After I Do

by Taylor Jenkins Reid

I knew then that I was sunk. I was smitten. I knew that I would give myself to him, that I would bare my soul to him, that I would let him break my heart if that’s what it came to.

As I started to turn down the mountain, I knew that I would seem victorious to all the people I would pass on the way down. It just goes to show how alike failure and success can appear. Sometimes only you know the truth.

Sometimes people do things because they are furious or because they are upset or because they are out for blood. And those things can hurt. But what hurts the most is when someone does something out of apathy. They don’t care about you the way they said they did back in college. They don’t care about you the way they promised to when you got married. They don’t care about you at all.

if he thinks I am wrong. Because maybe he can convince me. Maybe I am wrong. I want to be wrong. It will feel so good to be wrong. I will wallow in my wrongness; I will swim in it. I will breathe it in and let it overtake my lungs and my body, and I will cry it out, heavy tears so full of relief they will be baptismal.

That’s when I fall apart. I don’t melt like butter or deflate like a tire. I shatter like glass, into thousands of pieces. My heart is truly broken. And I know that even if it mends, it will look different, feel different, beat differently.

But I can see that it’s not going to be that easy. Change, at least in my life, is more often than not a slow and steady stream. It’s not an avalanche. It’s more of a snowball effect.

“There is no failing or winning or losing,” she says. “This is life, Lauren. This is love and marriage. If you stay married for a number of years and you have a happy time together and then you decide you don’t want to be married anymore and you choose to go be happy with someone else or doing something else, that’s not a failure. That’s just life. That’s just how love is. How is that a failure?”

It didn’t happen. But it will someday. He’s going to kiss someone else, if he hasn’t already. He’s going to touch her. He’s going to want her in a way that he no longer wants me. He’s going to tell her things he never told me. He’s going to lie there next to her, feeling satisfied and happy. She’s going to remind him of how good it can feel to be with a woman. And while all of this is happening, he’s not going to be thinking about me at all. And there’s not a thing I can do to stop it.

My brain replays the same imagined images over and over. It falls down a rabbit hole of what ifs. I just want to know what is going on in his life. I just want to hear his voice. I just want to know that he’s OK and he’s still mine. I can’t have lost him yet. He can’t be someone else’s yet. I can’t do this. I can’t live like this. I can’t live without him. I can’t. I have to know what he’s thinking. I have to know how he is.

I learned how to stop trying to solve your problems and just let you vent about them. I learned that you need a few minutes in the morning before you can talk to somebody. I learned that you never leave yourself enough time to get somewhere and then you freak out about being late. And I loved it about you.

On some level, my love life is a defining factor in my life. I’ve never been a person who had a career passion, really. I like my job at Occidental in part because it affords me a life outside of work that I really enjoy. I make enough money to have the things I need and want. I have time to spend with my family and, in the past, with Ryan. Love is a big part of who I am. Is that OK? I wonder. Is it supposed to be that way?

You know, when you marry a man, you marry his family, and vice versa. They tell you that. But they don’t tell you that when you leave a man, you leave his family. When your husband moves across town and starts dating someone named Emily, he breaks your brother’s heart, too.

And years from now, you’re going to look at them and see the hole this year has left in the family? You’re going to taint my wedding with your bullshit because you can’t see past it right now.” “There is not a hole in the family,” I say. “Yeah, there is. Ryan isn’t just someone you love. He’s a part of this family.”

Why do we do this? Why do we undervalue things when we have them? Why is it only on the verge of losing something that we see how much we need it?

“Brutal honesty. It’s OK to hurt me. It’s OK to hurt my feelings. It’s OK to embarrass me. As long as you do it from love. Nothing you could ever say out of love could hurt as much as it did to look into your eyes and see that you couldn’t stand me anymore.

Some people love that about life, that it’s unpredictable and unruly. I hate it. I hate that it doesn’t have the common decency to wait for a profound moment to take something from you.

Look at the things we are capable of in the name of the people we love.

it’s a secret that I suspect you yourself already know: the sun will always rise. Always. The sun rises the next day after mothers lose their babies, after men lose their wives, after countries lose wars. The sun will rise no matter what pain we encounter. No matter how much we believe the world to be over, the sun will rise. So you can’t go around assessing love by whether or not the sun rises. The sun doesn’t care about love. It just cares about rising.

Here is what I can tell you. All that matters in this life is that you try. All that matters is that you open your heart, give everything you have, and keep trying.