The Nightmare That Could Have Been
How I Could Have Missed It
One night several months after we got married, I woke up in a cold sweat, tears still wet on my face from a nightmare that had mercifully ended. It took me several seconds to remember where I was, to remind myself that the alternate reality I had just lived through in my sleep was just a dream.
I turned over. He was there.
It hadn’t been the first dream, but it was the worst. I dreamed we were on a train, he and I. We played cards to pass the time, and talked as friends do who know each other too well for a quiet moment to be unwelcome. Everything was as it should be. The scenery went by mile after mile, and I was content merely to be with him — this friend. It was not a romantic moment. It was pleasant. I was content.
We were joined by a third — in the dream it was a mutual acquaintance. We were not unhappy to have another and we dealt him into our game. The three of us talked of things of no consequence.
After we had done this for what seemed like a long time, this third man stood up, took my arm, and said to me, “Let’s go back to our seats now.”
I was horrified. I looked across the narrow table at Micah, and his face was inexpressibly sad, but resigned. Then I started to remember … there had been a wedding … the bridesmaids wore yellow … my brothers had played Saint-Saens for my wedding march … Michigan fall colors blazing … all the details of my real-life wedding came back to me, except in the dream, it was this nameless man that I had married instead of Micah. There was no way to go back. Why I had I thought I could marry anyone else? Of course, of course, of course, it was Micah that I wanted to be with for the rest of my life. Now it was too late for that. I had chosen wrong. There was nothing I could do. I had doomed us both to the misery of life-long separation. It felt like dying — but a dying that would take a lifetime.
That’s when I woke up. It took several seconds for the relief to even register, but when it did it was like Ebenezer Scrooge waking up on Christmas morning to find himself not dead — the worst possible thing averted.
My sub-conscious has a way of chewing on things for much longer than my conscious self feels it needs to. As I said, this dream was neither the first nor the last in which I found myself married to someone else, or found Micah had married someone else, or any variation on the theme that somehow or other we were not married to one another, and that that situation was final.
It could have happened.
I was in love with Micah before we started dating. In every way that a person could be attracted to someone, I was attracted to him. The friendship was there. The physical attraction was there. The respect for who he was as a person was there. I had never had more reason to be sure about anyone. I stopped thinking about anyone else. I was besotted.
When we started dating, a funny thing happened. I shut down. The thing I had hoped for had finally happened, but I didn’t know how to explain it — I just didn’t feel the feels I had felt before. It was awkward. We had been friends for so long, romance always hovering on the borders of our relationship but never, til now, realized between us, and I didn’t know how to be myself anymore. I didn’t know how to behave in this new role. Things did not look like I thought they were going to look. Nothing about the essentials had changed. But my emotions were suddenly not on board.
It wasn’t like this all the time. But it was like this enough that the year that we dated and got engaged was the most stressful one of our relationship by far (including the past two and half years of marriage). It was enough to make me question whether I was making the right choice.
We talked about it more than once. Painful, honest conversations. I felt guilty that I didn’t feel the way I thought I should. There wasn’t anyone else — I couldn’t imagine there being anyone else — but the only thing I could feel was fear. Was it right to marry someone, feeling like this? He asked if I wanted to reconsider. He wanted to marry me but he wanted me to be happy. He never pushed or even hinted at pressuring me with his own emotions, even though I knew he was hurting. I decided I wanted to be with him with or without the fluttery feelings. The thought of not being married to him was a worse alternative. If he would stick with me, I would stick with him. But I was scared. I was scared of feeling this way for the rest of our life together. Always questioning my decision. Wondering if our love was real, or just an attempt to prolong a crush that was past its expiration date. Some days were better than others, but I didn’t get much sleep that year.
October 25, 2014. Our wedding day. I took a deep breath, walked down the aisle, and promised.
I felt like the weight of the world had been lifted from my shoulders. It was like being lost in a cave and finally, unexpectedly finding the way out— blinking in the sudden light, remembering what it’s like to be warm in the sun again. Our honeymoon — 3 days on the soggy Oregon coast in the middle of a frigid fall — was sublime. We found each other again, and in greater depths than ever before. The friendship and the romance finally came into focus together, and things became clear and bright. It was one of those times that you treasure up and put away carefully — an almost perfect memory, probably as close as any of us get.
Married life turned out to be better than I had imagined or been led to expect. There were ups and downs, but the anxiety that I had felt leading up to our marriage has never yet returned. I have been thankful so many times that I decided to turn towards him rather than turn away. I could have done either. I could have ended things early on. There would have been nothing wrong in that. But I made a choice — a choice that I would make all over again and with much less anxiety if I could go back with all the advantages of hindsight.
From what I’ve heard, these times come for all of us — times of not feeling the feels. The first time is probably the hardest. No matter who tells you that you’ll get through it, you don’t know that the first time. If it hadn’t come then, it probably would have come at some point early on in our marriage — the sickening thud of coming down from the emotional high of love. It just so happened that for me, it happened right at the time that most people expect to feel most in love.
I wouldn’t know what to say to someone who was going through what I was going through emotionally, while hovering on the brink of marriage. I would never presume to guarantee the same outcome to another person. This is not a story of should or shouldn’ts — it’s just what happened.
A nightmare that could have been, but wasn’t; a happily ever after that might not have been, but is.
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