When you get married to him

Dear you,

Dear you,

You don’t know me. We have never met and we probably never will. First off, congratulations. You’re getting married to the most incredible person alive. You did what I, and several other girls after me, before you, never could: you found a love in sync.

You got him to love you the way we never could.

Pardon my language, the way this sentiment is being phrased is specious. I don’t know how to properly convey the emotions I have, and I know this is strange. I am inserting myself into a love story that isn’t mine, but… a part of it belongs to me. A part of him that you love, belongs to me, is shaped by me, so I hope you’ll excuse my stranger ramblings and bear with me.

There is a part of me that will always believe that you never get over your first love. He was mine, and I was his. We will be forever, inevitably linked, by the childhood nostalgia of being teenagers in love. That’s it, though… the pinnacle of our story. We were kids when we fell in love.

That part of me is jealous of you. I got to be his first love, but you get to be his last. His most adult relationship. You get a starring role in his unwritten chapters. You’ll get the chance to see his face when he first sets eyes on you in that white dress, you’ll get to have him by your side when you bring new life into the world. You’ll get the white picket fence and weekend soccer games and a man who believes in family before everything else. You get that reality.

I am envious, but more than that, I am insanely happy. I am so happy and thankful that he’s found you, that you’ve found each other. That you’re making a home together, because what nobody tells you when you’re a teenager, is that love is hard work.

Love is a choice.

It is so much more than sleepless nights spent whispering secrets and slow dancing under stars and sneaking home at 5:30 in the morning. Love is also when it’s hard, when you’re lost in the middle of nowhere, and the air is thick with terse, stony silence, and passive aggressive unsaid “i told you so”’s. Love is also when you’re sick and he sleeps in the bathroom with you, making sure you don’t die. Love is also what I can only imagine.

The thing I’m most grateful for is that you’re choosing to love him. You’re choosing to give him a part of your forever. You chose him, and in doing so, you’re gifting him a love that I never could.

After we ended, he wrote to me, saying, “I’m sorry I couldn’t love you the way you wanted”.

Here’s something I’ve never told him. That I’ve never told anyone. He did.

He loved me exactly the way I wanted. He gave me freedom and excitement and passion. He called me fireworks and kissed me in the snow when we fell snowboarding. He gave me adventures and picture perfect memories. He gave me the very embodiment of youth and first love and summer. He gave me stories.

And that’s all I wanted.

When you’re a child, you think you want what everyone else wants, because that’s all you know. Adulthood is a different story. I may not know what I want, but I know what I don’t. That’s the lie and the truth, isn’t it? Adult love is hard.

So naturally, there is a part of me that’s sad, too. This is the childish part of me that always believed he and I would find our way back to each other. That the only reason we ended was the right person at the wrong time.

And in a way, it was. We ended because we were just kids in love.

What I’ve learnt through the years of bad timing and insane chemistry, though, is that timing is irrelevant if you choose it to be. If you really want to be with someone, you will move heaven and Earth to be with them. And what I’ve learnt through what we shared, through the years spent chasing after that decadent first love, is that I want the adventure. I want the romance and intensity of young love, but I never wanted it to lead somewhere.

In the end, the “wrong timing” that we shared worked out beautifully, because now, he’s found you. Through the adventures and the lovers and heartaches, he found who he was meant to be. When we were younger, a friend of mine told me, “every ex lover is a lover closer to the one you’re meant to be with.” I have held on to that truth and you are the culmination of that truth. You are his conclusion.

And that’s beautiful.

Some people are meant to fall in love but not meant to be together. They share a love that’s so blinding and so bright, like a shooting star or fireworks, but that love, has the potential to be destructive. A shooting star entering earth’s field of gravity becomes an asteroid. Cataclysmic.

I’m not likening our love to that. We didn’t destroy each other, but we did destroy expectations. Long after we ended, he asked me, “what we had was real, right?” And I knew, I knew in the deepest depths of my soul, that he was heartbroken in a way no amount of looking back was going to heal. He was destroyed by something beyond us. I am a firm believer that you have to be destroyed to be rebuilt. I hope you destroy each other as the years go by, so that you may build each other up again, into a stronger, more durable structure.

I guess what I’m trying to say is, I wish you all the best. I wish you all the adventures and romance, all the what if’s and when’s. I want you to have the strength to carry on when it’s hard, to lean on each other when you’re tired.

And I want to say thank you, above all, thank you for being his conclusion. For being able to love him the way he wanted, in a way I, and the others after me, before you, never could.

You’re about to enter into a promise soon, a promise of forever that others have taken lightly. I hope you remember that you chose him when the fights are long and the romance is dead. I hope you fight for him and change with him and grow together, and above all, I hope you guys get that picket white fence. I hope you get the two dogs and a cat. I hope you play soccer on the weekends in your backyard and go on snowboarding adventures with your children.

I hope your love burns and nourishes like the sun, and I wish you both only the greatest of love stories. I’ll wish upon the stars and hope against all hope that yours is a love story that ends with you holding hands when you’re both grey and wrinkly. I hope you never stop slow dancing under the stars and kissing in the snow.

Above all, I wish you both the gift of falling in love, over and over again, everyday, secure in the knowledge that love is a choice. I hope you hold fast to that choice when the nights are bleak and the times are hard.

Because to be in love with each other is the easiest and hardest choice in the world.

Congratulations and thank you. Thank you for loving him the way I never could.

Sincerely, Charlotte