We applied for our marriage license today. Which was a solemn experience, and for me, shameful. When you apply for a marriage license you have to present court paperwork dissolving any previous marriages and much to my chagrin, I don't have a blemishless record there.
That metaphor works really well because I think of that marriage as a blemish. It was a dreadful mistake on my part, and the reasons I got into it are shameful. If I'd been a stronger person, better able to say no at any of the several steps I knew were leading to something I didn't want, I wouldn't have this pit on the surface of my life. I generally like who I am.
I'm really 100% in favor of a society where people can get divorced. I don't think staying together when you don't want to and you've tried is a good idea. My experience was not that I fell deeply in love with someone and wanted to be married and we found out it didn't work, my experience was that I got drunk several years before it was legal for me to do so and slept with a guy at a party. He had a crazy family I saw was using him and I thought I could help him. Our relationship was several years of me learning that was absolutely impossible. In hindsight I can't even give myself decent credit for being well-meaning. It was just so, so, SO stupid. I should never have entered a relationship with that man, let alone married him.
But I did.
So today, when Josh and I completed our marriage license application, when the clerk asked Josh if this would be his first marriage, Josh said "yes." And when she asked me the same, I quietly said "no." Josh knows I was married before and he knows more than anyone else about the divorce, so I wasn't worried about shocking him. But while I've been distraught at the relationship and divorce before, it's mostly been in the vein of what a dumb dumb dumb fuck up. Why did you do any of this to any of the other people involved? and today it was in the you are spoiled goods vein, and I just wanted to cry.
People get divorced. I assume they get married with the best intentions and discover that things don't work-- very sad, sometimes very bitter, but not fucked up in the head. I think the damaged goods feeling is coming from my having been married before without it meaning anything that it should have. I didn't love the guy I married. He was an okay person with a family who treated him like shit and I involved myself with him because I thought he needed an ally. I shouldn't have done that because I was nowhere near a forceful enough personality to combat that brand of crazy, even at my most furious at their bullshit. And a part of me is sick over the fact that when we were separating he asked if I wanted an annulment and since I didn't trust him to ever offer me anything useful, I said no. Without even knowing what a fucking annulment was.
On the other hand, even if we'd gotten an annulment, I'd still have spent several years with this guy, being screwed up in the head, and I'd still be dealing with that aftermath. It did happen. I've been sorry for what happened for a long time. But today was shame, a cold lump in my belly and a stinging in my eyes and something in my throat that made me speak low and quiet. I wish I could erase that blemish from my record, but I never can. This conflicts with my knowing that getting the fuck away from that mess at long last was one of the smartest things I've ever done. It was a long time coming and it's a smartest-thing-because-before-I-did-a-dumbest-thing, but it was the right thing to do.
Josh has never given the slightest indication that he thinks I am damaged goods, and he's seen me at my weakest, worst, and least attractive. Many times all at once because when I get going, well... Oh dear. When I murmured to him my upset after we left the municipal building he stopped walking, hugged me close, and told me I was not damaged goods.
One of my favorite parts about this relationship is that I know it's going to be okay. I don't know if I'd have this certainty without having had so much unpleasantness before. So there was a weird minute to applying for our marriage license-- that means I was in the process of applying for a marriage license with someone I want to marry. It's not perfect closure, but I guess I don't mind the gap; all the angsty stuff is becoming history and falling farther away from my now. It was a thing that happened and it will surface from time to time.
I think rather than rehashing this stuff, I'm just going to resolve not to write about it anymore. It's a lot of the same old stuff. Life has changed and so have I. Moving on.
