Traveling in Packs with Pacts

They fill the tables next to me at restaurants. And travel in packs.

“Look,” my friend Casey motions to me. We are seated outdoors on a restaurant patio for a friend’s birthday party. She nudges my attention toward the group of women seated next to us. Although they are carting packages and presents their mood is solemn. “You see that?” she whispers and then quietly announces,

“Look at their faces.”

I glance over my shoulder to see six women just a few feet from me. They may as well be at a funeral. None of them look happy.

“They’re married,” she diagnoses.

And I laugh. Not at them. But at something else. At a past that used to be mine in another life. And Casey’s too.

That used to be us.

“And look,” she continues her assessment like a sociologist studying another culture, “they all own one piece of jewelry. And no one is wearing a vibrant color.”

It’s all true. What she says. The homogeny continues beyond that. They all have short hair and many are a bit overweight. I imagine they all live in brand new split levels and drive their children to school each day in their shiny Yukons and Expeditions.

Never smiling.

Casey squeezes my hand and smiles, “That’s not us anymore.”

I smile back.

On another day at another restaurant I am seated next to another group of women. But this group laughs and jokes and shrieks. They talk about the Twilight series as if it is classic literature and make plans to attend a Lady Ga Ga concert. They are all in great shape and their hair, if not long, is trendy and youthful, their jewelry fun and varied. Their laughter wafts through the restaurant but it intoxicates not irritates.

You think I’m going to say they’re all single, don’t you?

Guess again. This is not the juxtaposition you are expecting, dear reader.

They’re all married too.

But it’s a different kind of married.

The kind where you don’t lose yourself or give up. Instead, the mystical kind where you find yourself and (gasp!) could it be?

Love your husband.

It is possible.

I saw it in the restaurant next to me just last week.

If I’ve learned anything these past few years it is this: life is divided into two camps, the happy and the sad, and they gravitate toward another like magnets. Happy attracts happy. Sad attracts sad.

Ever heard misery loves company? It does. But happy loves company too. Like attracts like.

I have since analyzed the gabillion reasons I stayed so unhappily married for so unhappily long. There are several but one contributing factor that it took me a while to realize is that in that life my friends were just as miserably married as I, if not more so! Several of the married couples I knew were just shuffling through the motions. I just thought that’s the way it was.

Interestingly? My unhappily married friends did not stay friends with me after my divorce. But my happily married ones did.

Isn’t that interesting? Yes. Mull that. It’s deep. It seems I abandoned an unwritten pact to stay eternally in despair with them. It has been a life lesson that has imparted deep wisdom of which I am so grateful to have, even if attaining it was through something so incredibly difficult.

Never again will I surround myself with friends who pity themselves, who settle for less, and who don’t believe that the power to find happiness resides within. Never again will I waste my time with people who portray themselves as victims.

Life is meant to be toasted to, embraced hard, and lived beautifully. And to do anything else? Is wasteful.

And sad.

Recently a new guy in my life asked me, “Why does it seem like when women get married they get fat and cut all their hair off?” I just laughed knowingly and said I wasn’t sure. But that the good news was I’d already lived that life.

For even if I ever do say I do again, my femininity and size four jeans are here to stay. Along with something even more beautiful and unwavering.

My belief that life is what I make it.

And I’m making mine?

Happy.

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P.S. Just for the record? I do think I would have to draw the line at discussing the Twilight series as if it were classic literature. I'm just sayin' . . . :-)