you should go,” she said. The break-up of my marriage — something she thought would last forever — hadn’t been easy for her or my grandfather. They loved my ex and had paid for my fairytale wedding. Getting the OK from Gram mattered to me.
We were always together after our first date
Our first date started at the bar where we met. Craig was a bouncer and DJ there. He ordered a drink. I ordered a shot. We both wore gray tweed coats. A few weeks later, we’d find out we had matching red puffy coats. It seemed fated. He would also tell me he felt time stopped when he saw me for the first time, and he knew then that I was the one.
I assumed it was a line, but a few months into our relationship, one of his female roommates relayed the same story. The night we met, he took my number down on a piece of paper he’d torn from one of the bar’s cash registers. He still has it in his wallet 22 years later.
After our first date, we were always together. We just knew. Craig’s humor matched mine. He wanted to write comedy for television, and I wanted to be a director. We planned to move to Los Angeles with a brief pit stop in Maine, where he grew up. We would use our time there to save money. After moving in with his parents, I got pregnant.
We had two kids and then we bought our house
Realistically, staying close to our roots (his in Maine, mine two hours away in Massachusetts) made more sense than moving across the country with no friends, family, or jobs. A cross-country move simply wasn’t feasible with a child on the way. We got jobs and an apartment. We set up the nursery and had a baby shower. Zach was born in January 2005.
When Zach was 11 months old, I found out I was pregnant again. We used our tax return money to put a down payment on a small Cape Cod-style house in a neighborhood filled with similar homes. Cameran was born in September 2006.
The logical step before children would have been to get married, according to everyone we knew. I had already done that and would only do it again if I had children. Once the kids came along, I knew marriage would come eventually. The Catholic grandmother who raised me was beside herself. “You have two kids, get married already,” she would beg.
Finally, we had a small wedding at City Hall
In August of 2008, we got married by a woman named Karen at our local City Hall. Our engagement was brief, and Craig asked me to marry him while we sat on the couch watching the kids play one evening after work.
Unlike my first wedding, there was no fancy hotel reception. My brother was my man of honor, and Craig’s younger brother was his best man. I bought a simple dress at Macy’s. It was black with polka dots, and I thought it made me look like a 1950s sitcom wife. Our ‘reception’ consisted of pizza from Craig’s favorite pizza place with the kids. It was a bit last minute; my grandparents didn’t even come.
There was no honeymoon, and 17 years later, it still hasn’t been one. Instead, we’ve taken two family vacations to Florida. We keep saying that one day soon, we will go away, just the two of us. Maybe it will be for our 20th anniversary. I’m not sure. We’ve never really followed a traditional relationship timeline.
What was important to me this time around wasn’t the wedding, and I didn’t care so much about getting married just to be in a marriage. The kids and the home were the commitment. They were the reason we pushed through the rough patches. They were our “til death do us part,” not some bloated ceremony at a hotel surrounded by friends and family. Marriage was a legally binding promise to do whatever we had to for our kids and our family. They were the reason the word meant anything at all to us. They still are.
