This year has been a very good one for my sister and brother. Both became engaged to their middle school sweethearts after long relationships and a couple of kids. My sister and her partner have been together ten years. When they met, he was my friend and he took an instant liking to her and she didn't wanna give him the time of day. It was only after about a month or so that she agreed to go out with him and they've been joined at the hip every since. They had my beautiful niece when they were 19 and then four years later, in the midst of all the drama with my accident and deaths and all that, they had a son. They never talked about getting married just because they had kids. His parents had done that and it was an ill-fated union from the start and it still haunts him today in some ways. Finally, in August of this year, he proposed on the exact day, to the exact hour, of their first date. (He was gonna do the day they met, but then remembered that day did not go well). They're still very much on the fence about actually getting married but, for now, the engagement seems to be working well for them.
My little brother and his..I guess, now it would be wife, met when they were 12. We used to do this after-care program thing at our Catholic school while my mom was at work, but my brother rarely had to go since he had baseball practice everyday. One day it got rained out and he had to come downstairs with the rest of us and he met one of my friends from the program and it was the total 'love at first sight' meeting, (if you believe in all that like they do, I don't). They've rarely spent more days apart than they absolutely have to since and they have a 5-year-old little boy together. Their first child was also unexpected and they were young (kinda runs in the family), but they didn't freak out and go get hitched, they knew they weren't ready. Back in May, they became engaged. And on Saturday they finally did seal the deal after about thirteen years, most of them as a couple. I was best man at the wedding and it felt...weird. Somehow it's been harder to let go, for lack of a better word, of my sister as she's grown up. We're twins, so we've always been very close, but I think I learned to kinda let go a little when they had their daughter. But my brother has always been my little brother, you know? He's always been one of the babies to me because he's the third youngest out of all of us kids. But the last few years, he's gone through some subtle but, in the end, dramatic changes as a person and I could not be more proud of who he is now.
Obviously, you think when you're growing up that things are gonna happen in a specific order when you get to be adults. I was born second, so I'll get to do everything second, he'll be third and my sister will be first. She was first, to her credit. lol, I'm the one that messed up all the order. But I'm not freaking out about it. Honestly, even if I did want to get married, I wouldn't do it until I was around 30 or so. Not because of the statistics or anything. But because I'd really want to be sure about the person. But now, despite the year full or weddings, I'm even more sure I don't want to go down that route. If I'm with someone whom I love (who may or may not be in my life right now) and she loves me and we work everything out that comes our way and we're both happy, then why should we change anything just because society says you have to be married? Sure, it adds years to your life, supposedly. But when it's your time, it's your time folks. I don't see anything wrong with being committed to one another and being committed to your family and life together but not being married. All of this comes up because, inevitably, I had to deal with the marriage questions from extended family at the wedding. And it was especially odd, given the weird situation in which I find myself. Most of my close family knows that I have no intentions of getting hitched in this lifetime, but the extended doesn't really need to know right now. So they ask all of the 'when's your turn?', and 'when are you gonna marry the mother of your child?' questions every chance they get. And now I can just ignore it. It doesn't make me feel bad or any less to go to these family functions and hear the questions. It used to. But not anymore. That's some progress, huh?
