Baggage you can carry

“All future spouses come into marriage with different types and sizes of baggage. Be sure you can carry it and fits under the seat in front of you.” - Tom Pearson - June 7^th, 2001

Marriage

How to choose a spouse? Of all decision made in one’s life a spouse is one of the largest. So how can one be wise choosing a spouse. Many people leave it to chance but who you put yourself around are likely the people you will marry. Some cultures have the parents pick the spouse. However western culture leaves it up to person who is getting married with few or no caveats. When picking a future spouse, it is important to know what their hopes and dreams are and just important to know their baggage that they are carrying. Baggage is the negative things that has happened to one’s lives that you as a spouse will have to help carry for them. None of us escape life without collecting unwanted baggage as we proceed through our trials and tribulations of life. I have my baggage too. From fiancées that told me they no longer wanted me, to a girlfriend whose jealousy chased me out of town. I have journaled my thoughts and feelings about each.

Fiancée

We were high school sweethearts, and this was our first love for both of us as we were experiencing many new things together. Her support and love for me was unwavering throughout our 2.5-year relationship and I for her. After graduating from high school, Alison and I were engaged to be married. She was a senior in high school and I was in my first year of college. Our plan was for me to get a marketable education, get married, and find a good job in in Scottsdale, Arizona, a place where she had lived for a few years with her family when she was younger. I grew to love the stories she would tell me about the colorful plateaus and the beautiful warm sunsets. I was working 30 hours a week in the evenings as a driver for Domino’s Pizza and going to college in the morning every weekday to get my associate degree in electronics engineering technology. I was burning the candle on both ends and seeing her when time allowed. We had a dream, and we were doing our best to make it happen.

The next year she graduated from high school, and we spent a beautiful carefree summer together. Alison was trying to make sense on what she wanted to become after high school besides being my wife. Her father tried to get her into his business in branded clothing sales to retail stores. Alison also didn’t have her driver’s license yet as her parents and I would take her where she wanted to go. She needed to spread her wings and her father knew this. Several months after Alison graduated and at the end of February, she was invited to go to Miami, Florida to visit her very good friend who moved to Florida after graduating a year earlier. Maria was an exchange student from Ecuador who lived with Alison’s family for two years and graduated at the same high school as we did. This break would be the first time we have been apart since we have been dating for more than a couple of days.

Ex-Fiancée

When Alison came back from Florida, she was cold and distant to me. We went to my house to celebrate my birthday a couple of days after she got back home. After dinner we had a private conversation. I asked her why she was so cold to me and what has changed with our relationship. She told me she didn’t want to talk about this during my birthday and can we discuss this another time. I persisted as I felt my world closing in on me. She told me she had been thinking about us in Florida and have decided to break up. I asked, “what happened in Florida”. She said “I had a good time there with Maria and her friends. We went out to party, and we talked.” I asked her more questions, but she gave me vague answers. I realized she didn’t want to discuss what happened in Miami anymore with me. Alison decided there in Florida that she wanted to break up with me. This shook me to the core. I never gave a thought of breaking up with her or even her not wanting me anymore. She was the woman I planned to spend the rest of my life with.

My memory becomes vague right after our breakup with my emotions in shambles. I did continue to work and go to school however now without purpose. The next few weeks and months were some of the worst time of my life emotionally. A couple of weeks after the breakup Alison asked me to come over to her house and pick up her engagement ring and many pictures and love letters we shared. I went over to her house thinking I would be able to at least talk to her and explain how I feel and hopefully she would feel the same. Her mother, Linda met me at the door and told me Alison was not at home and invited me in to talk as she was understanding of my pain. We sat on the couch as her mother gave me a box of the different items that her daughter didn’t want to keep. I couldn’t believe Alison didn’t want them anymore. These were pictures and memories of all our firsts times at the prom, basketball games, our happy times, and some of our dearest memories together. They were love letters that I wrote her about my love and my hopes and dreams for us. I felt like she wanted me to have all the memories of our love and I thought that could only haunt me. I refused the letters and pictures except the for the engagement ring. I took this since it was a symbol of Alison's promise to me, and the practical side of me knew I could at least sell it.

Three months later and in the summer, I was still in emotional trauma. I went to parties with my best friend and kept other friends around, so I wouldn’t have to think about her. On a summer night, I saw Alison at a house party in Richmond a few months after we broke up. She was dating a new guy and seemed they were happy and having fun together. I was devastated. I knew she was dating however I did not want to see it as I was single and still on the recovery. I left the party and was distraught that she was dating another person and having fun and I was not. I realized that my emotional wound was still wide open, and I needed to heal it. I started by dating later that summer however, I could never feel an emotional connection to whomever I dated. At the end of summer, I realized I need to make my own plans to move on and that she was not coming back. After earning my associate degree in Dayton, Ohio in the fall, I decided to pursue a bachelor’s degree in Indianapolis. I didn’t need to get a good paying job yet as I was still single, and I like the thought of moving to Indianapolis 70 miles away as I would have little chance of running into her again.

I was in Indianapolis when I heard from friends she got married. I had already given up that we would ever get back together. The reality struck me that when she broke up with me, she was not just seeking discovery for herself or freedom, she wanted to marry someone, but not me. My heart closed as I felt dejected and thrown away.

Alison called me the next year in the summer of 1984 when I was still in Indianapolis at college. She got my new phone number from my parents. She told me her younger brother Jim who was 16 was involved in a car accident and died. Alison was very distraught on the phone as she told me in detail the full events of the horrible accident. He was driving home at night on a narrow country road and lost control. The car spun and landed in a concrete culvert and threw him into it. It was tragic and I didn’t know what to say to her. She knew that I had a good relationship with her brother and family and asked if I wanted to come to the calling. I said “yes”, as I wanted to see her mother and father who were very kind and in many ways like a father and mother to me. I also wanted to see her sister who was 8 years younger. I wanted to share in the sorrow of our loss. I didn’t want to see Alison as it would be tearing me like opening a wound I have tried to heal over the last year and a half. It was a long drive from Indianapolis to Richmond as I tried to contemplate my thoughts. I arrived at the funeral home about 3 o’clock and walked into the room where her mother and father were standing near the casket. Linda gave me a long hug as I tried to comfort her in the saddest time of her life. Linda and her husband Jim told me their younger daughter was at her grandparents and I should see her before I travel back to Indianapolis. I told them “I will”. After talking to Linda and Jim, I looked across the room and saw Alison with her new husband. I cannot remember talking at all to her at the calling. I wouldn’t know how or what I would say to her or her husband. I wish I could have had more comforting things to say to the family. My mind was blowing up of the death of her brother and other feelings I could not truly understand. I remember going over to her mother’s house a few days or months later. She set up her son’s room as a memorial for him and shared her thoughts with me about him. I hoped that the pain she was feeling would be lessened by my presence.

Move to Shreveport

I didn’t hear anything from Alison until two years later when she called me again out of the blue while I lived in Shreveport, Louisiana at my first job. She had gotten my phone number again from my parents. At this time, I had already graduated with my bachelor’s degree and working at AT&T phone manufacturing factory repairing and proving in new phone testing equipment. She told me that her husband had cheated on her and that she was getting a divorce and realized that she should have never broken up with me and asked if we could start again. This was a shock to me. How can she ask me to come back after all she has done to me and our relationship? How can she even think I would come back? We talked more times on the phone over the next couple of months and I came to Richmond that year for Christmas to visit my family and I also visited her. She told me that I was her true love and that she knew we would be getting back together again. Alison was so confident it would happen, I was not. I didn’t feel the same about her as my heart was closed. At that time, I was dating a woman in Shreveport and even though I knew I didn’t love her, she was a safe bet as she never had my heart in her hands. I liked the validation that Alison gave me that I was always the right person for her however I could not feel the deep love I used to have through the emotional scar that had developed. Living far apart, me in Shreveport and her in Indiana we couldn’t overcome this barrier over the phone with 900 miles between us.

Alison left me on my birthday three years earlier when she went to Florida and decided she didn’t want me anymore. She then married another person nine month after we broke up. I had not loved anyone since. My heart was stiff and unyielding to love. How can I bring back the love I used to have for her living so far apart…her in Indiana and me in Louisiana? I was currently dating someone else at the time whom I didn’t love, however she was more comfortable than dating someone that I once loved. It was safer, and I didn’t have to resolve the feelings I had with Alison. I still had a some love for her however to move it forward into a relationship again seemed remote. I was making my new life in a new job and in a new city. How could I come back to Indiana for her? I have moved on and she was moving back.

My Heavy Baggage

This is the baggage I carried with me for some time. How heavy it would be depended on how and if I lighten the load? Maybe it’s forgiveness, a new love, journaling deep feelings or even a new beginning in a new town with a new job. It took five more years before my heart would flex enough to allow another love to enter it. I think I needed that healing and resting period. I dated in those years allowing some resemblance of love however never truly letting it thrive until I met my wife. I have been on a life adventure with her for over 30 years. She is an explorer like me, and we have seen much of the world together including raising two beautiful children in the Pacific Northwest. She is the one I have chosen to open-up my heart and love again and she is the one who deserves my affections and faithfulness.

Each of us carry baggage when we meet our potential spouse. This baggage can affect the way we interact with each other. We each are carrying baggage of emotional scars that were inflicted by us or someone else. Will I be afraid of giving my full heart to someone, will I be jealous holding on too tight or will I lighten the load?