Categories: uncategorized
Date: 23 March 2006 12:48:23
I thought my life was over.
We'd been engaged for around a year, and were fairly well advanced in planning the wedding. Then a mature, wise, Christian friend of my then-fiancée's told her that she thought we shouldn't get married. My fiancée apparently had shown huge potential before I showed up, and since then I had been a bad influence and caused her to go off the rails. In short, we should stop the relationship there and then. Obviously flustered, my fiancée couldn't think what to do, but thought she had better tell me at least that she was having second thoughts, prompted by this wise woman's words.
Unfortunately, I was living in Spain at the time, not entirely sure of my surroundings, and so feeling a little lost. In fact, I didn't even have access to the few support mechanisms that I had built up in Spain, because I was away at a conference, trapped in a small hotel, in a small village, surrounded by lots of successful, intelligent people who lived for their work in a way that I knew I never could. So every day I was being fed a dose of insecurity by not being able to keep up with these people, which probably didn't leave me best placed to take a phone call from my fiancée saying she was thinking of leaving me.
I think I kept my composure during the phone call, but I remember locking myself in a toilet afterwards (I couldn't go to my room as it was shared so I would have no privacy) and crying my eyes out. Eventually a friend noticed my absence and sought me out, consoled me and helped get things in perspective. I am still grateful for that. And even more grateful that my fiancée decided quickly that, wise and mature though that friend was, she was wrong about me. So life began again.