Wipe Your Feet

I hope I don’t end up on STFU Marrieds for this. That’s what you think when you’ve seen a lot of your friends get married and engaged and done a little bit of eye-rolling here and there. I promise not to bombard you with any more on the topic; I promise. I almost didn’t post this here because I had a six-month period where hearing about other people’s engagements made me want to hurl for reasons I didn’t even understand, but which were probably boring so I didn’t even try to figure them out (passage of time? Prop 8? Growing up? Existentialism? Individualism? Social constructs?).

However, and this is the last you’ll hear of it, I got engaged on Sunday. To Peter, not to Sadie. I would get engaged to Sadie too, if she could ask and it would mean that she would get health insurance, but I feel like I’m better off being engaged to Peter, because he’s a human being. We’ve lived together, in sin (sorry grandparents!), for four years, so it’s nice to know that almost nothing will change; I wouldn’t want it to, because Peter is the only person I could ever live with and not want to kill. I see his socks on the floor and I don’t kill him. He sees a four foot stack of dishes in the sink and doesn’t kill me; in fact, he washes the dishes. My parents celebrated their 35th wedding anniversary on Monday, and Peter’s celebrated their ?th (37th? 38th?) on the same day; I have watched my parents in awe all of these years wondering how it’s possible to spend so much time with another human being and still like them. My mother won’t let my father speak to her before a certain time of morning (I think it’s like 7 AM; they wake up around the time I go to sleep so it’s a solid few hours of silent coffee-drinking), but as soon as she lets him talk, she will laugh at his jokes for hours. I believe that my dad wakes up and spends his no-talking-time thinking of funny things to say so that their first interactions will be spent in stitches. I used to think that my parents had probably sold their souls at some point in order to buy this kind of rapport. It would have been worth it, because what else are you saving your soul for?

I met Peter at a party at my first-ever-serious-boyfriend’s house (we’d been broken up for about six years at this point, so, as Mary would say, “No more drama”). I saw him walk in with some of my friends from high school, with whom he’d gone to college. I stared at him like a creep for a few hours, and then he magically appeared next to me and dipped me. You know, the dip. Then he left and I thought I’d never see him again. The next night, he was at a different party, and wouldn’t you know I happened to be there with Molly Lambert; we argued about whether pork was a white meat (it’s not, I was wrong, I still shudder at being wrong in this instance as with all others) and then Peter and his friend invited Molly and me on a double date to see Annie Hall at the cemetery.

The date didn’t go so well. At all. I told Peter he didn’t need to walk me to my car, and as he cavalierly sipped some Smart Water I hollered to enjoy his electrolytes, went home, and paced around wondering what had gone wrong. Everything Peter had said as a joke I had assumed was serious, everything Peter had said that was serious, I had thought was a joke. In retrospect, I think that I had assumed that the whole date was a joke, because I was not yet of the opinion that I was freaking awesome and I’ve seen a lot of movies like Dogfight. Anyway, months passed, we dated other people, we didn’t see each other except tense run-ins at parties during which I always noted that I still felt he was the dreamiest boy I’d ever seen and then would abruptly leave because I remembered snickering at all of his serious remarks and interrogating him about his jokes and felt embarrassed. That January, at the Three Clubs in Hollywood, I was trying to find a party. I texted Peter, “Where the party at?” He arrived at the Three Clubs, drove me home, and beat me mercilessly at Scrabble. Everything he said that was a joke made me laugh. Everything he said that was not a joke, I knew was not a joke. Three months later we moved in together. I probably sold my soul for it. I wasn’t saving it for anything else, anyway.