APW Happy Hour

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Hey Apw,

Well. Who else was up late last night watching the Scottish election results roll in? Sleepy yawn. My thoughts are with the people of the (still seemingly quite) Great Britain, as they ponder the state of things today. Scotland has a lot to be proud of today, with turnout and participation levels we can’t even dream of. Also, possibly time for me to switch to tea after last night’s whisky, and maybe book tickets to London or Edinburgh over the holidays.

Otherwise, let’s switch gears from politics to guest book piñatas (an obvious transition) and talk about how awesome it’s been  hanging out with you guys on APW’s Instagram feed this year. All of it’s been great, but possibly the best moment came in the last week with Abbie’s guest book piñata sign this week. I mean, RIGHT? BEST IDEA EVER, YES? So, after you make your guest book piñata, or mourn the fact that you forgot to have one, come hang out with us on Instagram.

In other news, after my kiddo threw out a rather sizable check (the joys of a home office with no door plus a toddler) we’ve been considering making the APW office less virtual. So if you happen to know of awesome creative office space in Oakland, drop us a line. We’re in no big rush—I’ve learned to tape checks to the very top of my whiteboard (you can’t be too safe)—but we’re thinking about it.

And with that, it’s your open thread!

MEG

Highlights of APW This Week

Overcoming jealousy.

A feminist and fun beach wedding.

Proposal etiquette, brought to you by Steve Harvey.

Ethical diamonds: an inside scoop on the gem industry.

Helena and Laurent: fine art wedding photographers.

Are any of us adults anymore?

Depressed and newlywed.

“A small part of a long, messy, beautiful story: a marriage, our lives.”

Fake it until you make it. Or something.

Oh, you can hire a best friend who happens to be a wedding planner now? YES PLEAZ.

The tiniest of weddings, with the most Cards Against Humanity.

Link Roundup

It was Ovaries Week on The Cut. There goes your weekend. It’s that good.

It was Careers Week on Cup of Jo, so there goes the rest of it. Special shout out to Joanna Goddard’s “Ten Lessons I’ve Learned In My Career.”

Funny and honest things to read about motherhood while on maternity leave (or otherwise).

A pair of threes.

“Before I had a baby, these are the kinds of stories that might’ve made me wonder if these women simply shouldn’t have had kids. But now of course I know that is an idiotic assumption, that everything is so much more complicated than that.”

What if you’re ambivalent about having kids?

What it was like, having a mother who leaned in.

Cleaning house with Jenny.

Stop calling abusers “monsters.”

How sixty words changed the course of U.S. history.

“Is politics beyond Cosmopolitan’s purview?”

Awesome: “MIT Is Hosting a Breast-Pump Hackathon.”

“‘Support the Player and Be Quiet’: What it’s like to be an NFL wife.”

Tired of people mispronouncing your name? So is poetry champ Sha’Condria Sibley.

“Creating Your Baby’s Last Name? Tennessee Says No.

“Maybe she’s born with it, maybe it’s actually just makeup.”

The reality is, men have to join the conversation.

“‘It’s Vivian and Nonie,’ Hunsaker said of the decision to marry them. ‘They had been in the church since 1947. They had been deacons and in the choir. We thought of them as a couple. Nobody asked them, but you can’t not know. In the church directory, they have their picture together.'”

Surviving History: The Fever!”

A class to help Bostonians lose their accents.

The new Miss America is getting heat for her Planned Parenthood internship.

ModCloth signs an anti-Photoshopping pledge.

Why Chris Messina’s Mindy Project striptease was about more than just eye candy.

It’s Viola Davis as you’ve never seen her before, and we are excited.

Moly Alison Bechdel wins a MacArthur Genius Grant.

Moving toward a unified theory of Kim Kardashian: Hollywood.

APW’S 2014 HAPPY HOURS ARE SPONSORED BY MONOGAMY WINE AND PROMISQOUS WINE. Thank you Monogamy and PromisQous for helping make the APW mission possible! To follow PromisQous Wines on their foodie adventures, click here to follow them on Instagram.

On Ending a Perfectly Good Marriage

More than ten years ago I met the love of my life. I never believed in love at first sight. I never believed in the concept of “the one.” But then this thing happened the first time I laid eyes on him. This thing that grabbed a hold of my whole self, that whispered in my ear, “Sister—take note.” So I did. It was seven-plus years later before we tied the knot. Adventurous, blissful, hard years full of growing pains and laughter and fights handled poorly and holding each other up through things neither of us knew we were strong enough for. We watched too much TV. We traveled. We drank a whole bottle of wine on a Tuesday sometimes. We found jobs we hated. We cooked awful dinners. We found jobs we loved. We cooked better dinners. We talked about the amazing adventure-filled life we were going to have. We decided not to have kids. Before we got serious, before we got engaged, before we got married. We decided together.

Then, this summer, he changed his mind.

It wasn’t on purpose. It didn’t happen all at once. It was a slow dawning—like when the Velveteen Rabbit is made real. It just became. And suddenly two paths diverged in a wood and I… I decided to run and hide because both of them meant living a life I do not want. A life without him. Or a life with a child. You know that gut feeling some people have when they know they want to be parents? They just know. Well I have the opposite of that feeling. I don’t hate kids, I get along with my parents, I didn’t have a weird wrecked childhood or anything. I just don’t want it. The way people know they’re not cat people or they could never have shag carpeting or they wouldn’t be caught dead in parachute pants.

Okay. Maybe it’s slightly deeper than parachute pants, but I know some people who have really strong opinions on that. Point being, this is a thing I know, and have known for a long time. But suddenly, saying it didn’t just mean, “I don’t want kids,” it meant, “I don’t want the same life you want.” It took me weeks to admit it to myself. Longer to admit it to him. Just like it took him a long time to say the opposite words, knowing that what we’re saying is really the same thing. I want to be on a different path. One that you can’t travel anymore.

When I look back over the last years of our married life, I see a lot of mistakes. A lot of taking-it-for-granted. But I also see two people who genuinely love the shit out of each other, and who really want to make each other happy. I feel like we got a lot of the big stuff right, which makes this all seem terribly unfair. It’s a Catch-22. You work on a partnership and encourage each other to remain true to what each of you needs to live an authentic life and all of it lines up perfectly. And then it doesn’t, and that partnership and work you’ve done on being true to yourselves and each other doesn’t let you just ignore it and keep going.

Those ducks—they just don’t stay in rows where they belong.

This story doesn’t have a happy ending. We are two people who found someone who makes them feel safe and empowered enough to say this terrible thing to each other. We are two people who will push through a lot of pain to make sure we are both living an authentic life. The life we each want. We are holding each other up as best we can through this. Crying together. Purposefully ignoring the elephant in the room sometimes so we can share a bowl of popcorn and make it through a movie and pretend it’s all going to be fine for two hours. And at the end of all this, our paths may rejoin, and they may not, but there will be two people who know they did their best. Who got the big stuff as right as they could. And even though that might be the saddest part of the whole story, maybe it’s the happiest part too.