At last
I went to Joe’s wedding last night. It was great to see and catch up with his family again and I hope that the wedding video I shot comes out okay. I’m always worried about audio quality, but it was mostly out of my control and what I have seems to be mostly okay. I’m excited to see what I can string together, even if I’m dreading actually doing all the work of editing it. It’s good to get an idea of what someone would need to pay me to be able to do it.
The whole day was beautiful. I find it funny how nice of a wedding Joe had. I’m not sure how that sounds (or how it’s supposed to sound?). But it was just out of character nice with a good attention to detail. I think it probably shows how much he loves Anna and that she’ll compliment him nicely by helping him pay attention to those details.
I feel like this is the first real relationship he’s had with a Catholic whose faith rivals his own. He dated a few bad Catholics, he helped me convert (into a bad Catholic), and he converted a good Christian into a Catholic in Jacquelyn, but I can tell that Anna’s whole family background in so deeply rooted in Catholicism, as is his, and I think that will be good for him.
His wedding toast (12.5 minutes!) made it clear how truly he feels called to be her husband. It reminded me that one of the things I know to be most true about him is that when he feels discord about a decision in his heart, he is basically insufferable. I hope that he remains free of doubt about her. Seems like she deserves that.
Because of his wedding and my realizations about the night before I met him, I’ve been thinking a fair amount about our relationship. It really required so much work on my part to recover from it. He was often cruel and manipulative. In my rereading of my journals, I recently reread a chat I had with his ex-girlfriend when I was still with Steve but they were no longer together. It made me realize that a lot of those things that happened at the end of our relationship had also happened at the end of theirs – misleading people or misconstruing their statements in a way they would not have agreed to and trying to isolate her the way he did me.
Twelve years is a long time, and, surely he has matured. But how much is our twenty-one-year-old-self an indicator of who we will become?
I feel like the average reader would find it odd that I’m still friends with him, but I think that once someone is meaningful to me, I’ll continue to have concern for them as we age. I speculate that our friendship is my way of controlling the narrative of our relationship, or was at one time. I will not give someone the satisfaction of seeing me too weak to speak to them. I’ll admit that it’s a weird character trait, but I feel like it paid off this weekend.
I joked when he told me that he was going to seminary that I always knew he’d be a bad husband, but last night, I could see how he could be good to Anna. And I hope that for them both.
And finally – yikes, not writing longform journals for years and years has meant that I’m not the best writer in this form. Hopefully, my voice will be refined in the habit of writing more regularly.