Tomorrow is the wedding day!  I’ve been reflecting a lot over the last few days about my life leading up to this moment.  I’ve been thinking about when I was younger and all I wanted to do was get married.  I was so young then and really didn’t know what I wanted out of life.  I also wasn’t a very strong person.  I allowed people to treat me poorly and as a consequence, tended to date men who weren’t very good to me.  The funny thing is that without those relationships, I wouldn’t have found Jamie.  Each of my failed relationships put me on the path that led me to him, and for that I am grateful.  It’s kind of funny to say that now, but that is what maturity does to you.

One failed relationship in particular stands as the example of that path.  In 1998 I made the decision to return home to California after 12 years in Utah.  That was back in the heyday of chat rooms and I began chatting with people from the Bay Area.  I met someone, we’ll call him X, and we began a long distance relationship.  He sealed the deal on the move back to California and in March of 1999 I arrived in San Francisco.  My relationship with X lasted a stormy 3 years and boy was it awful.  He cheated on me, treated me like crap and made me feel I was lucky to be with him.  When I finally broke up with him on the Summer of 1991, I was a new person.  I made a decision that I was not going to be treated like that ever again and set out on a new path.

Thanks to X, certain things had happened that brought me closer to Jamie.  I was in California, I took a job at a radio station that introduced me to Hawthorne Lane, then took a job at a preschool where his former roommate worked.  If I hadn’t been with X, I’m not sure those things would have happened.  Most importantly, I had a new outlook on life and dating.  It took several more years of working on myself to bring me to Jamie, but in the Summer of 2006 it happened.  I met Jamie.

I am being ecstatic to be marrying my true partner tomorrow.  And I am also grateful for the “Ghosts of Boyfriends Past” who each taught me something about myself and brought me closer to the man who will become my husband tomorrow.