When I got engaged back in July, I was determined to understand, as much as you can ever really hope to understand, what I was getting myself into.  I don’t mean what I was getting myself into as far as my fiance goes and who he is.  No, I’m referring to my own emotional state, what getting married truly entails and means.  I wanted to be prepared and realistic for what was coming, and how I could expect it all to feel.  So I did what I always do.  I bought books on the topic and read them.  There were 2 that were particularly good: What No One Tells the Bride: Surviving the Wedding, Sex After the Honeymoon, Second Thoughts, Wedding Cake Freezer Burn, Becoming Your Mother, Screaming about Money, Screaming about In-Laws, etc. and Emotionally Engaged: A Bride’s Guide to Surviving the “Happiest” Time of Her Life . They were both helpful in different ways, and I truly believe all brides-to-be should read at least one!

One of the pieces of advice that resonated with me the most was a mention of the kooky paranoia that can often plague engaged/newlywed women.  WHAT?!? I thought when I read that part.  You mean the psychotic bouts of momentarily paralyzing paranoia I’ve been experiencing are NORMAL??!! Then I thought, why has not one of my married friends warned me about this?  After some consideration, I realized it’s probably because it’s not something anyone wants to admit, because when it happens it does not FEEL normal.  So no one talks about it.

I decided I was going to talk about the paranoia I was feeling.  I spoke with Tiffany, and discovered she has been experiencing the same thing ever since she got married.  She bought a house and got pregnant and now she is uber-paranoid for no good reason, too!  We decided a good way to get this out of our systems would be to blog about it: hence this post.  Tiffany has written a post about her problems with being paranoid lately as well, which you can check out by clicking here. {EDIT: Tiffany’s blog has suffered a tragic blow, from which we are not sure it will recover.}

So, what do I mean when I say I am crazy-paranoid these last few months?  I mean that sometimes, out of nowhere, I find myself gripped with an all-consuming fear that an awful, terrible, no-good, very-bad SOMETHING is going to happen, and then the fear passes as quickly as it came.  The result is me sitting around, scratching my head, wondering what the heck is wrong with me lately.

A few examples of this would be:

• I am utterly terrified that something bad is going to happen to Alex.  It’s a pretty non-descript fear, it can manifest itself many ways.  One time it reared its ugly head when I was waiting for him to get home from work, and resulted in me calling him every 5 minutes for about 45 minutes until he finally got near his phone and picked up, to find me nearly in tears because I truly thought he must be in a gutter somewhere.  Each time I get paranoid like that, the irrational fear involves something tragic and dramatic occurring that prevents our wedding from happening.
• I am worried much more often than I ever have been in my life that something is going to happen to one or both of my parents.  This particular irrational thought always involves something that makes one of them miss my wedding, and it is always for a tragic and dramatic reason.  For example, my dad recently had to go on a business trip to Texas.  I was SO SCARED something was going to happen to that plane.  And I’m never worried about things happening to planes, I’m one of those people who insists loudly that the chances of something going horrifically wrong in the air are much lower than something going horrifically wrong with a car on the ground.
• I’m also pretty paranoid something is going to happen to the WORLD, and that it will prevent me from being able to marry Alex.  I mean big things, like gravity will cease to exist and we will all go flying off into space, or a black hole will lumber into the solar system and disrupt planetary orbits, sending Earth hurling into the vacuum of interstellar space.

Obviously these are all doom-and-gloom, ridiculously improbable scenarios.  I’ve had this newfound paranoia manifest itself on smaller scales, though.  The biggest place I’ve noticed it is when it comes to driving.  It used to be that driving didn’t phase me at all.  I did it all the time, over long distances.  Now I dread being behind the wheel, because I have gotten cautious to the point of OVER cautious when it comes to driving.  I have gotten overwhelmingly nervous more times than I can count that someone was about to hit me.

Now, this may all sound like I need professional help.  But I think what’s important to realize is that NONE of these little instances of paranoia lasted for more than fifteen or twenty seconds – well, none except that time I got really freaked out and couldn’t stop calling Alex.  I always get a grip on myself and realize everything is fine, and that there is no point getting worked up over things that MIGHT happen, and that would happen regardless of anything I could do to stop them.  If a black hole is heading our way, I don’t think me sweating bullets over it is going to make a difference!

According to my books, this paranoia thing is actually normal.  I think the psychology behind it says something like this: newly engaged/wed women are so happy and everything feels like such a fairy tale to them, that sometimes it can get scary when you realize how perfect everything feels.  The result?  Being terrified that something bad will happen to take your happiness away, because after all, you’ve never gotten to experience a happy ending before now, have you?

It really made me feel better to realize that a) my mini-episodes of paranoia don’t necessarily mean something is wrong with me, and b) other people have experienced this issue.  So I’m curious, if Tiffany and I have both noticed this, has anyone else?  If you’re willing to share, please do!

© 2009, The Table Has Shoes (and Other Ambiguities). All rights reserved.

When I sat down at the computer to write this blog, I had intended to write about my recent trip to Aruba with Alex.  It was a great trip, very relaxing, and filled with loads of entertaining anecdotes I intended to share with my blog readers.  For example, I wanted to expound upon the wonder that is Aruban beef cuisine.  The trouble is, when I sat down to look in my trusty blog moleskine to see what I wanted to say about the trip, all I could focus on was the little note I made about a movie I watched three times the week we went away: He’s Just Not That Into You.

I suppose I ought to explain why I watched it three times in a week.  I borrowed the DVD from my dad and watched it on my own one night with a glass of wine.  But I thought there were some pieces that were so very true that I made Alex watch it with me the next night.  And then JetBlue had the same movie as the feature on our flight from Aruba to NYC.  Oops.  That’s what always happens, isn’t it?

The trouble is, by the time I got to my third viewing, I was pissed off at the movie.  I felt it was rather disappointing in its message.

In case you haven’t seen the movie, I advise you to not read any further because what I am about to say will be a spoiler for you.

He’s Just Not That Into You is a movie based on a book written by Greg Behrendt and Liz Tuccillo by the same title.  I’ve read the book.  I think I still own a copy of it.  The whole point of the book is to explain why women should get over guys that don’t show interest, because it’s OK that not every guy is interested.  It also gives hints to identify this behavior in men you might be currently involved with.  The movie picks up this theme, and weaves together a bunch of storylines that all involve some variation of “he/she’s not that into you.”  One of the male characters has a sort-of mantra: you’re the rule, not the exception.  Just because girls tell each other stories about a friend of a friend of a cousin who had some guy be a total jerk but then wound up getting married to the jerk and being happy doesn’t mean life will go that way for you, because that’s the exception, not the rule, he says.

I think this is fantastic for women to hear.  I know I spent way more time than I ever should have making excuses or reassuring myself with some story about someone else’s life that gave me hope for my loser of a boyfriend.  Most women fall into that trap.  I think that’s why the book was so successful when it was published – successful enough that a self-help book was turned into a major motion picture with actors like Scarlett Johansson, Jennifer Aniston, Ben Affleck, and Jennifer Connolly to boot.  I also have pretty strong opinions about Hollywood conditioning women to expect “the fairy tale” when it comes to love, and how that can actually sabotage real-life relationships, so I had high hopes for this movie.  (See blogs here and here if you are curious about my opinions on fairy-tale love expectations.)

So you can imagine my disappointment when He’s Just Not That Into You turned out to be merely another example of a cheesy Hollywood ending, where the main characters turn out to be the exception, not the rule, and everyone is happy in the end.  WTF?!  Even the male character (name happens to be Alex) who insists most people are the rule ends up making an exception!  It’s the worst cliche ending!  This movie is not appropriate for Anti-Valentine’s Day parties at all – which is exactly what it was marketed as, because it was released just in time for Valentine’s Day 2009.

To be fair, I did watch the movie 3 times, so obviously there must have been something about it that at least entertained me.  And there was.  The truth behind some of the characters’ frustrations was incredibly funny to watch and relate to.  Social media networks for finding romance, the silly things girls do when a guy hasn’t called them yet, and guys do when they are playing “the game” … all these things make the movie fun to watch once.

I’m just not sold on it being a movie for people who are single and looking for an escape from the typical romantic comedy.

© 2009, The Table Has Shoes (and Other Ambiguities). All rights reserved.

It is officially the middle of December. The date has entered double digits, the countdown to the big ball drop on the last day of the month is approaching, and pretty soon all those ‘The Year In Review’ issues of popular magazines will be hitting the stands. It therefore seems an appropriate time to take a step back and look at what life has taught me in the last year. And as I sit here and look back, I notice there is one over-arching lesson that has repeatedly reared its ugly head:

Life… gets complicated.

Come on, you know it’s true. Things that used to look black and white turn shades of grey and ivory the older you get. The consequences of your actions are more readily identifiable. Caution and deliberation replace impulse and rashness.

Which begs the question: where have all the Disney endings gone? Isn’t Alice supposed to wake up? Shouldn’t the shoe fit Cinderella’s foot? Of course Peter Pan is going to beat Captain Hook! Everything is supposed to work out in the end… or is it?

I’ve said it loads of times: you grow up thinking you’re going to go to college, get your dream job, meet the significant other of your dreams, get married, have kids, and live happily ever after. I can’t help but notice as I look around my friends and family that I do not know a single person for whom life has followed this grandmaster scheme. Quite the contrary. Everyone has experienced bumps in the road, detours, missed exits, and/or traffic congestion since entering adulthood. Life gets complicated.

When exactly does this happen, I wonder? At what moment does life take the wide-eyed idealist and pound them into, at best a realist, at worst, a pessimist? When is it that we begin to adjust our expectations to match our reality? I mean, it’s always something… if you don’t have relationship problems, you have money problems. If your relationship and your finances are going along just swimmingly, then you have family drama, or you hate your job. The perfect life does not seem to exist. Life seems to be about being happy with imperfection and letting go of the need to control the environment around you in order to obtain some out-of-reach vision of perfection you cling to from deep in your childhood.

There are people out there who would justifiably take issue with what I just said – that we should learn to be happy with imperfection. They would argue no one should settle for anything less than everything they always wanted. And I think there is something to that. It would be truly tragic if we were to simply talk ourselves into being content with our given lot in life and never try to change anything.

Which is why I think the biggest thing I have come to understand in the last year is this: life is not perfect; it’s terribly complicated the more you learn and experience, but I think life might be about deciding which things are most important to you (love, family, career, friends, robots… whatever…) and making sure you don’t settle for anything less than happiness when it comes to the things that mean the most to you. Example: maybe you don’t have the biggest house or the fanciest pants, but you have the world’s greatest spouse, damnit!

I suspect this is why we are supposed to respect our elders – they already know all of this stuff, and if we’d just listen to them once in a while, perhaps the shock of life wouldn’t be so jarring – and we wouldn’t be left looking bewildered and wondering when it all got so complicated.

© 2008 – 2009, The Table Has Shoes (and Other Ambiguities). All rights reserved.