I truly regret my wedding, but not my marriage. My marriage has been “the greatest story that’s never been told.” We eloped and got married in a Masjid that was above a poultry slaughterhouse, bounced around as husband and wife with a newborn, lived in military housing, damn near got divorced, worked it out somehow and realized successful marriages go through hell and back.

What comes next aren’t all the details, just the highlight reel for newlyweds or a couple currently going through some shit.

We started dating in high school, I guess that would make us high school sweethearts, but there was a time when those hearts held nothing but bitterness.

Ready?

Let’s start with the fact that we don’t know when we were married. What we agree on is that it was a humid summer’s day in New Jersey somewhere between June and July. Our ceremony was so small only three people aside from us and the officiator were there, one of them was asleep from the moment we walked into the prayer room turned wedding hall until the time we left.

If fancy had an ugly sibling that was locked to a chair in the basement that would be this place. It held a dampness to it throughout the year. The smell of mold mixed with chicken pee and woodchips, diesel exhaust, and Egyptian musk incense to distract the nose from an aroma that spoke of thousands of sweaty feet standing in the same place throughout the years for daily prayers. This room was where our marriage was born.

I was asked questions I cannot recall and said yes. She was asked questions she couldn’t hear and said yes, but we couldn’t hear her from all the way in the back behind a curtain, so, we had to ask again. This time yes was much louder. I could hear her wanting to be with me, but she couldn’t see me looking for her, wanting to be with her.

We didn’t dance the night away as children fell asleep on folding chairs. We didn’t watch our parents laughing with each other. What we did have was a two-person wedding reception catered by our favorite Chinese restaurant. I splurged and got the General Tso’s dinner portion during the lunch time special hours, and she got gizzards with chicken fried rice. This should have been one of the most important days of our adult lives, but it was treated as just another random day. We didn’t care, we were in love and this gave us the permission we needed to stay in love.

This is what love does, love does dumb shit!

For this reason I regret my wedding, not my marriage. This moment is what brought about a realization about regrets – no matter what you do you cannot change a regret. You only have two options.

1. Accept what happened and become better.

2. Bury it so deep you don’t ever think about it again.

Even when you accept it you cannot change what caused you to feel regret. We cannot be newlyweds to each other ever again. Her father cannot walk her down the aisle as my bride to be. We cannot have our first exclusive dance as husband and wife. She cannot have her father-daughter dance, and I cannot have my mother-son dance. Love does dumb shit and dumb shit creates something I’ve spent more than half of my life atoning for.

Her parents and my father would not know about our marriage until she was pregnant with our first child. When she got pregnant, we went to City Hall and signed the papers that made our marriage legal – about a year after the actual religious ceremony. I’m sure my in-laws were too angry or disappointed to disagree. I was going to be a father and that meant I was no longer a boy. I had to step up and be a man, ready or not.

Our marriage was a trainwreck from day one. We eloped, kept it a secret until a baby came along. We jeopardized her education – but she’s a trooper and graduated with honors holding our son in her college graduation photo. We lived in separate homes because we couldn’t afford a place of our own. We bounced from home to home living with my mother or her parents for short stints until I joined the active-duty military. By then there were so many dysfunctional parts of our marriage it fell apart.

In the fifth year of our marriage, it was over. I got reassigned and needed to leave for training and she stayed behind. A year later I come back to an empty home in a military housing complex then went to visit my son at his new apartment. Through visits I bumped into her and a guy she started dating and she learns about a girl I was seeing. By year two we are at each other’s throats and fighting with the courts too.

Then everything changed.

I was driving back after dropping off my son trying to understand what made her so bitter and why I gave a shit.

I was one hour into a four-hour drive back to my place after dropping my son off when clarity almost hit me like a seventy-five mile an hour highway divider…literally!

I almost caused me to flip my car as I jerked the steering wheel to avoid hitting the on-ramp divider. I instantly knew what happened next would change my life; for the better if I did something, for the worse if I did nothing. Nearly dying will really slow you down on a highway. The guy I nearly sideswiped was now passing me while beeping and cursing at me.

He was right about one thing – I was a fucking idiot.

You don’t have to be a professional lip reader to understand those words.

Idiot or not I had to share what I knew because if it was not spoken out loud then the universe would not hear me; so I called my brother.

Hey! We’re getting back together!

Yooo are you serious!!! Bro that’s great! Let me talk to her.

She doesn’t know it yet.

… ummm … how doesn’t she know this yet?

Yeah, we’re getting back together but she doesn’t know it and I cannot tell her.

Promise me you’re not going to do anything stupid.

I will not make a promise I cannot keep, but it’s not going to be illegal. If it doesn’t work then I know that I’ve done all I could and I’ll be okay with that.

Alright psycho, let me know how it goes.

Our son had been conspiring and conjuring up ways for us to reconcile that we fought until I saw what he was trying to tell us all along. We were such assholes to each other because we were still in love with one another. Now came the hard part. I had to be vulnerable and tell her that I was still in love with her. If she rejected me that would be the hurt needed to move on. Of course, I didn’t come straight out and say that shit…

NO! I’m not going to just jump in without making sure there’s no alligators in the water.

She had wanted to have new pictures of her with our son, I am a damn good photographer too. Since neither of us had extra money for things like this I became the best option. This would be great because I wanted to take our son to fly this expensive kite my uncle bought for him.

The drive was uncomfortably quiet with the exception of our son trying to get us to talk. She was looking sexy too. I’m convinced she dressed up nicer to show me what I was not allowed to have anymore. In my logical mind it annoyed me because the day was cold and I knew she’d be too cold to enjoy flying the kite which would mean less time flying the kite. Then my guy brain kicked in and saw it as a perfect test. She’d need to stand close to me to get warm because I’m a living furnace.

Sometime during that time out she started standing closer. I took her hand and held it to warm her up and she didn’t pull away. Our son held both of our hands and for the first time in three years we felt like a family again. By now she was wearing my extra jacket, I was doing my best not to show her I was freezing. When I dropped them off at her place we involuntarily kissed good-bye. Not a long kiss, but a husband’s kiss to a wife.

We had broken up with the people we were seeing before the final divorce papers were ready and were kind of dating each other again. Talk about a test from God – oh, you think you’re ready to walk down this road again? Prove it! Having those papers reminded us of all the things that went wrong and got us to the point we were at. It made us second guess this moment of falling in love again. Ultimately we chose to give it another shot. I don’t know how the conversation with my in-laws went, but my now 103 year old grandmother was brought to tears when I shared the news about our reconciled marriage with her.

I think we still have those divorce papers somewhere in a box that was never fully unpacked. They’re there, but they’re not signed. They weren’t signed because when we were going through hell we just kept going. Wedding photos get hung on a wall, but it’s the marriage that makes the home.

We don’t have an emotional marriage; we have a passionate one. We have criteria for one another. We have boundaries, and individual personalities. Love doesn’t keep us up at night with wandering thoughts that impatiently hurry seconds that feel like hours. Love isn’t strong enough to endure your spouse telling you what you know but have been avoiding to accept. Love is a thread that gets worn down until there are holes in the cloth.

I was one piece of cloth, she was another, our children a mix of our cloths. The mundane moments, the laughter, the arguments, the hardships, and the good are threads woven into what we’ve built. Some stay in our chest, others are placed on the table for anyone who needs it. A hole can become a forgotten memory or an opportunity to add more textures when we all relive that experience together. As husband and wife we help each other patch holes with new memories.

I don’t know how long we will be married, why should I care? I don’t want to imagine the reality that one day either of us will wake up with the warm side of the bed empty forever. This is the side of marriage that couples who have been together a long time never speak about – when death is how we part.

I see this now in how my mother-in-law processes a reality I am scared of. As I process the biggest regret of my life I hope that decades of tireless efforts have said “Dad I’m sorry” in ways my words couldn’t. That he is proud of the marriage and home an underdog scraped together for the most important woman of his life – his daughter.

I married my high school sweetheart on a muggy summer’s day in New Jersey not knowing how amazing the adventure would be. Now I sit here thanking a man who has been a father to me, adding to the foundation my father gave me, knowing that it takes two fathers for a woman to have the right man to become the husband she needs.

If you’ve just gotten married, or you’re going through some shit now I hope this helped.