How I got my wedding dress

I'm waiting for Mom to get back from Curves so we can go get the wedding dress to take it to the resale place. They were really excited to hear we were coming. I think most of the dresses they get are Aunt Tilda's thirty-year-old poofy sleeve number from her second marriage. Maybe that means I'll get more money.

Mom tried to get me to go to Curves with her. No thanks. If my workout's gonna be dictated to me it will be by supremely hot Trainer who occasionally can be coaxed to lift up his shirt and show me his abs, not by sixty year old ladies in sweatpants who believe every woman on earth has the same body.

Anyway, now seems as good a time as any to explain what happened with the wedding. I met Ex-Fiance while I was working for a horrible newspaper in eastern North Carolina. He was working for one of our competitors as a news reporter. I thought he was cute. We dated.

Then I decided to move back to Raleigh and become a teacher and I figured that was that because I wasn't interested in a long term relationship.

But he kept sticking around. He came up on weekends and sometimes I went down to visit on weekends and that was the pattern we adopted. I had no friends where I lived and everybody at work was married and older so there was no alternative. That's life in North Carolina for me. Ex-Fiance's friends were my only friends.

Time passed. Years passed. We downed massive amounts of wine on the weekends and ate at the same pizza restaurant. We played Knights of the Old Republic on X-Box.

Then I decided to move to LA to become a screenwriter. I asked if he wanted to come with me because I was afraid of moving alone. He responded by asking me to marry him.

We were on a trip to New York to stay with friends. We walked to Central Park, one of his favorite places on earth but a place that means absolutely nothing to me, and he pulled out a claim check for a jewelry store and popped the question casually.

I thought he was joking at first, but then said yes because that's what you do. You say yes. It's not like there was anybody else out there trying to marry me. I was used to him.

The ring was my great grandmother's. He had gone to my mother and gotten it, but it had no stones so he took it to the only jeweler in town who would put stones in it (there were better jewelers twenty miles away), but the jeweler got sick so Ex didn't have it when we went to New York, hence the claim check. When I did get the ring back the amethyst in the middle (my idea) was deeply flawed and one of the braces holding in a tiny diamond on the side was not properly set so it kept picking at my clothes. I was always having to dig pieces of lint out of my ring.

Kind of symbolic, no?

The night we got engaged his favorite basketball team got into the final four. When everyone told him congratulations he thought they were talking about the game.

Then we moved to LA. I paid for the move. I paid for the apartment. For four months I paid all the bills. He never could seem to find a job. He kept saying he was looking for one but wasn't satisfied with anything less than news reporter, even temporarily, so while he drank more and more and went out to hockey games I laid on the couch, exhausted from working at a school that didn't yet have its shit together so I could pay both of our bills.

I'd get up at 3 am to go to the bathroom and he'd be on my computer playing some video game where you conquer other cultures.

I dreaded sex.

Then I started to make friends. I went to the gym and got First Trainer. I was at the gym as much as possible because I didn't want to go home.

Because of First Trainer, I cut way back on the drinking. Then I told Ex I'd like him to go a week without drinking. He agreed. I marked the bottle. The very next day after he promised to stop there was less vodka in the bottle. I confronted him. He said it must have evaporated. I marked it again. The next day there was MORE vodka in the bottle than before.

He's not too bright.

One day two months before my wedding I was addressing envelopes for the wedding invitations while watching TV. I saw that credit card commercial where that girl in her wedding dress runs and hugs her friends because she's so happy.

"What an idiot," I said.

I looked down at the cards in my lap. I realized what I had just said. That's when I knew I didn't want to get married.

He didn't take it so well. Before he moved out he would get drunk in the middle of the night and come into the bedroom to demand to know why I wanted to break it off. He finally moved out.

He took me to lunch a few months later to catch up. We were going to try to be friends. When the bill came he discovered he had no money. I paid.

It's the last time I paid for anything. I haven't seen him since.