Where Would You Be?

I got this book for Christmas and knew it would be a great source of blog fodder. See, I figured I'd just expand on the prompts when I needed a quick blog post.

I finally got around to writing in it, and here's the prompt I chose to work with:

Where would you be now if you had married your first love?

I’d be living in El Reno.
I’d be in denial.
And I sure wouldn’t be in love.

My first love swept into my tiny hometown of Tipton, Oklahoma, from the big city—that’s right, y'all: OKC.

He represented my need to feel loved, my craving for adventure (apparently I thought having a mysterious out-of-town boyfriend was adventurous), and the independence my seventeen-year-old self thought I wanted.

We started dating during my senior year of high school. He took me on dates to Long John Silver’s (Altus, OK, has limited dining opportunities and he had limited knowledge of what constitutes a date), he took me to my first and only prom, and somewhere along the way he took away my self-esteem and my understanding of what true love should be.

Because in spite of the fact that he controlled who I talked to, what I wore (no skirts—that meant I was trying to impress guys), and was irrationally jealous (the reason I wasn’t on Facebook until 2010), I still thought I was in love with him…and that he was in love with me.

Despite the warning signs, we remained a couple and moved in together after I graduated from college. I thought that would solve everything. He would see that I wasn’t interested in other guys. He would appreciate me, because I would cook dinner every night and do his laundry every weekend. He would get down on one knee and finally ask me to be his wife (this was four years into the relationship).

None of those things happened.

He didn’t believe I wasn’t interested in other guys because who knew who I was talking to at work, at the grocery store, and when I went back to Tipton to visit my mom.

He didn’t appreciate my meal making and clothes washing. He expected it.

And he didn’t ask me to marry him. Quite the opposite. He told me he never wanted to get married or start a family.

So we finally called it quits, after five years (which was five years too late).

I didn’t dramatically swear off men forever, as my mom was afraid would happen. Instead I came up with specific criteria Mr. Right had to have.

And it sounded a lot like Bruno Mars's When I Was Your Man:

"I should have bought you flowers and held your hand
Should have gave you all my hours when I had the chance
Take you to every party cause all you wanted to do was dance."

And guess what? Somehow I found Mr. Right.

And because I did, I know where I’ll be when I marry my true love:

I’ll be living in (or around) Oklahoma City.
I’ll be in a constant state of happiness, because making me happy seems to be Randel’s goal in life. Seriously, he should get paid for it.
And I for sure will be in love.