Always a bridesmaid

This weekend in slightly upstate New York, I attended the wedding of a gay couple who I am friends with. The wedding was beautiful. It was held on farmland with a converted barn serving as the reception hall. The small ceremony was on a lawn, with the Catskill Mountains soaring behind. Cocktail hour was on the grounds behind the old estate, next to an in-ground pool. In other words: beautiful. Rustic and simple, yet elegant without being over done in the way that some gay weddings can tend to be.

During the reception one of their female friends stood up and gave a speech about how she met them. She had written such an eloquent speech. It had humor and poignance and was clearly from the heart. She was moved to tears while speaking in front of the reception and I was mesmerized by her words. There was one part in particular that hit me the most, when she said that somehow, amongst the concrete and busyness of New York City, my friends had managed to find each other and that now they are able to love each other in abundance.

Of course, as I sat there at the wedding, single and dateless, I wondered if I would ever be able to navigate through the concrete and the busyness of New York City and finally find someone to love abundantly for the rest of my life.

Their family and friends were all coming together to celebrate the union that these two men had forged with each other and as happy as I was to be able to witness it, I also felt a great sadness inside myself. I longed for the opportunity to experience what they were experiencing.

I am currently 39. Throughout my life, I’ve only really had two relationships that I would consider real relationships. Meaning, I was invested in the relationship, I cared for the guy I was with and I experienced a type of love. I wonder if the fact that I didn’t come out until my early 20’s put me on a slower track towards achieving better, long-lasting relationships. I did not get to be as practiced as the seasoned heterosexuals who got to start pursuing the object of their affections in their teenage years. 

However, there are plenty of gays who, by the time they turn 39, are already in a long-term relationship, so maybe it’s less to do with practice and more to do with how everyone’s lives just end up playing out. At the wedding, being surrounded by so much long-term love, I wondered if a relationship like the ones I was witnessing was in the cards for me.

As the years continue to pass, and I find myself perpetually single at more and more weddings, I often times initially resist wanting to attend the weddings. Of course it’s incredibly selfish of me to actually consider no going to a friend’s wedding. After all, the wedding is not about me, it’s about them. 

The resistance still happens though. I get the invitation and I wonder if there’s someway I can pretend I didn’t know when the wedding was going to be and that I won’t be able to go since I already put down a non-refundable deposit to participate in my volleyball league’s summer beach tournament. But I would still send a gift from their registry along with “my regrets” and wouldn’t really be missed anyways, so it wouldn’t be a big deal, right?

But I never actually do that. Why would I? They are my friends. I’m not so angry and bitter about being single that I would silently protest my own singledom by boycotting a wedding. Just because I haven’t been successful in finding love shouldn’t mean I can’t celebrate somebody elses’ fortune.

During some moments of the wedding I found my thoughts drifting off. I daydreamed about the guy who I might one day find and fall in love with and marry. I wondered where we would choose to get married and celebrate with our families and friends. I wondered what Madonna song I would inevitably force him to let me do a choreographed dance routine to (most likely “Vogue”). I wondered who he would be, what he would look like, how we would have met. But mostly I wondered how he would love me and how that would feel after all the seemingly endless years of searching and hoping had gone by. How would it feel to finally find someone who loved me in return.

For now, that continues to exist solely in my dreams. But I remain hopeful. Hopeful that there is a guy out there looking for me. Hopeful that it won’t be too long before we find each other. And hopeful that our love, the love he and I will share, the love that we will have found amongst the concrete and busyness of New York City, will be just as abundant as the love that I witnessed this weekend.