“Funny thing.. I took my tuxedo out of mothballs yesterday.  Looks pretty good, too.  You know, suits are like men.  They like to step out once in a while with a pretty dress.  That suit of mine does the greatest one-step you ever saw.”

– Grandpa, Meet Me in St. Louis (1944)

I went to a wedding in Indianapolis this afternoon. (Yes, someone out there actually took the risk of inviting me to a public function in which there is an open bar. Bless his heart.)  My date and I looked so friggin’ cute; I should have taken pictures.  We were one of those couples that I’d normally love to mock, incessantly. But given the fact that I am so smitten with this one, I opted to be girly and get spun around the dance floor and drink every kind of liquor possible before demanding my date to take me to Steak n Shake. Cute, I know.

I continue to be amazed by the way a person can just weave himself so seamlessly into the fabric of your life.

(You know I’m crazy about this kid solely on the fact that I have re-worded that sentence 2938423 times and that cheesy one-liner is the best I can come up with.) I guess what I’m trying to say is that some people are such a fit, you can’t deny the fact that you’re meant to impact each other in some way, for some amount of time unknown.

With the wedding atmosphere blatantly staring me in the face, I couldn’t help but think of my own plans for matrimonial stress. I mean bliss.  Somewhere between the string quartet’s processional music and you-may-now-kiss-the-bride, I came to some kind of enlightenment.  It is not, in fact, marriage — the commitment — that scares me.  Don’t get me wrong, it does scare me.  But not to the point of neurosis.  Or paralysis.  I always referred to myself as some kind of commitment-phobe, never wanting to pin myself down to anything, whether it had romantic intentions or not.  Only recently have I discovered that with trust in the other person comes my ability to commit – a desire to commit, even.  This is promising, as I thought my life was doomed to putting off something as harmless as a lunch date, forever.

No, it is not the lifelong commitment that makes me skittish.  It’s the wedding itself.  Seriously.  I don’t know how people do it; it scares the shit out of me.  I fear for my expectations the most. (Read: Homecoming Syndrome, est. 1998)  And all the possibilities for drama! You have to pick bridesmaids, and dresses, and a church, and do I really want a catholic service?, and a cool reception location, and you have to deal with how your family is going to intermix with his, or you just hope that in true Polish wedding style everyone will just get hammered and dance, and you have to create this photo album of precious, prescious memories of this, the best day of your life.

What I really want to do is just send out really cool announcements that say, “I fell in love! We eloped!” and enclose a picture of me and my husband barefoot on some beach somewhere, or maybe embracing in front of some european landmark.  Preferably Venice.  Yes. I would take Venice, our closest family members, a cluster of our closest friends.  Still barefoot.