Day 13 NaBloPoMo

Today's NaBloPoMo prompt:  What is the bravest thing you've ever done?

I believe I have mentioned here before that I was engaged to someone other than MM before MM and I met.  My ex-fiance "L" and I were co-workers and had many mutual friends.  We had been a couple for over two years, living together for seventeen months and engaged for over eight months when we broke up thirteen days before our wedding.

Yes, I broke up with my fiance less than two weeks before our wedding. . . the day after my bridal shower, as a matter of fact.  I then had to call all of my friends and family members to tell them that the wedding was off.  (Just the acceptances on our guest list made up about sixty people, most of whom were "my" guests.)  Not a fun experience or one I'd particularly like to repeat.

I have had quite a few people tell me since the break-up that they thought I was brave for calling the wedding off.  Several women have told me that they had similar doubts before walking down the aisle but went ahead anyway. . . only to end up divorced later on.

At the time, I just knew that I had reached the end of my rope with a specific issue in our relationship, and I had decided that I would rather live the rest of my life alone than be married to L and to that issue.  I did truly believe then that by ending my relationship with L, it was probable that I would never marry while I was still young enough to have children of my own, and perhaps not at all.  (I was 36 at that time, and my relationship with L had been the first serious one I'd had in over five years.)

I broke up with L anyway.

Of course, at the time, I had no way of knowing that less than six months after our break-up, I would meet MM and would end up marrying him and having children with him.  I have often thought about the fact that I came so close to marrying someone with whom I was not entirely happy, and about how I never would've met MM at all if I had gone through with my wedding to L.  I've thought about how, as awful as it was going through infertility with MM during the first few years of our marriage, how much worse that experience would have been with L as my husband instead of MM.  ('Cause let's face it: my egg quality wouldn't have been appreciably better if I'd started trying six months sooner, which is the timeframe L and I had discussed.)

I didn't think of breaking up with L as a brave thing at the time--in fact, although it was hard, I know that it was the absolute right decision for me--but in retrospect, I think it was a brave thing.  The easier thing would've been to go ahead and marry L, despite my reservations.


I am grateful that I had the guts to make the hard decision to end my relationship with L, even at the eleventh hour, because if I hadn't, I wouldn't have my current life.  I wouldn't have moved back to Phoenix, wouldn't have met MM, and wouldn't have had AJ and MJ.