All We Need Is Love

As a self-proclaimed cynic, I’ve always thought this song was a crock of sh%t. I’ll call myself a former hopeless romantic, violently turned cynic. That’s better. Basically even worse than the born-cynic, it’s like the ex-smoker theory. No one is more offended by smoke. To put it mildly, no one is more offended by love than a former hopeless romantic whose flame was either brutally extinguished by the universe or slowly suffocated via half-hearted hopes and lackluster promises, or both.

When THIS whirlwind romance began, I began kicking and screaming. We’ve covered the “Jess’s Hot Lava” in a previous blog, you’ll have to go back to get the full story. Plus it’s worth the read. Just saying.

I did not want to fall in love. I wanted a damn dinner partner. That’s what I had wanted for as long as I could remember. Someone to spend an adult Saturday night with. A good bottle of wine, fantastic conversation, mingling, maybe even a little dancing; a man I could pluck a topic out of the universe or more realistically, Elite Daily, or google, and verbally spar. Simple enough, right?

You’d be surprised. Those men are few and far between.

Fast-forward to my having found the previous aforementioned man and doing my best to deny (hence the cynicism) that he existed. Guess what? He prevailed. His description….”I just kept putting my helmet on every day,” pretty much sums up our early courtship. The Helmet Mindset did amazing things, my ever-present scowl softened, people even started coming up to me and saying I looked different. My father in particular said, “Jess, I know you’re a real hard-ass, but you just look fragile and not in a bad way.”

The weeks leading up to the wedding have been a vortex of planning, details, and execution. Friends and family keep asking us if we have cold feet, it has been an easy, quick & clipped, “no.” There was no time to even consider nerves. Or maybe better said this way….you never really know when that sort of thing is going to creep up and slap you in the face. I can’t speak for my fiancé, but for me, I was having lunch with a good friend at The Winds, sipping daytime Chardonnay and indulging in pasta for the final time before the Big Day when the face slap reared its ugly head.  

The Winds patio is as close as I’ll get to my days in Europe while sitting in Southwest Ohio. It is typically a wonderful sensory overload of indulgences, ivy covered outdoor walls, the hum of conversation and laughter, food that awakens the palette in a different way with each visit. I digress...... Last Weds I was flooded with a sense of panic that lasted a full 72hrs. I hate to fail. I really hadn’t spent a whole lot of time lamenting over my previous attempt at marriage. I hadn’t sat around and considered what, if anything, I could’ve done differently.

 The 72hrs of panic was chock-full of a lot of finger pointing in my own direction and being gripped with a sense of fear that it had been ALL my fault and what if I was destined to F it all up again. What I did know was the following:

1. I would follow this man off the side of a cliff.

2. There is absolutely nowhere else I would rather be. We could be cleaning gutters on a Saturday or flying off to Cali. I still want to be by his side.

3. I can tell him anything. He knows it ALL. I’ve shared the good the bad and the ugly with him.

SO in reference to number 3…..I puked it all out. My fears, my maxed out state of self-loathing. He laughed and laughed and laughed. It was like Fantasy Football Draft Day all over again. Lots of me enduring laughter directed AT ME. I’m fully convinced that he is thoroughly entertained by me and that may be, in part, the reason he is making this commitment. (Full on face palm).

 Following an actual discussion, where it was determined that if anything, we’ve built this “vacuum cleaner” (what we call our relationship) with the best of parts, and we’ve gone back to engineering multiple times to work out the kinks. We definitely know what doesn’t work, and what we both know we should never do. Deal Breakers for those of you current on therapy lingo. Full commitment to wake up each and every day and ask ourselves, how can I make this day better for my partner? Will take us through the remainder of our years.

 Yesterday, one of my favorite friends, posed the infamous, all important question…”are you nervous?” It was with a clean, pure, & virtuous heart that my answer was an absolute “no, maybe that I’m going to bomb my vows, but that’s it.”

This softer, more kind, less ready to burn the whole world down woman I’ve become over the last two years is ready to commit, this time for keeps. I’m waking up on Wedding Eve with a clean soul, a happy heart overflowing with love and a to-do list a mile long.

So yes. All I need is Love.