I Wonder What Life Would Be Like If I Were Mrs. A.?

There used to be days when I would dream of nothing but becoming Mrs. A. Mr. A. was the boy I dated from my sophomore year of college until the middle of my senior year of college. He was a star baseball and football player and he was built like a Mack truck. I have no recollection of how I met him or what it was about him that made me fall for him, but I do know that our relationship was one of those relationships. In the beginning, we were giddy with being "in lurve" and getting to know each other. After about a year, things started to head south. Mr. A. was a year ahead of me in school and about mid-way through his senior year, he had what I call the "I'm graduating from college and I'm freaking out" experience. He was panicked about working in the real world (if he didn't get drafted by a pro team) and about what it meant for our relationship. Ultimately, he dumped me the spring of his senior year and I had to watch him hook up with random girls until the school year ended. Bru-tal. We did the whole get back together, break up, get back together, break up thing for the entire summer and the first semester of my senior year. Finally, I told him to get lost and that if he ever called me again, he would be parting with the parts of him that make him a boy. I didn't hear from him again. Ever.

What's funny about this whole thing is that I know exactly where I would be if I were Mrs. A. I'd be living in northern Indiana and I would be the wife of a teacher/football coach. I would have at least two children and I would be raising them mostly by myself. Mr. A. would be off coaching quite often and then would be doing schoolwork at home most evenings. I would be expected to have dinner on the table every night and I would be expected to spend time with my in-laws who would probably live next door. We'd have a smallish home, I'd have small town friends, and I wouldn't get to leave town very often.

In short, I'd be miserable. In the paragraph above, I've basically outlined a life of misery for me and a life that is full of compromising myself for someone else. Mr. A. was not open to even discussing living somewhere other than Indiana and he was not willing to see that my career might be just as important as his. Even after all of the compromising I would have done, I would still spend most of my time alone and I would have several children to tend to as well. And I would have been talked into having those kids. It would not have been the life I truly wanted.

Truthfully, Mr. A. really is a pretty decent guy. I can't fault him for knowing exactly what he wanted and for going after it. He was also always honest about what he wanted. And so was I. When he did his whole senior year freakout thing, he was honest about that too. Looking back, he was a fun guy to have in my life for a while. We laughed a lot and had quite a bit in common. But I do know that we would never have ended up together. Even if he had proposed and I had been dumb enough to accept, we would never have walked down the aisle. Ultimately, it would have compromised us both and we would have been miserable. I think we saved ourselves quite a bit of heartache by figuring things out sooner rather than later.

And Mr. A. now? He's married to an elementary school teacher and has at least one child that I know of. I'm sure he's living the life of his dreams and I couldn't be happier for him. I'm happy for the times we shared, but I'm happier without him now. And I think my husband would agree.

*I feel that it is worth mentioning that like MSO Rin, I really wanted a candlelight. Desperately. Mr. A. had all the chances in the world to lavaliere me, pin me, etc. and he never did. It was a big bone of contention in our relationship for a while and, looking back, I realized that in that his resisting these things so much, it was clear he wasn't in this thing for the long haul.