I love being married, (I even like it), even though I fully understand that the wholeness of the "marriage" reality has yet to settle on us. I have been married for a month; been living in this couch-less existence for a month, and yet it has yet to feel like my real life.

I was doing some reflecting the other day (as I am too often prone to do) and I realized I handle large moments in my life poorly.  Daily mundane happenings I can strap to my belt, cock a smile and make some happy remark about, but big moments....the ones that culture, time and TLC movies have preordained as "the most important day(s) of your life".... those, I am not so graceful with.

I did not go to prom. I have never for a moment regretted this decision. This was not a post-modern feminist stand against the archaic ritual of actualizing your pubescent sexuality, nor was it a social stance against passive aggressive social placement in public schools. I simply did not feel like it, and I feel quite confident that had I gone, I would have experienced the same odd depression and anxiety that afflicts me on most "large" event days.

This happens when we expect life to be something. Not just expect it like, oh I think my prom/wedding/ baby/whatever will be like ______, but when nothing else will suit us, *and* (key point), we expect it to make us happier than any other moment. 

It is because of this, that I, (a planner by nature) have found the best moments, or the most enjoyable ones, were on day that Warner Bros Studios have yet to make a movie about starring Zac Efron. They are simple everyday truths that I live when I am having a sword fight with Paolo in Micheal's with foam swords but we leave without buying anything(cus we wanted quesedillas instead), or when I am forced into something outside my comfort zone.

I suppose the reason I have been doing all this thinking, is because so much of what makes people "happy" is what they think will make them happy. But what if you broke out of the box and decided to be happy any way? 

When I first met Paolo, I was secretly a little mad for him but he didn't fit any of my "criteria" that I had set for myself. This criteria was the list of things a man had to be in order for me to be..happy...impressive....a good-on-paper-half-of-a-couple.  Therefore, even though I never wanted to spend my time elsewhere, and wanted him every moment, I never considered him as a candidate for a serious boyfriend.

I remember one such moment during a snow storm. It had snowed nearly three feet and I trudged out to the parking lot all the way across campus and began digging the snow off my car with an old binder so I could drive to his house (with no lights because I forgot to dust them off until I got there). I remember thinking, "What am I doing? What is this compulsion? What am I fighting for?"

It wasn't until someone from my past came back my need for Paolo hit me. He was a "criteria" person...good on paper, and I had my shot at The List. The Half Of the Couple. And there was nothing I wanted less.

This is a lesson I have to keep learning. And learning; that what we thought we wanted could be standing in the way of our happiness. When I first became Paolo's girlfriend, it freaked me the efffff out and it took me two months to tell Grace. GRACE, of all people! Now being a wife, I am half delirious with happiness and half freaked the eff out again. 

But when I think of spending every day with Paolo, to have him when I am 45 to uplift me (he should have a PhD in Uplifting People) and do the goofy things, and fix a shelf, I am incredibly happy. Still, the "bride" title, the "my husband the other day said..." sentence is still taking its time to adjust itself inside my vocabulary.

But it'll get there, in the every day moments. Because *that* is where life lives.