LOVE STORIES

On Monday, my office had dinner at Gordon Biersch to celebrate my co-worker's upcoming wedding. He's leaving for the Philippines this Friday and he'll be a married man on December 10th. Through the course of the evening, everyone was giving the groom advice, warnings, etc. In addition to their anecdotal words of caution, though, they also provided him with insight to the new life he has to look forward to with his new wife. In between their stories of wedding day mishaps, elopements and such, they somehow found moment after moment to pound the pressure on me as the only one in the office who's never been married and who doesn't have any kids. It's Ken's night to get harrassed, people - LAY OFF ME! Hahaha...I wasn't bothered; a shocking non-reaction actually, because conversations that veer towards love and marriage used to make me feel uncomfortable, inadequate, lacking. But I realized they weren't hinting for me to hurry up and get hitched just to annoy me. They were doing it because they have such unique stories of love to tell, that they wish others could experience the same bliss.

A year ago I probably would've harped on bitterly and defensively (sounding off Betty Friedan's battlecry of feminism: the independent-free-thinking-stop-manipulating-us-women-of-independece) if only to avenge the disquiet the people around me seem to experience when it comes to my "lovelife" (if it could, for lack of a better word, be considered that at all). The bitterness, jealousy and anxiety has been assuaged somehow, maybe because I haven't had the opportunity to feel any these days, or maybe because I've just learned to let it go. Conversations with Dorothy this evening emphasized the importance of such release into the unknown (thanks Dorothy!).

Why wait for love to fall on your lap when you're surrounded by it daily? How, when I watch my friends from high school get engaged and then married, can I be angry at a world that has made them so happy? Watching Riza dance with Joe on Saturday caused all loquacity to flee from my tongue. This girl, who I used to eat lunch with on a school bench, whose pages in the yearbook I used to proofread, is a married woman! No words could have rightfully expressed my excitement for their Once upon a time... No such verbiage exists when the heart enraptures the whole of a person in love, as I've witnessed this past year.

In journalism, the introduction of a story that makes you want to read the rest of the article is called a "lead-in." Dating is kind of like the foreword, a hint of things to come. Weddings are more like the lead-ins to marriages. As a guest ("the reader") you're drawn into a couple's first page as husband and wife. I got drawn in SEVEN TIMES this year, and I was hooked every time, hoping and praying thereafter for their stories to be filled with more than 3 wishes, the occasional rescue and the conversion of malice into blessing. Love's oral tradition moves beyond the happy ending in a fairytale. Most times, the ending is just another beginning...