Stopped there at the stop light, my left hand was angled on the steering wheel just right so that the sunlight flung sparkles from my ring all over the car. I should have been on cloud nine. Instead I had a terrible feeling in the pit of my stomach.
Gosh, this is really not how I expected to feel the morning after I got engaged.
If these feelings are real and justified, then you have a hard job ahead of you, I told myself.
My fears eased when we were together. We had four years of history, countless dates, conversations, and inside jokes. I needed my fingers and my toes to count all the times we'd been told we were perfect for each other. Getting married made sense, and by extension, so did making wedding plans. But every dinner that was placed on the calendar, every decision and reservation made left me making a growing mental list of what we'd have to cancel were we to call it off.
Was this just who I was? Maybe major life-changing events just threw me for a loop and things would level-out in time. I decided to hang on a little longer. However, I set a date on the calendar. If my uneasy feelings were not resolved by that time, I would have that difficult conversation.
I gave the relationship my all for the next couple of weeks. I moved ahead as if there most definitely would be a wedding. I graciously thanked people for their congratulations and mentally prepared to be in a marriage relationship. But rather than more confidence, all I experienced was a nagging sense of guilt whenever I was with my fiance and sleepless nights where I vowed to call it off as soon as the sun came up.
I had never been at such a crossroads. Either way I turned was not a happy direction. Calling off the wedding would be hurtful to my fiance. It would also drastically affect my relationship with many people I knew because I knew him, people I had learned to think of as family. Not calling off the wedding meant that this torment inside me would go on for who knew how long. In the last couple of weeks both of us had admitted we felt like we were draining the life out of each other. What if it didn't stop after the wedding? What if we were miserable for the rest of our lives?
Taking a gigantic leap into the unknown for the sake of a hopefully happy future, I called it off.
Next Chapter: This is What We've Trained For
