Forced Kisses and Headlines

I remember the day that I fell out of love with him as if it were a re-occurring dream. We decided to go to breakfast on a Sunday morning. We had been together for nearly three and a half years and he could sense my hostility and unenthusiasm for the relationship. We sit down at the breakfast table and as our first morning cups of coffee are poured, he picks up the daily newspaper. "Put that down." I said to him in a shocking tone, as if reading the newspaper were an uncommon thing to do at breakfast. "Michele, it's the paper. Why can't I read the paper?" He looked at me with this look of confusion and disbelief, like why I was even questioning his motives. "It's breakfast. We've been busy all week and have hardly seen each other. Don't you want to talk to me?" "Talk about what?"

Suddenly my life from twenty to sixty flashed before me in my dark roast coffee. I could see us now. At breakfast in ten years. Me, trying to keep one child quiet and one from opening and pouring out every single last sugar packet as he sat there smirking reading his morning paper from the top of his spectacles. Fast forward thirty more years. Kids grown. Just us two again in the household, out to morning breakfast with absolutely nothing to say to each other. I wondered if I would even remember the sound of my own voice by this point.

It was in this moment that I fell out of love for him. It was the moment that I realized I could not see myself spending the rest of my life with him. As he looked at me, cowering over my coffee, slowly stirring in my two packets of equal, he knew it too. Within a week we were over.

I can only remember seeing my parents affectionate with each other one time. If you could call it affection. My father walked in from the back deck and pursed his lips over my mothers small head and she just stared at him as if he were a young boy on a playground taunting her with his desire to be close with her. He pulled her into him and gave her a small kiss. Lasting merely a second. That was the only time I had even seen my parents embrace and now, over ten years later, it remains to be the last. I remember thinking that my father tried so hard to win her over everyday of their marriage and you could see in the disgust of glances that she was not having any part of it.

I knew at that moment that I never wanted to have a marriage like that. I wanted to continue to be affectionate with my husband throughout the years of our lives together. I wanted to be prepared to live with someone and not for someone and to love unconditionally either way. I wanted my children to grow up in a loving household where they would be reminded everyday that out of all the men in the world mommy chose daddy and would do it a hundred time more if given the opportunity.

I could tell that my mother was not happy with me the other day that I was over visiting and I found myself with that nervous sweat and repeating the phrase "what did I do THIS time to disappoint her?" over and over in my head as I tip toed on egg shells around the house. I was always disappointed her. Even now that I live on my own and do not speak with her often I STILL seem to disappoint her in someway. I asked her why she was mad at me. Her response was that it was because I am never happy. Never happy? With what? Is that even a reason to be angry with someone? I seemed very happy. I personally love my life. I have amazing friends, I love my job and I come home alone and do as I please, typically write and facebook, but nonetheless I am happy.

Perhaps my parents loveless marriage is why I always seem to be going through men like men go through tube socks. I never want to be stuck in their relationship, or their type of relationship I should say. The minute I see signs of something that even closely resembles it, I break down and I run in the opposite direction as fast as I can. I have had three marriage proposals, or promises I shall say. All of which I obviously never followed through with. I could easily be married with 2.5 children and the white picket fence at this point in my life had a gone down a number of different paths, but that wasn't what I wanted. I am HAPPY here, alone, at this moment. She looks at my life as if I've wasted years of it. What is more of a waste? Waiting until I am older, til I have found myself, before I find the love of my life? Or spend the next fifty years in a loveless, affectionateless, kissless marriage?