Top 10 Reasons I’ll Probably Never Re-Marry

Copyrighted by Lorna Tedder. Originally published in Third Degree Burn.

My neighbor is getting remarried. To a man she’s known casually for years.

Flying By Night novel

One day, they ran into each other in a store and chatted for a few minutes. Then they looked at each other, really looked at each other, and both went “Wow—this is the person I want to spend the rest of my life with.”

They went out together that week for the first time, and within a month were talking about getting married and starting a family together. For both, it was like a light dawning, that sudden bright flash of knowledge that they’d found another of their kind.

“You just wait,” she tells me. “You’ll be going about your business and one day, wham, love will hit you between the eyes. Right when you least expect it.”

Me, I’m not so sure. I won’t rule out ever marrying again, but there are 10 reasons I’m shy about the likelihood of it,

10 incidences that make me uncertain of stepping out onto thin ice again.

  1. “You don’t have to ask my permission to go somewhere. We’re equal in this marriage.” Then, a few hours later, “Where do you think you’re going? I’m not invited? You’re excluding me!”
  2. “I married you to save you from yourself.”
  3. “I pulled one over on your mom.”
  4. The silence. Or maybe the glare. Or both, when disapproving.
  5. “You’d be a horrible mother.”
  6. Said with my two-year-old in his arms after I refused to do something he wanted: “You’re weird.”
  7. Shortly before hurting me: “I would never hurt you.”
  8. “Religion? You don’t have a religion—you have a cult!”
  9. After hearing me excitedly tell the plot of my new novel: “Who would ever want to read that?”

And maybe the most devastating, simply because of the timing and the way I felt about being in love…

  1. …on our wedding night, a whopping two seconds before the first sex of our married life together: “I finally made an honest woman of you.”

But for all those reasons, there’s one reason why I might one day  remarry: I still somehow believe in the possibility of love and that it can be blended with respect, trust, and compassion, and that when I least expect it and from whatever corner I least expect, it can sneak up and surprise me.


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