Morning Call from the Bride

So I was on the phone with Beaurewong this morning, bright and early. She had already started the day on a rough note, being insulted and disrespected by some girl working in the coffee shop. I told her that it may be she is looking for a fight, and at that time preparing to be insulted and disrespected, and the girl could be having a bad day and the “rudeness” Susan felt directed at her could have absolutely nothing to do with Susan…but no. Susan would own that girl’s bad vibes as her own, and carry them throughout her day.

She repeated the story of Timmy and Lacey's two daddies' drama in which only one survived, and this time she called it murder. I remember these two doggies with fondness, having spent more than an hour in their company on a beautiful evening walk by the Hudson River. They were both extremely aged, Lacey being a small blonde poodle and Timmy being a black standard who was adopted by Lacey's two daddies when his one elderly daddy passed away. Okay, the dog died, sad, and?

She tried to get off the phone with just that, but I had been waiting to talk with her and she had been ignoring my calls since Monday night's adventure when something horrible might have happened to Ed in the bathroom. Oh, no. Don't you dare hang up yet.

We agree that her fearfulness for Ed's safety is no different than the fear that she feels for all of her friends' well being, and this stems from her fear of abandonment.

Susan says that she "knows" she and Ed should get married, because they "love" each other and "take care" of each other. "It's not about money!" "Ed wants me to sign a pre-nup, and that's fine with me because it's not about the money for me!"

I explained that in order for there to be a "pre-nup" there must be the assumption of a "nup" to follow. A contract is a "meeting of the minds" (yeah, Judge Judy) and so in order for two parties to be in complete agreement before signing a contract, they must both understand what is in that contract. A prenuptual agreement is not something that a bride "in love" signs without understanding the legal rights that she is surrendering.

Susan has done her research, though. She's read almost the entire "marriage" entry on Wikipedia.

She said that she felt that people weren't being supportive of her in her decision to marry Ed Wong, but I wouldn't let her get off with cheap tears. I assured her that if I didn't love her I wouldn't care, and wouldn't ask anything of her, but I felt sure that if she and Ed really have thought things through then she should certainly have considered x, y, and z and be prepared to answer questions from those who care about her happiness.

I told her that from what I have observed, the intensely personal and completely loving communication between herself and Ed may be entirely in her own mind: I related back to her a story she shared in which she had called Ed in a frenzy and railed against him horribly, only to be touched by his tender love for her when she called him back twenty minutes later to apologize and he said that he completely understood.

"In fact," I offered, "he may have been paying no intention to you the first time and not heard a word you said, and his understanding tones on the second call may have been nothing more than a trained response to the tone of your voice.

She promised to do her homework, which she set down as "taking a trip to Barnes & Noble" to see if they have any good books on marriage.