Lonely in the change...

It wasn’t until KP came to visit a few weeks before the wedding that I really realized what being married meant for our friendship.

Kim was already mourning her loss in me, but I was hopeful, acknowledging things would change but imagining the best.

But that weekend—as my Kimmie world and Eric world collided, and as they shared a room and vied for my attention—I realized it wasn’t possible to be a married single person. Or a single married person.

My lasts in that regard swept by, often before I knew them as such—my last crazy vacation with Kimmie dear, my last hike up to frigid Minnesota to stay a week at her house, the last giggly night falling asleep to Madagascar, being entirely there and not divided.

You know, I meant to write about this a long time ago. Would you believe that the day we got engaged was one of the loneliest days for me?

There I was, ring on my finger, hand-in-hand with a man who wanted to marry me… but no close girlfriend I could run and tell. I called Kimmie in MN. Lara in Champaign. Pattie in Texas. Lisa, in Paris at the time. Heinrich and Doris in Germany.

Everyone was so distant, in one way or another. Kim was ho-hum about it, and Lara did her best with the excitement level, given she had just been waiting until it finally happened.

I felt so lonely. There was no one right there in LaSalle-Peru, no friend I’d become close with since I came home, to squeal with or show my ring to.

All I had was Eric. (And my family, of course.) And I knew that’s the way God intended it—he worked things the way he did—and that’s not an intrinsically bad situation to be in. But that didn’t mean it wasn’t hard.

And as excited and happy as I am to be married to Eric, there have been and I know there will still occasionally be, those lonely moments, as we adjust to married life and as my roots grow deeper in the area.