As one would expect, I have been keeping a close eye on Con as his wedding approaches. For a while after he talked to Grace on Valentine’s Day, I thought his nerves were gone, that he had taken Grace’s faith to heart and started to believe himself. But with the turn of the month into the same one in which the wedding will take place, he has begun to get anxious again.
His fears stem from his own self-doubt, I believe; he believes that he will let Grace down in time, that he will not be able to keep the promises he makes to her. This is weakness, but there is love in it, and so I hope that it can be overcome.
I considered encouraging him to talk to Grace again, but I thought that his continued doubts would hurt her more if he brought them up again. Instead, I have been looking for a peer of Con’s, a man who is already married and can reassure him with his own experience. I did not have to look far.
This afternoon, while Grace was on duty, Con’s best man Michael stopped by. Michael is a friend of both Con’s and Grace’s—in fact, the two of them met through him. He has been married for three years and his wife is expecting their first child. I like Michael very much. He is a cheerful, kind man, but with a streak of pragmatism that I believe is what Con needs right now.
Michael didn’t need much hinting from me to see that something was wrong with Con; they have been friends for many years. He sat Con down with a beer, waiting until it was half gone to broach the subject. “So. What is it?”
Con avoided his friend’s gaze. “What?”
“You’re all lumpy-faced. Something’s wrong. Don’t deny it.”
Con rolled his eyes. “Am I that easy to read?”
“You are to me.” Michael leaned forward over the table. “Wedding jitters?”
Groaning, Con put his head in his hands. “I suck major balls.”
“That’s true,” Michael said evenly.
Con suggested that he do something that I believe is anatomically impossible, though I will have to ask Brid to be sure.
Michael laughed, took a swig of his beer, then set it aside. “Okay. Let’s think about this. What’s the real problem? Because I know it’s not Grace. She’s awesome.”
“She’s amazing,” Con agreed. “Which is why I’m an awful person.”
“Yes, but we need to get to why you’re an awful person,” Michael said patiently. “Do you really think you won’t want to be with her in twenty years?”
“Fuck, Michael, I don’t know what’s going to happen to me in two days, much less two years,” Con burst out. “She’s asking me all these questions about the future and I don’t know any of it. I don’t know if I want kids, I don’t know if I want to move to the suburbs, I don’t know if I want to buy a van—I don’t know! How am I supposed to give her the right answer to all these questions if I don’t know? And if I get it wrong…” He stared at his beer bottle, all but empty now, and in his mind and heart I could see the true source of his fear—that he would hurt Grace, that she would fall out of love with him.
“You don’t have to be perfect, Con,” I murmured to him. “You don’t have to always get it right.”
Michael studied Con for a minute. Then he got to his feet, went to the fridge, and pulled out another beer. “Look, asshole, you don’t always have to get it right,” he said. “Most people think that one person or the other is going to be in charge of a marriage. That’s bullshit.” He opened the beer and put it in front of Con. “The way it goes is, sometimes the husband takes the lead, and sometimes the wife does. You’ve got to work together. It’s like rowing a boat.”
At this, Con looked up at Michael with skepticism. “You’ve never rowed a boat in your life.”
“That’s because I prefer to keep my stomach inside me where it belongs. But the metaphor still works. You get one side, and Grace gets the other, and if one of you stops pulling, you just end up going in circles.”
“So what if I can’t pull my weight?” Con asked.
Michael sat back down across the table. “Do you really think you can’t?”
Con was silent.
“Because if you can’t, you need to tell Grace now,” Michael warned him. “The closer you get to the date, the more she’ll be hurt if you call it off.”
“I don’t want to hurt her,” Con said. “I love her.”
Michael drank his beer and thought for a moment. “You remember what an idiot I was right after I met Amanda?”
Con snorted. “How could I forget?”
Michael ignored this. “I promised her everything. I told her that I’d take on the world for her, that I’d give her everything she ever wanted, that we’d be happier than everyone else on the planet. And then I started waking up in cold sweats, thinking that she actually expected me to pull all that off, and that I’d lose her if I didn’t.”
Con leaned back in his chair. “I didn’t know that. How’d you get over that?”
“I talked to Amanda,” Michael said. “And she told me that I was a dumbass, that all she really wanted was a chance to work with me and try for all that stuff together. That’s all Grace wants, I’m sure, and she believes you can do it.” Michael took another drink of his beer, then said without looking at his friend, “For what it’s worth, I think you can do it, too.”
Con was touched, and yes, reassured. The confidence of his friend means a great deal to him. Of course, he couldn’t say that outright because of the strange restrictions between men in their society; instead, he scoffed and said something about how that sounded dangerously like a compliment, and the conversation dissolved into taunting and laughter. But both men knew what it meant.
I think that only taking the leap and making those vows to Grace will show Con that she and Michael are right. My task, then, is to build up his courage in the coming weeks, so that he can come to the altar with a light heart. I have confidence that I can do this—my experience of weddings and what comes before them includes some of my most powerful and beautiful memories. If I can show Con even half of what I have felt in those moments, surely he will see that he has nothing to fear.