You know the saying, “be careful what you wish for?” Well, I’m here to testify that it’s true! Guys, Brian (the “Shelver”) was a weird boyfriend, but as a fiance he is beginning to really worry me.
In many ways, the past year has gone by as if it were a dream! Brian and I have been engaged — really engaged, thank you very much 
— for three months now, and it’s been pretty great. You may remember my previous confusion over whether Brian had proposed or not…. well, he hadn’t. I didn’t know for sure one way or another for weeks until one day we were watching Law and Order, and it was a rerun with Angie Harmon, and I talked about how she got married to that football player, and then there was a commercial for the Jewelry Exchange in Paramus, and I said we should go out there and look. And Brian gave me this look, like, “what planet are YOU from??” and my faux-engagement just kind of shriveled up right then and there.
So, we weren’t engaged, but we did date pretty steadily for about eight months, and then one day he proposed! It was pretty romantic, even for a New York proposal. It wasn’t at the top of the Empire State Building or anything, but it was in the jazz hall of the new mall at the bottom of the new Time Warner building, and you could look out at Columbus Circle and everything. I wasn’t really expecting it, and he didn’t have a ring at the time, but we were sitting there waiting for Branford Marsalis and Brian got this funny look on his face, and then just blurted, “Iloveyoudoyouwantto marryme!” I laughed, and of course said yes. A July proposal! I couldn’t wait to tell my parents and of course my old roommate Melanie, who is now in the Union Square ward with her husband (and I think she’s pregnant, but she hasn’t told anyone yet).
So all was a bowl of cherries, until about mid-September. I was sitting in Brian’s bedroom while he made dinner in the other room. Here is the part where you roll your eyes in disbelief: I saw something under his mattress. Just the corner of a page, poking out. And I know I had no business rooting around in there, but I couldn’t resist. You guessed it: pornos. Brian had 3 or 4 nudie magazines under his bed: a Maxim, a Playboy, and a couple I’d never heard of and that, quite frankly, weren’t normal.
Look, I’m not naive. I know that guys have needs, and that any single guy over the age of 25 probably looks at pornography once in a while. But that doesn’t help me feel better about it. I feel like now I’m being held up to some weird standard. Worse yet, it cements my earlier suspicions that Brian has issues.
A part of me feels trapped. I’m not getting any younger, and Brian is the best prospect I have of getting married and having children. But I don’t want to marry into nothing but problems. I don’t think I have it in me to call off the engagement (not that we have a wedding date set anyways) and start all over again, not in New York. It’s just too hard.
When I first started blogging over a year and a half ago, I never thought I’d be in the position that I’m in. In a way you could say that I have everything I want: a fiance, a job, a calling… the whole package. But sometimes I feel even emptier than when I tried speed dating that one time. All these things I have, and I don’t think I’m any closer to understanding where I’m going or what I’m about. Does it ever get any easier?