It Happened To Me: I'm Publishing My Own Stuff

So, I wrote another piece similar to the first one, and I submitted it to that site.  Nothing yet.  But it's just sitting all written, so here it is.  This is the perk of living in an era where you can promote yourself without shame, any hour of the day.

It Happened to Me: I Married My Brother’s Best Friend

Is it lame to kiss someone who has personally witnessed your unfortunate adolescent bangs, your college chub, and all the losers you’ve ever crushed on?  Or is it in actuality the best idea you’ve ever had?

In high school, I had the requisite self-esteem issues, and rather than go slutty, I tried to make myself indispensable to boys through other means.  Throughout those years, I had a small caseload of moody, brooding idiots that I coaxed through their woefully average teenage sorrows, and who were not really interested in me as anything but a free therapist.

I hadn’t a perfectly clear idea of who I’d end up with, but I figured that because of my deep inner beauty and soulful eyes that I’d probably sacrifice myself on the altar of a Boy Who Had Problems.  For the better part of three years, I was busy managing the mood swings of a Cobain-ish dude who often vaguely threatened suicide and told me his actual girlfriend could never understand him like I did.  How can you pass that up?  Love was deep, complicated, and one-sided… I was Joey Potter and soon, any day now, Dawson would realize I had been there all along.  Because you’re not in love unless you’re miserable, naturally; and if you’re really in love, you’re also hopelessly ill-suited to one another.

Meanwhile, in another part my neighborhood, Jeff and my brother met the summer before 8^th grade.  I was two years older, and didn’t really pay attention.

But soon, he became, as they say, a fixture in our house.  I remember telling my mom how much I liked when he came over; “Jeff is the nicest of the friends.”  He smiled all the time, and asked me questions about school, and he had an easy confidence that often resulted in an informal shoulder squeeze or a not-awkward side hug.  He also smelled really good, like clean t-shirts and sporty deodorant.

As the oldest girl in a tiny house, I had my own room, but only for a fraction of the time – it was often used by the other kids for various purposes, and I often had to move my piles of granny panties and beige Target bras so that my brother and Jeff could set up their amps and play guitar with the door closed.     

Jeff was over when I came home with my first speeding ticket and launched into a hailstorm of tears and curses.  I laughed long and hard at the muscle shirt he wore the summer he trained for football and got really buff, and loudly weighed in with the rest of my family of the merits and faults of his latest girlfriend.  I usually thought they were stupid and not good enough for him, and always liked it better when they weren’t whining and clinging around. 

A few years later, I was an angsty college sophomore, and Jeff was finishing his senior year of high school.  I had determined that transferring schools was the answer to all my problems, and I came home for spring break depressed and despondent.  As a last ditch effort to get through the semester, I tried to convince my brother and some of our friends to come visit me.  “It will be fun!” I promised lamely.  To no one’s surprise, there were no volunteers.  Except for Jeff.  Who told me, that yes, he’d love to come visit.  By himself.   

Coincidentally, my roommate was out of town.  As no one but you, dear readers, could have predicted, we spent a suddenly…ahem…romantic weekend together. 

WHAT.

We didn’t spend a lot of time analyzing – I chalked it up to my loneliness and he blamed it on the fact that he was on a college campus for the first time.  With a nervous “Hey, it’s ok; we’re adults!” we parted company swearing up and down like Monica and Chandler that this can NEVER be spoken of again. 

But he called me later that week. 

I came home that next weekend, heavily incognito, and we found to our surprise that the supposedly “stupid” weekend didn’t seem so stupid.  We were two people who enjoyed each other’s company, and now, apparently, were physically attracted to each other.  Why were we so desperate to squash this?

There were, of course, some very real problems.  He was my brother’s best friend.   Aside from the vaguely incestuous overtones, there also was the weirdness of me being a college sophomore and him being barely out of high school. What is adorable in the sitcoms is very often agonizing in real life.  It was not solved by the end of the half hour. 

My brother was pissed.  Not annoyed, not bothered, but actually pretty angry.  I think he felt a little like he was thrust into the middle of some icky combination of my desperation and Jeff’s opportunity-seizing.  Not something you herald with a “Yay! Congrats, guys!  So glad you discovered you enjoy swapping saliva.”

 I could definitely feel where he was coming from.  Dating someone who is so close to being related to you smacks of eating a half-eaten Poptart even though it’s the blueberry kind, just because it’s in arm’s reach.  Had I put on sweatpants and parked myself on the couch of love with a bag of off-brand Cheetos?

In order to quell the voices in my head, I got very analytical.  There were reasons why I liked him so much.  When he told me he’d call, he’d call.  He looked at life with cheerful optimism.  He worked hard and had goals for the future.  I knew he was genuine because he’d been around for four years, and was still the same guy.  We shared the same faith and agreed on what we wanted out of life. 

Approaching things this way made me feel a bit pathetic.   What did it say about me that the guy I might end up with grew up on my street?  How anti-progressive of me.  What’s next, promoting arranged marriage?  What will Other People think?

But Other People don’t really get a say.  We launched this new relationship with the certainty that either it would end awkwardly after a few weeks, or this could really be it.  We’d give it a shot.  And over the next four years, it literally just got better and better.

At our wedding, the combination of such a deep shared history and the fact that we dated long distance for four years made the emotions so raw that I really didn’t know if I could say all those words out loud.  Our moms almost didn’t make it through the ceremony, and the pastor who married us said he’d never seen so much crying in a church outside of a funeral.  

Undying romance is always enhanced by abandoned trains.

                It is very true that all couples have different stories, and not all of them are easy.  Yeah, love can be complicated, but I think sometimes girls don’t get told the whole truth.  You can be Romeo and Juliet, and more power to you, but if you get exhausted from hanging from the balcony, you can look for an alternative.  Sometimes you can even fall in love with a person you actually like very much… someone who is standing next to you on the ground.