(no subject)
Has anyone seen the final scene of Burn After Reading? There's a line that goes something like "Jesus, what a clusterfuck. What have we learned? I guess we learned not to do it again. Fucked if I know what it was we did, but we sure won't do it again." Kind of sums up the current state of my marriage.
Type your cut contents here. A month ago, as of the 31st of January, I got hitched with Lindsey Danyel Wolgast in Alexandria, VA. We'd been together for a while, although not nearly long enough, at my last tech school at Corry Station in Pensacola, Florida. The idea was pretty simple. We'd been together for a while and thought we had a legitimate possibility at a bright future. The problem was, while she was being ordered to Fort Meade (Maryland, 15 minutes outside of DC), I had orders to Elmendorf. Alaska. Four time zones of space spells death for a relationship, so we decided that we'd really like to be stationed together and see where things would go. Trouble is, the only way for the military to care about a couple in the slightest is for them to be, at a minimum, legally married. A big ceremony is unnecessary, as long as you have the certificate. After a good deal of thought, I decided that unless I went for it, I'd be forever doomed to wonder "what if". And I already have a girl like that, and I was damn sure not going to let it happen again. Lindsey was perfect for me. Tall, dark haired, gorgeous eyes and lips, etc etc, as well as almost exactly the same interests in anything. Musical taste, movies, humor, whatever. And there's definitely something to be said for a girl who can knit me a scarf (her birthday present to me), and can also absolutely slaughter me in call of duty 4.
So after thinking it through and discussing it with her, we decided to go for it. We were going to get legally married and be stationed together and see where things would go. We didnt want to have a ceremony just yet, we were going to wait a year, minimum, to make sure that it was what we wanted. Or at least that's what I had in mind.
As soon as we're married, Lindsey wants to change her name, get joint bank accounts, cosign car loans, so on and so forth. I took it all in stride, because I cared about her like I've never really cared in a relationship before. Maybe I was just finally old enough to be ready for a real relationship, or maybe there was just something about her...I can't really say. Either way, I went with it all. Whenever I would bring up the possibility of divorce in the future she would get really sad and not want to talk about it. Its not that I was ever planning on leaving her, I'm just a realist and I knew that marriage before we even hit 21 years old had a very solid chance of not working out, and I like to plan for every contingency so I don't get involved in a shitstorm like the one I'm in currently. She would never talk about it though, and so I pushed it out of my mind. This was the real deal, right? We're married, she hasn't gotten cold feet, I'm still thrilled, what more is there to it?
For the past few weeks, she's been down. Not being an idiot (and my wife has a face like a billboard, with a habit of displaying her emotions where anyone can read them), I caught on and asked her what the issue was. After a few days of pestering her, she finally confessed that she HATES the military and HATES fort meade. She's done, through, over it. She can't really explain what exactly she doesn't like, besides the weather (my Upstate friends will giggle at that one), she just despises where she's at and is determined that when she finishes her first enlistment (approx. 5 years from now), she's getting out and moving back home to small-town Texas. I REFUSE to get out of the military so I can move back to another small town and work a dead end job, driving a pickup truck and drinking sweet tea on the porch. Not yet. 20 years from now, I want to be doing something like that. But at 25 years old, I still have so much to see and do, and an entire career in front of me. I wonder why, if she can survive 5 years, she can't survive another 11 and earn full retirement benefits. But she's dead-set on the idea. When I explain that 5 years is a long time, especially at our age, and 25 year old Lindsey won't be the same person as 20 year old Lindsey, and that she can't really judge a place after a month because duty stations are always what you make of them, she just insists that she doesn't like it and she's never going to, and nothing i do or say will change it. Childish, I think, but I love the girl so I bite my tongue. The problem is, if she moves back to Texas its the end of us. I love her with all my heart, but there's no way I can give up my entire life at such a young age to go do NOTHING. The small town life just isn't for me. And being a reasonable person I know that I'd be absolutely miserable there, which means we'd be miserable together and it wouldn't work out anyway. Maybe I just don't love her enough, or whatever it might mean, but I know for an absolute fact that it would be the death of me to give up everything I want to do so that I can work for the local police department in Nederland, Texas. So this puts a 5 year maximum cap on our marriage. Maybe she's being selfish, maybe I am, but our future plans have suddenly become entirely incompatible. After a while, though, I realize that not only am I not making her feel better about Meade, but she doesn't seem to WANT me to make her feel better. She's so detirmined to be miserable that she won't accept anything I tell her about being a half-hour away from Baltimore, Annapolis, and DC, and all the entertainment and opportunities that provides. So I call her out on it, and she confesses that she doesn't care whether I try to make her feel better, and in fact she thinks that getting married was a terrible idea. Apparently, she had convinced herself that she'd "learn" to love me once we were married, and now realized that it doesn't work like that. Its damn close to the worst logic I've ever heard. She tells me that she never loved me, and while she thought that I was a 'good guy' when we were hanging out at Corry, she just never felt that way.
As I remember it, she was the first one to use the "L" word, as well as the one who arranged our first stay in a hotel room, our first night on the beach, etc etc. Its true, at Corry I tried for her twice and got shot down both times (the second was especially embarassing...I got the cheek.) But after the second rejection I gave up and was dead-set on not trying again. She, though, invited me to stay the night on the beach with her the weekend after the cheek incident. She would later claim that it was my pathetic attempt that endeared me to her. Fantastic, I thought, she wants to throw me a pity fuck. My self confidence was skyrocketing. But she invited me to stay the night on the beach, where we dug a bed out of a sand dune and had our first kiss. She stopped things past that, though, because she said she liked me too much to sleep with me the first night we kissed. Understandable, I suppose, although not all of me was entirely pleased. The week after that she arranged for us to stay the night in a hotel room, and I obviously was pretty happy with that plan. From that night on, we were for all intents and purposes together. I turned down other girls for her, I spent all of my off time with her (at the cost of a few friendships, actually), and I was happier than I've been in ages.
Still, she claims now that it was all basically a lie. She had convinced herself and convinced me that she liked (and would later say loved) me. The way she tells it now, she knew even then that it wasn't quite true, but she was damn sure going to try, because hell, it might be fun to hang out with me for a while. She realized while she was looking for apartments for us to live in that we're 'just babies' (agreed) and that she's too young to be married and that I'm not only not her one and only somebody, I'm not even in the running. She plain told me that our entire relationship was a lie. Knowing how hopelessly in love with her I was and always had been, she simply decided to play around with my affections. She said she'd understand if i was mad, but I should be mad at the situation, not at her. For some reason, she doesn't realize that her actions are incredibly selfish and, truthfully, cruel. I've never been dumped before in my life, and suddenly I find myself dropped by my wife like I'm her middle school boyfriend.
There's three possibilities I can come up with. First, she's absolutely full of shit. She loved me, and she's just freaking out because we got married so young and so quickly and we spent the entire first month apart. Second, there's another guy there. I'm no idiot, this was one of the first things that came to mind. But I asked her and she denied it, and she denied it in a way that I believe her. But, hell, I believed she wasn't just dragging me around by the nose too. I also asked around with my friends there (however good military intelligence is, there's just no network like the Airman Grapevine) and they all said it probably wasn't the case as well. There's no secrets in the barracks, so i'm relatively certain that I can dismiss the possibility. The third is that she's 100% truthful in what she's saying and she's very possibly one of the worst human beings I've had the misfortune to get to know. I personally think its a combination of the first and third. She cared about me, but probably not as much as I did about her, and almost definitely not enough that she should have agreed to get married. She's still a child though, and she seems to have gotten excited about the idea alone of marriage. I'm pretty sure I married one most careless, impulsive girls in the world.
So now I finally looked up divorce and annulment law in Virginia. Barring intoxication, incest, or infidelity, we won't be granted an annulment. Virginia is apparently quite concerned with the sanctity of marriage and doesn't like to just dissolve them willy-nilly (a wonderfully fun phrase). Also, if she was a prostitute without my knowledge at some point before we were married, we could get annulled, so I guess I'll investigate that path. Pretty sure it won't lead anywhere, but I've got to take care of every possibility. Divorce takes some effort too. On top of lawyer fees, ranging from 1 grand to 10s, there's a whole headache that comes with it. There's two types of divorce - fault and no-fault. just what they sound like, fault means that one of us cheated, abused the other, or were sentenced to prison for a year or more, and no-fault means that nobody did anything necessarily wrong. I suppose we could just act like one of us cheated for a fairly simple process, but adultery is a punishable offence under the UCMJ (the set of laws all military members follow on top of whatever local laws apply) and I'm sure as hell not going to ruin my career for a lie and an easy divorce. To get a no-fault divorce though, assuming no children, we need to have been living seperately and have had no sexual contact for a period of no less than 6 months. All of this means that not only are we stuck together for another 5 months, neither of us can even start anything (physical) new during that time or we risk losing our jobs. While Lindsey wants to get out of the military desperately, with a Dishonorable Discharge on her record I wouldn't be exaggerating to say she'd have a hard time getting a job at Wendy's.
So we're fucked. Like I said in the beginning, "Jesus. What a clusterfuck." I have a ton of damage control to do now, as well as quite a bit of pent-up anger and heartbreak at being treated like a plaything and being too blind to see it. A long entry, I know, but if you made it to the end I commend you. I apologize for all the tense changes though, I kept going back in forth in my mind between past and present and it was hard for my typing to keep up.
Type your cut contents here. A month ago, as of the 31st of January, I got hitched with Lindsey Danyel Wolgast in Alexandria, VA. We'd been together for a while, although not nearly long enough, at my last tech school at Corry Station in Pensacola, Florida. The idea was pretty simple. We'd been together for a while and thought we had a legitimate possibility at a bright future. The problem was, while she was being ordered to Fort Meade (Maryland, 15 minutes outside of DC), I had orders to Elmendorf. Alaska. Four time zones of space spells death for a relationship, so we decided that we'd really like to be stationed together and see where things would go. Trouble is, the only way for the military to care about a couple in the slightest is for them to be, at a minimum, legally married. A big ceremony is unnecessary, as long as you have the certificate. After a good deal of thought, I decided that unless I went for it, I'd be forever doomed to wonder "what if". And I already have a girl like that, and I was damn sure not going to let it happen again. Lindsey was perfect for me. Tall, dark haired, gorgeous eyes and lips, etc etc, as well as almost exactly the same interests in anything. Musical taste, movies, humor, whatever. And there's definitely something to be said for a girl who can knit me a scarf (her birthday present to me), and can also absolutely slaughter me in call of duty 4.
So after thinking it through and discussing it with her, we decided to go for it. We were going to get legally married and be stationed together and see where things would go. We didnt want to have a ceremony just yet, we were going to wait a year, minimum, to make sure that it was what we wanted. Or at least that's what I had in mind.
As soon as we're married, Lindsey wants to change her name, get joint bank accounts, cosign car loans, so on and so forth. I took it all in stride, because I cared about her like I've never really cared in a relationship before. Maybe I was just finally old enough to be ready for a real relationship, or maybe there was just something about her...I can't really say. Either way, I went with it all. Whenever I would bring up the possibility of divorce in the future she would get really sad and not want to talk about it. Its not that I was ever planning on leaving her, I'm just a realist and I knew that marriage before we even hit 21 years old had a very solid chance of not working out, and I like to plan for every contingency so I don't get involved in a shitstorm like the one I'm in currently. She would never talk about it though, and so I pushed it out of my mind. This was the real deal, right? We're married, she hasn't gotten cold feet, I'm still thrilled, what more is there to it?
For the past few weeks, she's been down. Not being an idiot (and my wife has a face like a billboard, with a habit of displaying her emotions where anyone can read them), I caught on and asked her what the issue was. After a few days of pestering her, she finally confessed that she HATES the military and HATES fort meade. She's done, through, over it. She can't really explain what exactly she doesn't like, besides the weather (my Upstate friends will giggle at that one), she just despises where she's at and is determined that when she finishes her first enlistment (approx. 5 years from now), she's getting out and moving back home to small-town Texas. I REFUSE to get out of the military so I can move back to another small town and work a dead end job, driving a pickup truck and drinking sweet tea on the porch. Not yet. 20 years from now, I want to be doing something like that. But at 25 years old, I still have so much to see and do, and an entire career in front of me. I wonder why, if she can survive 5 years, she can't survive another 11 and earn full retirement benefits. But she's dead-set on the idea. When I explain that 5 years is a long time, especially at our age, and 25 year old Lindsey won't be the same person as 20 year old Lindsey, and that she can't really judge a place after a month because duty stations are always what you make of them, she just insists that she doesn't like it and she's never going to, and nothing i do or say will change it. Childish, I think, but I love the girl so I bite my tongue. The problem is, if she moves back to Texas its the end of us. I love her with all my heart, but there's no way I can give up my entire life at such a young age to go do NOTHING. The small town life just isn't for me. And being a reasonable person I know that I'd be absolutely miserable there, which means we'd be miserable together and it wouldn't work out anyway. Maybe I just don't love her enough, or whatever it might mean, but I know for an absolute fact that it would be the death of me to give up everything I want to do so that I can work for the local police department in Nederland, Texas. So this puts a 5 year maximum cap on our marriage. Maybe she's being selfish, maybe I am, but our future plans have suddenly become entirely incompatible. After a while, though, I realize that not only am I not making her feel better about Meade, but she doesn't seem to WANT me to make her feel better. She's so detirmined to be miserable that she won't accept anything I tell her about being a half-hour away from Baltimore, Annapolis, and DC, and all the entertainment and opportunities that provides. So I call her out on it, and she confesses that she doesn't care whether I try to make her feel better, and in fact she thinks that getting married was a terrible idea. Apparently, she had convinced herself that she'd "learn" to love me once we were married, and now realized that it doesn't work like that. Its damn close to the worst logic I've ever heard. She tells me that she never loved me, and while she thought that I was a 'good guy' when we were hanging out at Corry, she just never felt that way.
As I remember it, she was the first one to use the "L" word, as well as the one who arranged our first stay in a hotel room, our first night on the beach, etc etc. Its true, at Corry I tried for her twice and got shot down both times (the second was especially embarassing...I got the cheek.) But after the second rejection I gave up and was dead-set on not trying again. She, though, invited me to stay the night on the beach with her the weekend after the cheek incident. She would later claim that it was my pathetic attempt that endeared me to her. Fantastic, I thought, she wants to throw me a pity fuck. My self confidence was skyrocketing. But she invited me to stay the night on the beach, where we dug a bed out of a sand dune and had our first kiss. She stopped things past that, though, because she said she liked me too much to sleep with me the first night we kissed. Understandable, I suppose, although not all of me was entirely pleased. The week after that she arranged for us to stay the night in a hotel room, and I obviously was pretty happy with that plan. From that night on, we were for all intents and purposes together. I turned down other girls for her, I spent all of my off time with her (at the cost of a few friendships, actually), and I was happier than I've been in ages.
Still, she claims now that it was all basically a lie. She had convinced herself and convinced me that she liked (and would later say loved) me. The way she tells it now, she knew even then that it wasn't quite true, but she was damn sure going to try, because hell, it might be fun to hang out with me for a while. She realized while she was looking for apartments for us to live in that we're 'just babies' (agreed) and that she's too young to be married and that I'm not only not her one and only somebody, I'm not even in the running. She plain told me that our entire relationship was a lie. Knowing how hopelessly in love with her I was and always had been, she simply decided to play around with my affections. She said she'd understand if i was mad, but I should be mad at the situation, not at her. For some reason, she doesn't realize that her actions are incredibly selfish and, truthfully, cruel. I've never been dumped before in my life, and suddenly I find myself dropped by my wife like I'm her middle school boyfriend.
There's three possibilities I can come up with. First, she's absolutely full of shit. She loved me, and she's just freaking out because we got married so young and so quickly and we spent the entire first month apart. Second, there's another guy there. I'm no idiot, this was one of the first things that came to mind. But I asked her and she denied it, and she denied it in a way that I believe her. But, hell, I believed she wasn't just dragging me around by the nose too. I also asked around with my friends there (however good military intelligence is, there's just no network like the Airman Grapevine) and they all said it probably wasn't the case as well. There's no secrets in the barracks, so i'm relatively certain that I can dismiss the possibility. The third is that she's 100% truthful in what she's saying and she's very possibly one of the worst human beings I've had the misfortune to get to know. I personally think its a combination of the first and third. She cared about me, but probably not as much as I did about her, and almost definitely not enough that she should have agreed to get married. She's still a child though, and she seems to have gotten excited about the idea alone of marriage. I'm pretty sure I married one most careless, impulsive girls in the world.
So now I finally looked up divorce and annulment law in Virginia. Barring intoxication, incest, or infidelity, we won't be granted an annulment. Virginia is apparently quite concerned with the sanctity of marriage and doesn't like to just dissolve them willy-nilly (a wonderfully fun phrase). Also, if she was a prostitute without my knowledge at some point before we were married, we could get annulled, so I guess I'll investigate that path. Pretty sure it won't lead anywhere, but I've got to take care of every possibility. Divorce takes some effort too. On top of lawyer fees, ranging from 1 grand to 10s, there's a whole headache that comes with it. There's two types of divorce - fault and no-fault. just what they sound like, fault means that one of us cheated, abused the other, or were sentenced to prison for a year or more, and no-fault means that nobody did anything necessarily wrong. I suppose we could just act like one of us cheated for a fairly simple process, but adultery is a punishable offence under the UCMJ (the set of laws all military members follow on top of whatever local laws apply) and I'm sure as hell not going to ruin my career for a lie and an easy divorce. To get a no-fault divorce though, assuming no children, we need to have been living seperately and have had no sexual contact for a period of no less than 6 months. All of this means that not only are we stuck together for another 5 months, neither of us can even start anything (physical) new during that time or we risk losing our jobs. While Lindsey wants to get out of the military desperately, with a Dishonorable Discharge on her record I wouldn't be exaggerating to say she'd have a hard time getting a job at Wendy's.
So we're fucked. Like I said in the beginning, "Jesus. What a clusterfuck." I have a ton of damage control to do now, as well as quite a bit of pent-up anger and heartbreak at being treated like a plaything and being too blind to see it. A long entry, I know, but if you made it to the end I commend you. I apologize for all the tense changes though, I kept going back in forth in my mind between past and present and it was hard for my typing to keep up.