Dear Cary,
Am I a horrible person for hoping my husband doesn't go with me to my 10-year high school reunion next month?
Since it was first mentioned, he automatically assumed he's going, and having never been to one of those things, I'm not sure about the protocol. But last night, I was thinking about it and dreading it. I'm not the awkward little girl I was when I started high school, or the insecure young adult I was when I graduated. I was never popular, but I had lots of friends and interests. I earned my degree. I'm in great shape. I write for a newspaper. My husband is wonderfully fun and handsome and interesting. He's successful, too; he's a lawyer.
I guess I'm hoping for the satisfying closure you always see in the movies and books about reunions, where classmates finally accept the main character, where she reconciles with the friends she's wronged and hasn't spoken to in a decade, where all unrequited loves admit how blind they were never to have seen how amazing she is. I'm living in a fantasy world, I know. But I fear there's no chance of anything happening with my husband hovering nearby.
Maybe I am still the insecure little girl that I was then, if all that affirmation is so important to me after all these years.
I'm also worried that he'll be bored while we hang out with my friends the entire weekend in my hometown. Everything will be an inside joke. Or worse, he'll think we're lame, or he'll hear about ex-boyfriends or other unpleasantness in my past that I'd rather avoid. I can't tell him not to come. No matter what I say, he'll think I'm ashamed of him, when it's not that at all.
The reunion is having a strange effect on my entire group of friends. My best friend is refusing to go, and when her husband (another classmate) brings it up, she cries. She has achieved success in the career she always predicted she was going to have. She's smart and friendly and interesting. She married her high school sweetheart, and she looks great. She had serious issues with weight for a while, but she's conquered them.
Another friend of mine who moved overseas shortly after college graduation has been planning for two years, before the event was even annoounced, to fly in for it. It's all she's been talking about. She was bullied all the way through middle school and she wasn't well accepted in high school, but she is sure that everyone will be so much more mature and friendly and accepting. I'm afraid that it will be a huge letdown to her. She just went through a divorce. I guess the root of this is: Why are we all making this reunion the end-all, be-all of everything? What can we do to get past all this insanity?
Reuniting and It Feels No Good
Dear Reuniting,
I think you are making the reunion a big deal because high school was a big deal and there are many powerful emotions still cooking after all those years.
What you can do to get past the insanity is recognize ahead of time what it will actually be like and plan for that.
Make some rules for your husband. Tell him you will want to be just with your old friends for some of the time. But also include him in some big dinner or something. And make some plans ahead of time with the people you really want to see.
What happens when you put a society of adolescents together for a few years, bond them intensely and then suddenly loose them on the world? All those relationships go into the freezer. They don't keep well. You take them out a decade later and they've decayed. It's not that the people have decayed, but the relationships, which are fed by contact and interaction, have decayed. There are no functioning relationships between these people. So naturally at high school reunions many people feel confusion and sometimes disappointment or sharp letdown. It's a bunch of strangers who used to know each other. You're not going to feel the way you used to feel, nor are you going to heal the past. You're going to be you, today's you, encountering people that you used to know but don't really know anymore.
So be prepared for unexpected melancholy. It may help beforehand to take stock of yourself honestly, to admit that a part of you is still only 15 but so is everyone else and admit that you are still afraid of the popular girls but so is everyone else and admit you really dread going to this but so does everyone else and admit that even though it's going to be scary and awkward you have to go anyway just like they do -- because you just have to find out. You have to find out what happened to all these people. That's all. You just have to find out.
And then you'll know.
Be prepared for people to be weird and nasty and strange and drunk. Be prepared for people you thought were nice to be mean and people you thought were mean to be nice.
Be prepared to find idiots prospering and geniuses failing, the best and the brightest tarnished and fallen, the mediocre shining and thriving, those you thought you loved and admired suddenly shallow and dull, those you never noticed suddenly effervescent and gleaming and irresistible.
Be prepared for some really bad hair. Be prepared for premature sweater vests and unimaginable slacks.
Be prepared for the spectacle of incompleteness, of a swarm halfway there, no longer brimming with potential yet not accomplished either, beginning again only beginning bigger this time, and a bit clumsy as all beginners are.
Be prepared for the deep-voiced pomposity of the formerly shy in full boorish bloom, the new engineering sales manager heading his division, exceeding his targets. Be prepared for the nervous too-wide smile and the wallet full of pictures: wives standing on beaches and wives pushing baby carriages and wives in uniform. Be prepared for bad breath and insensitive questions.
Be prepared to feel an overwhelming desire to run away.
When necessary, detach. Think of work and what needs doing at home, and how much better you like your new life than your old life.
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