Day 71: Under One, Tiny-Two-Bedroom-but-Happy Roof

Does it get any more glamourous than this? I'm telling you, these shoes are amazing. Granted I don't have a dress that quite compares to this, but I also don't walk the red carpet or go to the opera, which are pretty much the occasions this ensemble calls for. Tomorrow will feature these heels with an outfit of more modest design, though still just as elegant--say for a nice dinner out somewhere or a cocktail party. Bottom line? Can't go wrong with sequin heels. (Or, wait, am I just justifying my extravagant purchase? Doesn't matter.) We'll call this look, "Dressed to the Perfect Tens."

As the SATC 2 movie release fast approaches, I see my girls (I figure it's about time I called them that) everywhere--Star Magazine, Glamour, Vogue, Shape, you name it. All the articles (okay, features) talk about the actress' wardrobes, onscreen rapport, and personal lives as well discuss the movie's details and possible plot twists. Of course, a dedicated SATC fan like myself has purchased all of the aforementioned magazines and read ever word about the movie.

While I'm excited at the prospect of seeing the long-awaited flick with Hank and any interested gal friends (I'm trying to organize a dinner-movie group thing, where we all dress up...wish me luck), I'm also realizing that my episode review days are nearing an end. There are only twelve days until the movie's premiere, and, dear readers, I only have a total of seven more posts to go after this one until my project is completely finished. This makes me sad. It's not that I'll miss the actual writing about the episodes. It will be nice not to have to watch the show and take two hours every other day to figure out how it relates to my life and the world. It will be a relief not to have to analyze all the relationships I've ever had, including the present one.

No, the sadness is due to a few things, the most significant of which is that I hate endings. I am a process person. I enjoy the leading-up-to, the contemplating, the planning, the preparing. I don't often enjoy the event and the feeling that it's over. I will miss feeling the fire under my ass. I don't do well with internal deadlines, as in "I'll get this done by this time, because I want to." I need a cold, hard date and time to push me to finish things. I will also miss the structure the project provided, writing about a topic I really enjoy, and talking about fashion. I'm pretty sure I'm going to have to start writing about something new just to keep my sanity. But I don't know what that is yet. I'll keep you posted, quite literally.

In the next two episodes, we see Carrie struggling to assert her right to be a single gal with expensive shoes instead of expensive children. When someone steals her $500 heels at a posh baby shower, the hostess shames Carrie for suggesting they be replaced. Carrie, making a point of how much she has spent on the married hostess with three kids over the years, "registers" for her upcoming wedding to...herself. She gets her shoes and her dignity back. Later, she reunites with her old high school boyfriend and wonders if they might end up together. That is, until he confesses that his recent divorce has led him to check himself into an asylum. Miranda starts up a fling with the new, African-American doctor in her building. Samantha has a run-in with her worst enemy, the annoying child, at a restaurant and gets spaghetti thrown in her face. She also fakes an exclusive club membership and gets caught. Charlotte is getting used to married life with Harry, including having to ask him to pick up his tea bags and not sit on their white couch in the nude.

Hank and I were discussing the issue of cohabitation the other day, even before these episodes--specifically, whether or not it's a good idea to live with your significant other, especially before marriage, assuming both people eventually want marriage. I always thought it was dangerous. Sure, there are benefits. You get to go to sleep together every night; you save on rent, since you would be at each others' places all the time anyway; and you get to see how the other person lives. But there are drawbacks, too. Biggest one? You get to see how the other person lives.

Hank's viewpoint? There are always issues between any couple, and it just gives you time ahead-of-time to work them out. He holds forth that if you love the person, you may have a bone to pick about how they do certain things (like laundry and dishes), but the things are small enough that they can always be worked out. It's not like you would break up with someone over a dog-feeding situation.

But people do. As we talked about, I was reminded of all the little things that bug me about living with Hank: that I often have to ask him to wash the dishes if I don't want to end up doing them all the time; that he doesn't seem to know how to do a white load of laundry or water plants; that if left up to him, we wouldn't change the sheets for six months. As I listed them off to him, I was embarrassed by how small and stupid (not to mention stereotypical) they seemed. Besides, did I think I was easy to live with? Me and my inability to be on time to functions? My nagging about taking out the trash, which I rarely do? My complete bitchiness when I am interrupted in the middle of reading, writing, practicing piano, sleeping, or nearly any activity that requires minor concentration? I wasn't sure how I had lived peacefully with myself for so long.

It was a wake-up call for me. I saw that instead of enjoying life with Hank this past year, in a way I had been evaluating him the whole time--trying to figure out if we could live together for the rest of our lives, instead of working on our cohabitation issues one day (and one issue) at a time. Every time something went wrong, it was a point against living together before marriage or even living together at all.

It doesn't have to be that way. For example, last night I simply asked him if he could please do the dishes while I made dinner. He did it, no questions asked. I hadn't waited for him to do them himself. I hadn't gotten mad at him for not doing them sooner. I had just asked, and life had gone on. I realized that all the things that drove me crazy weren't reasons not to live with him (or anyone); they were just things that needed to be worked out.

Since our talk, when something bugs me, I can't help thinking of something Hank asked during our talk. "Would you rather live apart?" he had questioned very sincerely, like it was a definite option. "Of course not," I had said, equally sincerely. "Okay, well just let me know if you ever do. I don't want you to ever feel trapped with me." I was shaken by his frankness in that moment. I hadn't meant my frustration to point to an end of our living together; I had just needed to get it out. After that, though neither of us are psychology gurus, we decided that ironing out these things was probably a natural process of getting used to living with someone, and our little bickering sessions were likely even healthy. Better now than later, we reasoned. And I think we're right.

Cohabitation isn't easy. Sure, sometimes it makes me personally want to gouge my eyes out with blunt scissors. But sometimes it's really fun. I sure look forward to Hank coming home every day or seeing him when I walk in the door, and, in the end, I'm learning that the issues we have are really small and their solutions can be fairly easy. And there are always things to work out, because we're all human and we're all difficult. I'm also not sure facing the issues post-marriage would be any more peaceful. In fact, it could be traumatic to learn about the hidden habits of someone you have vowed to love and stick with no matter what. Let's face it: in a marriage, you are betting on your life that you know the person well enough to have confidence your lives will mesh well. If you haven't lived together yet, that's a lot of blind faith. If you've been cohabiting, at least you know what you're saying "I do" to.

I hope you'll be back. I will.

Day 70: Untying the Knot

Rockin shoes, eh? With the uber-casual attire, they actually pass as any-night going out material. And there's nothing much else to say, except for that skinny gray pants are next on my must-have jeans list. I'll call this outfit, "Drinks with the Gals," because you could have been painting your living room all day and thrown on these shoes and grabbed this clutch seconds before meeting up with them. They won't care that you smell bad and have blue streaks in your hair. They'll just be glad you're there.

Well, Charlotte ties the knot once again, though this time in tradition Jewish style. Before saying "I do," though, she has her share of fretting about it being her second marriage, especially after she sees her old wedding dress still hanging in her closet. It takes her a while to realize that she can celebrate a second wedding just as much as she celebrated the first. On the big day, everything that can go wrong does, and Charlotte is left in tears. Carrie tells her to buck up and see how wonderful she has it--and also tells her that the worse the wedding, maybe the better the marriage. Miranda finally fits into her old "skinny" jeans (in the old sense of the term, meaning the ones we wore in our lean years and keep around for motivation). She rejoices by flirting up a storm. Samantha, in her publicist capacity, tells Smith (she changed his name from Jerry Jerod to Smith Jerod) to broadcast that he's single and not get too attached to her. But when he leaves to do a movie shoot, she finds herself missing him. Carrie laments over Burger's abrupt breakup via post-it note. To get over it, she sleeps with the best man in Charlotte's wedding and ends up with a bad back from "jackrabbit sex," as she calls it.

As episodes go by, and I write about these characters and their situations every couple of days, I see interesting patterns. One I'm noticing lately is that no matter how much I think I relate to Carrie and her interests in writing, relationships, and shoes, a lot of my actions coincide more with Charlotte. At least my dating history is very similar. I, too, have been in relationships since I was 14 without much break in between any of them. I, too, have always felt insecure by myself and been in search of a mate to make me happy, even if I know I should rely on myself for happiness. I also have tried very hard with all the wrong kinds of guys, always assuming that there's something more I can give, always in danger of giving too much. Like her, I have converted for boyfriends--even if it was to vegetarianism and not Judaism. Granted I've never been married, but I've sure had to face the ghosts of wedding dresses past.

The first time I was engaged--to Arnold--I wanted the whole shebang on our wedding day. I didn't really want a ton of people, but I wanted things to be perfect. I went to Ace to pick up paint color pallets and spent weeks deciding what combos I liked best. I handmade all the invitations. I tore out about a hundred pictures of wedding dresses from magazines, dreaming of the ideal one, and so on. In the end, I decided to wear my mother's wedding dress as a tribute to my history (in my mind, that dress signified the perfect choice). After all, it fit me perfectly without any needed alterations.

Months after I cancelled the wedding, I visited my parent's house and saw my mother's dress still hanging on the closet door in my old bedroom, still in a plastic bag, still unworn except for that one, hot, August day in 1975. It was like an invisible bride had been hung there and forgotten. As a matter of fact, when I was there for Christmas this year, now six years that first cancelled wedding, it hadn't moved. I'm not even sure it has been touched.

The next time I officially got engaged (I no longer count the times I thought I was going to marry someone, for there are far to many), this time to Jorge, I decided I would buy my dream wedding dress right off. After all, that was the best part of the wedding planning process in my mind, and I had skipped it last time. I got one from David's Bridal on sale for $500, and it was gorgeous, even perfect. It had a halter neckline, a sheath body made entirely of beaded lace, and an elegant satin sash around the waist. There were days I would take it out of its garment bag just to stare at it.

After I refused to send invitations for that wedding, in effect canceling it (or as I liked to think "indefinitely postponing"--canceling was too harsh a term), I tried to forget about the dress, the symbol of yet another failed relationship in my mind. Perhaps unconsciously, I brought it to my parents' house and hung it next to my mother's old one, just to get it out of my small apartment. Now there were two invisible brides.

Last year, when I met Hank and before I moved to Denver to live with him, I decided I had to get rid of the dress I loved so much but that haunted me. I would put it up for sale on Ebay. I packed it up from my parents' house and brought it to my apartment, where I photographed it from twenty angles. I also snapped shots of the shoes I had bought for the occasion (Stewart Weiztman rhinestone jelly flats as a throwback to my childhood) and all the accessories that came with the dress. I put up all the photos on the same day I started advertising my apartment.

After a week, no one had bought the dress. I was dissapointed. It was so beautiful, and I had priced it at $200, which I thought was a steal for an unworn, unaltered, beaded lace wedding dress. I decided to take the dress and its entourage to Denver with me, where I would attempt to sell them all at a consignment store. On the move down with my father, I tried to ignore the oddly shaped, unlabeled box that contained the odd relics of my past and hoped he wouldn't ask me about it.

About a month later, I hadn't thought much about the dress. On a whim I decided to repost it on Ebay. This time, I amped up all of my pictures and wrote an ad about the dress that made it sound irresistable. Sure enough, I got a hit. Within a week, I had sent it off to a woman in Florida, who had been looking for the perfect dress for her upcoming wedding and knew she had found it the moment she saw my ad. It was official. My dress--no longer my dress--was gone. And I had nothing left to show for my engagements. It felt wonderful. And it felt sad.

There is a moment in one of the episodes where Charlotte says she doesn't feel like having a big celebration again. She doesn't think it's proper. After all, it's her second wedding, and she has already had the bridesmaids and the flowers and the perfect dress. This time around, she says, she feels she should have a small and simple wedding. But Carrie won't have it. She tells Charlotte to go for it--to celebrate this marriage the way she wants to, with all the excitement and vigor and pomp, even if she has gone through it all before. So she does.

I know how Charlotte feels. I almost feel like I know how divorced women feel. The only things that really separated me from being one were a couple of stupid pieces of paper and a single wedding day. I went through all of the motions. I just didn't take the vows. And while that's an important difference, all the stuff leading up to the vows seems almost more important and harder to forget--like planning a honeymoon with someone you're planning on spending the rest of your life with, asking people to be bridesmaids, and making invitations with your family.

But do I want a simple and small wedding when the time comes for me to finally say, "I do?" No, I don't. I still have dreams of the great dress and shoes, of an amazing cake, of being surrounded by friends and family and good music, of having a night out with my sisters the night before, of writing my vows and saying them to the person I love most in the world. In fact, I'm going to take my cue from Charlotte: if something is worth celebrating, celebrate it. It doesn't matter what came before.

I hope you'll be back. I will.