“You know you don’t have to do this right?” my friend Kim said, appearing by my side.

My white satin gown clung to my body in the July heat. I let out a deep breath as I looked out the window of the bridal suite, taking in the scene outside. A hundred or so white chairs faced a pergola decorated with flowers. Wedding guests were milling about.

This was the first time it registered with me that this was my wedding day.

“If I don’t do it now, I’ll never do it,” I said. Kim squeezed my arm in reply.

My fiancé and I had only known each other a year. This irrational fear started budding about six months into our relationship. He was seriously considering buying a home and flipping it. Simultaneously, I was finishing up my master’s degree and changing jobs.

I was worried all this change would upend our relationship, which felt fragile. I was so busy with school and he was working countless hours to save up for a house that we only saw each other once a week. When we did spend time together, we didn’t do much talking, being young twentysomethings.

After his offer was accepted on the house, I was relieved when he presented me with a key. This relief was short lived. Having never lived alone before, he told me “I’d like someone to come home to…an empty house feels weird to me.”

Shouldn’t we want to come home specifically to each other, not just the comfort of having someone here? I asked myself. I never dared to ask the question out loud because then I would have an answer—and it might not be one I wanted.

When he proposed a few short weeks later, alarm bells rang loudly through my mind. I ignored them, despite feeling this was all happening too fast.

It was a mix of fear and insecurity that led me down the aisle. At barely 23 years old, I convinced myself if I waited any longer my future husband might spontaneously fall out of love with me. Or maybe I was worried I would slowly recognize what I had been feeling all along wasn’t really love in the first place. Regardless, my limited understanding of love at the time was that it was fleeting, something to be captured or it might slip away.

We went on to flip homes together and did well as business partners. We were rarely home at the same time. We didn’t discuss much of importance. Our marriage was a numbers game, and as long as we were making money, we were doing well.

Six years later, our son was born. Something about becoming a mom changed me. I softened in a way. I was in love for the very first time in my life and it wasn’t a spontaneous feeling. While love between a parent and child is a different type of love, it opened me up to feelings I hadn’t experienced before.

It took about a year into raising our son together for us to see the glaringly obvious cracks in the foundation of our relationship. Our marriage was well-intentioned, but we were not two people who knew how to love one another, and we certainly were not in love.

We divorced when our son was a year old. We had both grown and changed as separate people, who never formed a solid partnership. There was no “finding our way back” because there had never been a starting point for us to begin with.

This is not to say I wouldn’t repeat the same pattern again. In fact, I did. That’s what happens when we don’t address the patterns of behavior within ourselves. Since we truly only have control over our own thoughts and responses to situations, it’s up to us to grow, heal, and change the way we interact with others and the world around us.

When presented with triggers, like major life changes, it’s normal for us to recall old patterns of behavior, even if they don’t serve us, since that’s what our brains default to during times of stress. For me, when I was presented with a mountain of change and a relationship I was never fully certain or secure about in the first place, I reverted. Old fears resurfaced, igniting the panic that I had to act “now or never” because feelings may change.

The truth is feelings can and do change. Real love is different though. And while I am no expert on love, I’m willing to learn. One thing I can say with certainty is that we can’t hurry love—it takes time, patience, and a willingness from both parties to be vulnerable with one another.

Love is the foundation of any good relationship, whether it’s a friendship, romantic partnership, or any of the gray areas that we experience in life in between. I’m also a believer that we should allow ourselves to fall in love when the opportunity presents itself, because it happens so rarely.

Though, I suspect now that love is not a deep dive all at once, but rather a slow burn.

~