Thursday, September 14, 2006

nice day to start again

Attending to a wedding when you have a raging case of PMS can be pretty rough. There's the bloating, which makes you feel less than sexy in that sexy black dress and convinced you look hideous no matter how much your boyfriend reassures you to the contrary. There are the cravings, which leaves no waiter with a hors d'oeuvres tray in a five foot radius safe. There's also the hair-trigger emotions and moodiness of nuclear proportions. Amazingly, I only cried briefly at Clarissa's wedding, once when she walked down the aisle and once when I saw her privately after the ceremony and she gave me a bouquet she had specially made for me (in leiu of tossing hers).

The weather and location (a small castle-like mansion surrounded by lush greenery) were lovely and the couple couldn't be more perfectly suited to each other. However, there was something sad about the day.

For the record, I am not one of those women who goes to weddings and is all, "when is it going to be my turn to get married?" So I wasn't looking over at BF David with a diamond-ring-hungry gleam in my eye. The melancholy stemmed more from the feeling that I truly drifted apart from most of my college friends (with one or two exceptions, other than the bride, of course). These were people I used to frequently run into on the street or in shops when I was in college, people I went clubbing with and always had something to talk about at parties and other gatherings. Yet last weekend, I struggled to come up with any bits of conversation. I used to drink (and, on very rare ocassions, do drugs) with some of these people, stay up all hours talking to them, and here I was, barely being able to scrape together a few sentences. How do you cover such a big time gap and discuss the last five or more years in a few minutes? I couldn't do it, it felt too phoney and awkward. Most of the conversational chemistry I had with this people had dissipated, though I still made an effort. I think it comes down to the fact that we are all at such different places in our lives and I have less in common with the others than I used to, because I'm not married nor do I have a kid or own a home or go rock climbing or joined Weight Watchers or any of the other popular trends among the group. Also, since I never kept in touch with most of them, I haven't seen the evolution of these things, so talking to Aunty Mom, who is a single parent who I have kept in touch with, was different than talking to a couple I haven't seen in years who now have a small child.

However, It wasn't just my flawed social abilities. I think the general atmosphere of the wedding was happy though subdued. People seemed to prefer gathering in small clusters and talking amongst themselves. Which was better than having some crazy uncle try to drag you out on the dance floor to do the electric slide or cringing through another rendition of "Lady in Red."

After the wedding, there was a party at hotel suite, though BF David and I did not attend that one. We had an early start back to New York the next day and I was all tapped out as far as socializing went. Instead, we went back to the hotel (which was rather swanky, as was our room, which was a suite!), had dinner in the hotel's restaurant, and went to our room where we laughed our asses off watching a comedy special on HBO. Despite the awkwardness and my out of control hormones, it was a relaxing and pleasant weekend.

As I write this, Clarissa is on her honeymoon. I wish her and her husband a long and happy life together.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

I know exactly what you're talking about. I've completely drifted apart from my married friends, except for one or two. The ones I hung with in my late 20's are all now married with kids and our lives are just vastly different. But I think there's a part of me that feels uncomfortable around them which has caused me to detach a bit. Like maybe they secretly think, "Oh, poor thing. She's still single.

Anonymous said...

Most weddings are about 80% too long. Give me a shotgun at City Hall or a Vegas quickie every time. If I can't skip them altogether, I figure I owe it to everyone involved to show up late and leave early.


Silver

Anonymous said...

i don't agree with what sex&moxie said at all in regards to people who are married feeling bad for single people...i mean, maybe i am too new at this, but for me it seemed like a natural progression with my relationship with mr. clarissa but in the past, i've felt bad for people who were married...

i do think our friends have changed a lot, and more than maritial status, i think socio economic status has played a larger part..when we were in college, we worried about school and sex and love and dating and trying to figure it all out. now a lot of our friends are concerned with stocks and mortgages and jobs and things that still do not pertain to people like you (or even me for that matter) since we're just not in that place. in a lot of ways i feel like i still have more in common with my highschool friends, who while i have seen them sparingly over the past 10 years, there is still some sort of ephemeral commonality there that i wasn't expecting.

Dolly said...

Moxie,
I don't have a lot of married friends, but BF David does and he certainly spends less time with them than he used to. And I think the friends I have who are getting married/got married this year would never take a pitying attitude toward me if I was single (which is one reason I hope I don't drift apart from them after the nuptuals).

Silver,
I think it depends on the dynamic and the people. Some weddings can be extremely fun, like the one I crashed with Polly earlier this year. If there's a really upbeat, fun atmosphere, a great time is sure to follow.

Clarissa,
Yeah, I relate better to my poor friends for the most part. But when we were in college that didn't seem to matter so much, because we always had other things to bond over, like music and movies and general discussions of life. And maybe that would still be there if I was living where you live, I don't know. It's not like I could go up to people I haven't seen in years and out of the blue ask them what they've been listening to recently (or maybe I just lack the social savvy, who knows).

Anonymous said...

I don't think married people pity single people at all. The only time I would do that is if one of my single friends was really depressed about being single, and expressed it to me ALOT. In fact, I'll let you in on a little secret: every once in a while, we secretly crave being single for a night, so we could go out, get crazy drunk, make out with someone in the back of a smoky bar, and stumble home- without feeling guilty;) As far as the friend rift goes- that will happen throughout your life, as you reach different phases I'm afraid. I found the biggest change in my friendships began when we each started to "pair up", not really when we got married. I had a great group of single girlfriends in grad school and after college- we traveled alot together on weekends and always had so much fun. One by one, they each aquired a boyfriend, and *poof*, there goes the fun weekends together. In fact, I was lucky if we got together once a month! I think it has alot to do with "partnering" and less to do with marriage. But kids..... that's a WHOLE new area. Now THERE is a rift!