Maybe Vegas?

1999

We had a friend who was plan­ning to get mar­ried in Vegas.  We were try­ing to fig­ure out a way to go when the wed­ding came around.   I mean it was VEGAS BABY!!  While talk­ing about going Mike said, straight faced & with all seri­ous­ness, “Why not get mar­ried while we’re there? We’ll elope.”

“Whaaaaaaattttt?????”

My eyes prob­a­bly filled the entire top por­tion of my head while my gap­ing mouth swal­lowed the rest of me when say­ing that one word.  He had men­tioned mar­riage before, when we were first dat­ing.  In fact, it was men­tioned when we *almost* broke-up.  Later when we went on our first vaca­tion together it came up again.  But those times it was more “One day we might get mar­ried”  NOT “Hey you wanna?”

He looked back at me smiled & said “Yea, why not?  I mean we’re going to get mar­ried some day anyway.”

“We are?”

“Aren’t we?”

“Well, I don’t know.  You’ve never asked me.  And by ask I mean some­thing more than, hey we are going to Vegas any­way so why not?”

We talked for a lit­tle bit longer.  This was the first real con­ver­sa­tion about get­ting mar­ried.   A real lay it on the line, what are we doing in this rela­tion­ship talk.  A where are we going? kind of talk, starts of inno­cent enough but then BAM.

I felt a lit­tle sea sick and unbe­liev­ably giddy at the same time. Get­ting mar­ried is, like, a BIG FREAKIN’ DEAL.  Mar­riage is for LIFE.  I mean I wanted to be with him for life, I didn’t doubt that.  But had seri­ous freak out issues & fear over whether or not I could make a mar­riage work. What if he woke up one day & real­ized he hated me?  Or I hated him?  I was a dis­as­ter, the fear over “what if” made me ter­ri­fied.  I had seen a lot of peo­ple who seemed to be in love, only to walk away.  But the excite­ment over the idea of know­ing we’d be say­ing to the world that we were in this FOR LIFE, that I’d be HIS wife.  I got giddy over the idea of our teeth sit­ting on the night stand side by side one day years from now. Real love not some­thing that was just wild hor­mones run amok.

Of course I would have mar­ried him right then & there sit­ting on the big red couch.  Prob­a­bly with the creepy neigh­bor tak­ing long range pho­tos of our ceremony.

How­ever, it turns out money for a flight & the abil­ity to get time off work wasn’t in our favor. We didn’t get mar­ried then. Prob­a­bly sav­ing our moth­ers joint freak­ing out over their kids decid­ing to first shack up, then run off to Vegas & not even call first.

But the seeds were there. We had talked.  No offi­cial engage­ment but now it was out in the open.  We both were in this thing for life.

[this is part of my  “how I met your father” series]

Tagged as: dating, how i met your father, living together, love, love at first sight, Marriage, our story, the story of us