Ask Team Practical: Wandering Eye

In the swirl of pre-engagement-ness, I have a question that seems difficult to talk about with anyone. My partner is awesome. We’ve been together for a long time; we’ve supported each other through difficult stuff; we make a great team. We’re excited about our future together, and he’s one of my favorite people of all time.

But here’s what sounds awful. I’m not sure how I’m supposed to feel about the Possible Others in my life. Like, inevitably, over the course of being a person and interacting with other people, sometimes closely for work or just friendships, I’ve identified a small number of people I would consider as a partner, were I not dating my current dude. And this isn’t some lustful wandering eye sort of thing, or a physically motivated wish where I think it would be fun to make out with a hot coworker if I were unattached or had a “monogam-ish” arrangement with my partner. It’s more like, recognizing that deep partner-level compatibility in some close friendships and working relationships. We’re talking a very small number of people over the course of my lifetime.

And while I think about moving forward with my significant other, and moving into “forever” territory, a part of me feels sad about those possible futures that won’t be. Even writing it “out loud” makes me feel terrible, because it’s not that I *don’t* want that future with my partner. But then I psych myself out and worry that I’d only be thinking this if there were some reason, if I were secretly unsatisfied with the life I’m building.

Am I alone in this fear? If I’m not, how do I look at this differently, and how do I reconcile it with really wanting to marry my partner?

– Confused Cartographer

Dear CC,

Choosing a spouse is, by definition, a choice. The very nature of picking one person means that you won’t be picking a whole bunch of other people. You only choose one (well, you know, depending on what kind of marriage you have), and like mom said, there’s plenty of fish in the sea. The surprising thing is, she was also right about there being more than a few good ones.

I’m guessing that you don’t subscribe to the idea of “the one”—that there’s just one person out there that’s your perfect soulmate. For starters, it’s sort of mathematically fatalistic. All we need is for one person in the history of life to choose the wrong spouse, and then the rest of us are screwed. (Think about THAT for a second.) So, if there’s not “one,” that means there’s a whole slew of folks you could possibly “make it work” with. Noticing that this possibility exists—that there might be someone else out there with whom you could also have a pretty awesome go at it—that’s not a red flag that something’s wrong with what you already have. It’s just fact.

Like super smart Sharon wrote, picking a spouse is sort of like buying a house. There are other houses that you could possibly live in, sure. But you pick the one that seems to be the best fit, and then you settle in and start making it your own. And the more you live there, the more it becomes yours and feels like home. That’s it! That’s marriage. This person isn’t “yours” apart from you choosing to make them yours. I know with my own husband, the longer we’re together, the harder it is for me to imagine being able to make it work with anyone else. We grow into a couple and settle into one another more and more all the time. Read More…

Sarah & Jen

*Sarah, Web Developer & Jen, Massage Therapist*

As we explore the idea of unexpected outcomes this week, Sarah’s post (she’s the one in blue!) about figuring out what their wedding was going to be is perfect. Sarah and Jen moved from not being totally sure they could make a wedding happen, to wanting a simple party, to something else all together. I hope it reminds all of us that weddings are malleable, and we can make them into what we need them to be.

At one time, I thought this would be a story about a gay wedding. And obviously, it is. But really, I think ours is just a story about A Practical Wedding, and how two girls in love found a way to have one, despite their fears.

In May 2010, a handful of circumstances converged to make Jen and me realize that we wanted to make our commitment to each other official and public. We had been together five years, and a wedding was something I had fantasized about. In all my fantasies, though, I couldn’t figure out a practical way for us to make it actually happen. I always got bogged down with thoughts of how we would find a rabbi (we’re not part of a congregation), how our families would react, who would walk whom down the aisle, and how we would afford all the little things that make up a wedding (in New York City, no less). And then one day, I had the realization that our wedding could be whatever we wanted it to be—it could be as simple as a cocktail party where we toasted each other with our friends around us, no rabbi and no wedding trappings if we didn’t want them.

I proposed this idea to Jen and we set a date not too far away that seemed like a reasonable time to pull off such a simple party.

As we started to tell our family and friends about our idea—“A simple party, not even a wedding really, more like an anniversary party, no need for cake, bouquets, an officiant, or even a sit down meal,” we defended—the reactions we got surprised us. Somehow, I didn’t really expect approval from either our more conservative family members or some of our more radical friends (who have spoken out against working toward same-sex marriage in favor of broader marriage equality). Still, we were afraid of getting negative reactions—that two women couldn’t legally get married, that we were calling attention to ourselves for no reason, that we shouldn’t need a wedding to validate our already strongly committed relationship, or even that we were too young at twenty-four to make such a commitment.

But no one said any of those things. They were happy for us. Some almost happier than we were. They treated us like any other engaged couple and asked where we would be having the wedding, what we would wear, who would conduct the ceremony (we never even talked about a ceremony), and amazingly, what they could do to help. Almost no one seemed to care that the wedding would be purely emotional, since we weren’t interested in getting an out-of-state marriage certificate. (New York State did not offer a legal marriage to us at that time, and the Federal government still won’t recognize one). Read More…