Relationships: Women Marrying Later and Divorcing Less

It was worth waiting for the best guy in the world.

I've always felt more outsider than insider: professionally I freelanced for about 20 years before I ever took the corporate job. My clothes are from thrift stores and funky boutiques; I'm not really a Macy's girl. My family is about as far from normal as you can get. And when it comes to marriage, I waited until 42 to sign my name on a paper and pledge to be the best girlfriend ever -- forever. 

I was the only one I knew who took this long to get that ring on (I was dead last in my class to get married, which caused endless hilarity at our 20-year reunion), it appears this could be a trend. According to a post in Strollerderby, more women and marrying later and divorcing less.  

Maybe it's because we skipped the starter marriage, or maybe it's because we're better tuned in to what we want in a partner and how to compromise in a relationship. In any event, it's nice to know we're keeping it together, 40licious style.

The 40licious Bride: Aftermath

It's hard to be whatever you'd call the modern equivalent of a fairy princess for six months -- building to the apex of fabulousness in which you wear the BEST DRESS you've ever had, partied with the BEST PEOPLE you know, and then linked up for life with the BEST LOVER you will ever meet -- and then plunk down back to earth.

Oh, of course there is still the residual glow. Every few nights a box with something very special arrives at our door, and we are thrilled that someone thought so much of us to get us a gift. And the wedding pictures are trickling in from the amazing Alison Peacock, who didn't leave my side for three days, so each new batch we see is fun and exciting. (And, I secretly hope we get to be part of her "sample" photos so our pictures can live on her website!)

But here is the thing: I've waited 42 years to do get married. About five or six proposals, a couple live-in almost-rans, one tentative post-9/11 engagment. That's a lot of buildup. I thought that I could strike the right balance of the logical with the fantasy, the magical with the practicalities of married tax penalities (seriously, it's enough to make one consider switching to a heartless, mindless yet fiscally fair political party. I don't know which one that would be, but I'm thinking of going there).

We came back to our apartment and focused on the dogs (we are training Cinco very seriously, with a guy who trains Homeland Security dogs. I swore that Cinco's recent mad dash into an intersection at 6 a.m. where he was almost squished by a sedan was his last). And stuff to get rid of. And an article I have due.

I'm not sure what I expected to happen when we got home, after all the euphoria. It was something -- different. Stevie didn't get any richer or more powerful. I didn't become suddenly sleeker and I had my hair extensions removed. He's just this guy. And I'm just this girl. And we decided to get married. And we'll just have to make something amazing happen next.

Wed

We are married. We are home.

The 40licious Bride: Part VI

This post is about another 40licious bride, my friend Lisa. Now, Lisa is much, much older than I am -- we met when I was 4, and she was 5. She moved into the apartment downstairs and from that day forward, we did everything together. Being a grade ahead, she'd come home and teach me what she'd learned -- shoe-tying, time-telling, cursive (and later on, some unmentionable skills).

Over the course of our lives, we've gone through all goods and bads together. Huge mistakes and giant triumphs. She's been in school longer than anyone I know ... I think it's been the last 18 years or so. Together we've woven a story of cross-country moves, crazy loves, deep sadnesses, health scares, teenage personal safety madness, children who would not see life, adored families, and a full bank of shared memories (sometimes we need to borrow from each other).

By the time you are 40licious, most of your friends have been married already; many of them are divorced and working on #2, or happily riding the single wave. I was there for Lisa's first as we walked through blueberry fields together to meet her groom; we were also on vacation together in Florida on the day that would be the last straw of her marriage to a sweet but broken man.

A few years after, she met Sam, a much younger (really, by about 10 years) man who is an artist, a musician, a writer. His childlike enthusiasm and zeal for life is matched only by Lisa's -- together they are sweet and fun and funny and test boundaries of all things conventional.

And so it was my great pleasure to head out to Santa Fe last weekend to watch them marry in a circle, in the park, with a dozen of their closest friends surrounding them. The officiant was dressed in a toga. We all sang the theme to Sponge Bob Square Pants as they walked up to meet us. She dipped him in a kiss. And they were pronounced "wifeband."

When you are 40licious, you can have whatever the hell kind of wedding you want. And your friends will be there to cry for your happiness, and cheer you on until the bouncer turns off the lights in the pool-hall where you have your reception.

The 40licious Bride: Part V

I see a pattern here, and apologies to those of you who are completely uninterested in reading about our upcoming nuptials. There's just so much I am noticing since I took so long to get here!

Today I shopped for the undergarments that will go with my dress. The dress is a strapless tiered number in a mermaid silhouette made of taffeta, and the worst wardrobe calamity I can imagine is akin to my 10th grade homecoming outfit that mostly involved my hiking up the top the whole time. I can't tell you even who I went with. But that was about the last time I went strapless.

So I'm in Macy's and paying for my bustier and some undies and the total came to $66.66. The clerk looked at me in horror. "Do you want to add something to change the price? You don't want bad luck for your wedding," she said.
"No thanks," I said, "It's four digits, not three, it should be fine."
She paused a moment and punched some numbers into the register.
"I took $1 off. It's $65.56 now. Have a beautiful wedding."

Even people I don't know are looking out for me, and that is exactly the magic of being engaged.

The 40licious Bride: Part IV

 

 

By the time you get to 40licious, you like things a certain way. Personally, I have to art direct everything and that includes my wardrobe. ESPECIALLY my bridal wardrobe.

 

Saturday, we went to Steve's parents' and his mom, Ellen, meticulously stitched the edging on my veil. We sat around and chatted about this and that, broke for dinner, then sat around some more and she was done. We were about a foot short of trim, which gives me a reason to go back and adore her some more. I sneaked some really beautiful pictures of her deep into the work but she's camera shy so I won't post them.

But I also have in my mind a dramatic cage veil for the reception. Looking online, I blanched at the prices -- $240 and up for a piece of French netting with a dumb big flower on it. So I ordered my own piece of French netting ($9) and bought my own dumb big flower ($8) and put it together, and tacked on a $1.49 comb from Joann fabric store. Slapped it all together as Ellen diligently did her fine work on my other veil for the ceremony. Voila!

I thought I was being DIY to save money, but I realize that foremost, I'm being DIY to make it OURS. 

The 40licious Bride: Part III

There's a blog I've been following lately, from a woman who has gone back to the UK, Ireland, I think, to deal with her dad's estate. She's still raw and so so sad. She's trying to figure out who she is now and what she's supposed to DO.

Those days for me were a haze. I remember taking so long to clean out his house. I'd go and bring friends to help and paint and we'd bring more stuff to goodwill and paint more and call the exterminator for the mice and bats that had taken residence. A contractor pulled the awful old shag rugs and left the floors bare, I think. The rest of the floors he took down to reveal the resplendent oak below. The next thing I knew, six months had passed. We sold the house at a pathetically low price.

I moved. I communed with my dad in dreams, often. Still do but not as much. Mostly, we are eating dinner and I am asking him if he is OK and where he is. I used to always be confused in the dream, knowing that he'd died but then he's right here before me.

I reserved a bit of his ashes in a cigar tin that sits in the feng shui helpful people corner of my living room. The ashes mean less and less as time goes on. He's not there. That's not him.

Holly, his partner of many years, my "bonus mother," has some of him buried in the yard of the home and vineyard she shares with her new husband. That's where we're getting married.

I guess I waited too long to have my dad dance with me at my wedding, walk me down an aisle, give my husband a hard time about taking care of me. He would love this, all the merging of the tribes, meeting Steve's family, seeing the cousins and friends that were originally his and that I inherited.

But parts of him are next to his cat, which Holly also buried somewhere out there. I like to think that the strong gravitational pull from 100 of his friends and family all concentrated in one place will make him come want to check it out, from wherever he is, and maybe stay for the champagne toast.

I don't know when I went from being A Person Without a Dad to being just A Person again. But hoping that woman in the UK gets there with as much grace as possible.

The 40licious Bride: Part II

I'm a very practical person, which is handy, because I am also a very environmentally conscious person. Most of the stuff I have has been either gifted, found, traded, or ThriftScored.

We're trying to be as sustainable as possible with our wedding. For the most part, that's easy. We've chosen a local caterer who uses fresh seasonal foods that don't have to be hauled in from far away places like Chile. The wine is from the very terra on which we will marry. The plates and napkins were foraged from Goodwill -- they're beautiful and Holly can use them again for other weddings. All flowers are beautiful and I don't care what they are, as long as they're seasonal and will last two days. I was forced to compromise a little on the dress though. I tried on dresses my friends offered to lend and they weren't quite right. I scoured Craigslist and jeez, there's a reason people are trying to get rid of some of those dresses: think Laura Ingalls Wilder Prom from Hell. I found one I loved, it was a great deal, and they sent my order off to some third-world country where I'm sure there's a tiny child stitching the flower on the ribbon right this very second.

Like any self-respecting 40licious woman who has taken the scenic route to her first wedding, I am feeling a great deal of deservedness. The other day I had an hour to kill on Melrose. So I thought I'd skip into my favorite shoe store, John Fluevog. He's one of those designers who upends my rational thought around money and resources.

And then I saw them. The most beautiful shoes in the world. The shoes I must have in order to be perfect as I walk down a grassy path through an apple orchard to my groom. They're a light suede. They are uncomfortably expensive. And I might get horse poop on them.

No matter. In the lifelong pursuit of beauty and truth, and this is just a small victory.

The 40licious Bride

This dress was a contender. Didn't make the cut though!

You see these shows where the women are going berzerk, barking orders, throwing tantrums around their wedding. I must have passed that phase. I am also old enough to reject things that don't mean anything and make up ceremony that does.

Wedding planning at 40licious seems organized and lovely and, well, FUN. We're lining up everything as it comes, and counting the RSVPs each day.

At first, I wondered if we just shouldn't elope. Take the money and flee to Ireland for a while, or put it toward a house near the beach. But now I'm realizing that never, ever again will we have this same unique collection of people who mean so much to us all in the same place at the same time. I have a lot of mothers in my life -- Mom, Holly (my dad's partner), my Aunt Corky, Trina -- and another on the way, Steve's mom, who couldn't be kinder. To have them  in one place is mind-blowing for me. Not to mention all my new and old friends, Steve's friends, our families ... just thinking about it makes my heart bust.

Voices

In 1983, I was at Chimacum High School in the farthest boondocks of Washington State. I was 15. Alternately a good kid and a raging lunatic. I was woefully unpopular and growing out an unfortunate asymmetrical haircut. I was learning to drive and listening to the Stones and The Who and Duran Duran and I even lip-synched Irene Cara's "Why Me?" at a talent show.

The man I will soon marry was 22, in a band, managed by Barry Manilow. They dressed him in white leather and razor-cut clothes and a bandanna. He had a small son. He was a rock star in California. Had we met then, I'm sure he would have been nicely dismissive. I would have been too young. He is good. So good and so kind. And I was such a dork.

I took the scenic route to where I am now. There is no way I would have predicted that it would take a good 27 more years until I got married. No less, to a man with three children and one grandchild (still taking suggestions on what to be called as Evan's grandmother. My grandmother preferred "Grace" or "Gracie").

I do believe that time knows its own way and travels in the path it is supposed to. But I do wish, the tiniest bit, I could have been the girl with the fake ID and too much eye makeup in the audience who could have scored a makeout session with Steve after the gig.
 

DIY Wedding

As I've said about a million times on this blog, when you're doing something right, the universe greases your wheels. But what about when you hamfist it? The universe basically throws gobs of bleh at you and makes you start over, refresh. Step away. Reevaluate. And you can't have clarity until that clarity wants to wash over you like a blast from a fire hydrant in the summer on West 82nd Street in Manhattan in 1978, when you wore running shorts and tube socks and Stan Smiths and a shirt with maybe a rainbow on it.

We're figuring out how to have the most meaningful wedding we can. What we need, what we don't. One of my best girlfriends is a wedding photographer by trade, so that's a no-brainer. Steve's on it with the music, and has been the perfect partner in helping with joint brainstorming and intuitively leaving alone the decisions I want to own. Which bodes well for our lives together. We are all set with the place and the wine and maybe even the officiant. I've spotlighted about 15 women in my life who will walk me down the aisle, led by my mother. Friends are giving me hints about scoring the deal on the dress, or do I just want to wear theirs? Those seem like the easy parts.

Perusing invitations, however, is a labyrinthine exercise. I'm a writer. Paper and words and ink and how it reads and how one remembers is important. I went through a maze of paper and fonts and wording on the Internet, each selection leading to a slightly different variation ... more casual. More formal. More Christian. More Hippie. And finally, I found The One. And it's letterpress and charming and in our colors (dark teal, dove gray and white) and $800. For some paper with ink on it.

So I very liberally borrow the idea I like -- a dove on a trellis with some fleur de lis thrown in -- and we pour over fonts together, as if we are deciding our last meal, or the name of our child, or a move to the Wyoming mountains. And finally we plunk down $24 for our wedding font and I play and play and play for nights on end to get it just right. And then I have the design in mind all perfect. And the paper I want to use sucks and gets all mangled in my printer. And my trips to Michael's and Staples result in a bag full of stickers and card stock and bits of ribbon and a Martha Stewart Fleur de Lis hole punch, and 100 blank invitation cards.

And I make a mess of my invitation. It is no longer beautiful to me. The font we have chosen now looks so amateur. Might as well use comic sans. My print looks gaudy and my paper looks plain. Is the bird tacky? Is the whole thing a bit too "Very Hungry Caterpillar"?

My very sweet neighbors arrived on my doorstep yesterday, 8-year-old Kaya with a basket of mandarins and a piece of baklava, her architect dad trailing along. They are a little listless, I think, as Mom is traveling India for a month gathering food stories. They have sort of adopted us. Or maybe we have adopted them. Sanjiv, who is also a Pisces, picks up on my design plight and offers to help out.

So I will put everything away for two days. And try to see the possibility that my new talented friend sees. And maybe we'll make something beautiful.

A Clean, Well-Lighted Place

By the time you hit 40licious, you collect a lot. You have a house and head full of books and recipes and stories and homespun remedies (Off the top of my head, I remember that slug slime helps soothe nettle burn. Look for the cure right next to the problem. Which works in other situations too). You know obscure Broadway show lyrics and enough trivia to win trips to Turks & Caicos on game shows.  But mostly, you've collected people. Lots of amazing, big-hearted, funny souls who have made your journey on this earth so darn delightful, and easier and meaningful.

And then sometimes -- it might take until you are WELL INTO your 40liciousness or beyond -- you find someone who is so big-hearted and funny and lovely and helpful and sexy and fun that you just have to join up lives with them and walk your paths together, forever.

Steve proposed on my birthday, and the very next morning, I went to Japan for 10 days. We didn't have a lot of time to do any of the fun canoodling engagement things, whatever they are, right away. When I came back, the first order was to recover from jetlag of a land 17 hours ahead. Then it was to think about the wedding.

What will it feel like, smell like, taste like? Who will be there? I don't care about decorations, or party favors, or his-n-her engraved champagne flutes. Since forever, I've wanted to walk down the aisle to Pachalbel's Canon in D, and hear the Beatles' "In My Life" for the first dance. And I want an amazing dress. And to never have to limit our guest list.

The original idea of just getting 300 of our closest friends to the beach quickly disappeared after each site required numerous deposits and permits and then we thought it's just easier to do it with a beachfront hotel and have them arrange everything ... until we saw that most places charge $8,000 just to step foot in the door. And maybe throw in some lemon water. Eight. Thousand. Dollars.

And then our small wedding up in Lilliwaup grew as I tallied at least 100 people in my family alone, too much for the 77-person Lilliwaup Community Center, where my father and his brothers attended kindergarten in a one-room school house. It is also the site where we had my father's wake, and pretty much every other wake and celebration in between.

We thought about Sonoma, a place we both love, and talked with some well-meaning hippies who run a wine-country retreat center.  Which turned out to be even too funky for us (and you're talking about a girl who lived off the grid in a tiny cabin, and peed in a tomato can for five years).

And during our long Easter flight delay at SFO, with the rain pelting down outside and planes coming and going without us, our plan came together. We were invited to wed in a place we both love, hosted by people who mean so much to us. A place we visited that's in between what both of us consider home. A place where rolling hills kiss faraway mountains; where vineyards erupt in passions of purple; where  horses nearly bust out of their own skin, they are so ready to race.

We have found our spot and our date. And I've told anyone, regardless of age, sex, race or inspiration, who wants to be a flower girl that she can. We're up to about five now. And we will gallop off into our future, with our families and friends at our backs. And I will wear cowboy boots with my dress.