that damned grey dress

its barely february, and yet the ugly subject of weddings seems to have already reared its beautiful head.

i am a single mother in my 30's. i have a lovely boyfriend who lives a long way away. he is in his twenties. during our happy three years together, we have attended a fair few weddings, and, if i were to emply particularly flowery language, and given the subject that might just be what i decide to do, i might describe them as hideous blips on the otherwise blissful plain of our togetherness. or something.

to begin with, these events always provide more than their fair share of sartorial angst, but i think this says more about me than necessarily what is required. i have spent approximately 56 kajillion hours in changing rooms, umm-ing over the appropriateness of a skirt length, ahh-ing over the acceptability of a particular shade of blue in the name of getting it just right- for which read "charming, yet unremarkable." but, to cut a fairly long and tedious story short, i have, despite all the shopping, worn the same grey dress i got from h&m in the sale, for a tenner, to each and every wedding. yeah- grey. not dove grey, or grey-with-a-hint-of-pink, or lilac. no, the sky-right-before-it-pisses-down grey. and that is a fairly handy metaphor for how i feel about weddings; any previous enthiusiasm gets rained off in the face of things being... not quite right.

why this should be, this big sigh in the face of other people's matrimonials, i don't know. actually i do. what all these weddings have had in common, other than alcohol, bread rolls, vomit and that damned grey dress, is this: none of them have been ours. now, don't start thinking that that is at the heart of the matter, because it is not. you will never meet anybody as truly ambivalent about marriage than me. but, if, say, it was our wedding, there is at least a small chance, that possibly, perhaps, we might enjoy it. maybe. instead, we stand about, too drunk, avoiding eye contact with eachother during the commitment parts, trying not to die of resentment when the other disappears for four hours looking for cigars, jiggling along politely to a piss-poor rendition of 'groove is in the heart'.

anyway, this morning my beloved called me from his car on the way to a meeting, and, after we had caught up on the last few hours, spoken of the weather and breathlessly reassured eachother of our love o'er the hectares of slush betwixt us, he mentioned that we have been invited to a wedding. but! in light of a dimly remembered and doubtlessly drunken announcement at the onset of the year that i would be retiring from the wedding circuit hence, he thought i would rather not go. this bewildering ur-invitation was followed, inevitably, by a fairly heated argument in which we traded accusations and unresolved resentments, disappointments and disillusions, passive aggressions and grand transgressions... and, as you may not quite have gathered by now, its not even our wedding.

three terminated phone calls later, it has been decided that i will be in attendance, with lines drawn under all wedding experiences previous, and a new set of rules and boundaries laminated in my clutch bag (essentially, "each of us should avoid leaving the other on their own" and "be nice"). the changing room angst can begin again in earnest.

the grey dress is to go to charity. probably "mind".