Weddingbee Blog

Happy (belated) New Year’s! This year is what I like to think of as a landmark year for the mister and me—not only are we planning the biggest, baddest party of our lives, otherwise known as our wedding, but we are also entering our 10th year as a couple. Looking back over the past nine years of our lives together, I can’t help feeling nostalgic for the couple we once were and excited for the couple we are becoming and the life we are building together.

We’ve grown up together and, as you all know, growing up is never easy. Mr. Cotton Candy and I originally became engaged in the summer of 2007. I was fresh out of college and six months into my first “real” job; after seven years of dating, getting engaged seemed like the logical next step. The wedding date was set for April of 2009, wedding planning was in full swing, and life was good. Fast forward to the summer of 2008, and everything we had built as a couple began to crumble.

We were living together in his tiny one-bedroom apartment, and I was working a thankless job for little pay with a two-hour-plus commute both ways. Things became tense in our little world, and I became resentful of the ties that I felt our relationship had on me. Slowly the the relationship (and the person) I had turned to for comfort and support was beginning to feel stifling and oppressive. I began to dread the future I saw ahead of us—I felt like I was losing control of my life and my future, and everything inside of me screamed to get out.

Things finally came to a head for us one evening in October. I arrived home late after working overtime at my job to find Mr. Cotton Candy sitting alone in the dark. He said we needed to talk; he knew I had been unhappy for some time in our relationship and that it might be best if we called the wedding off and went our separate ways. I will forever be grateful to him for having the courage to end our relationship at a time when I didn’t. I shudder to think of what our lives would be like now if we went through with the wedding and never addressed the issues that were crippling our relationship at the time.

In the weeks that followed our breakup, I moved out of our apartment and into my own place and gave notice at my job. Although my heart was heavy, I felt a great sense of freedom and relief. We maintained a strong friendship during our time apart as a couple. I had always believed that our friendship was the strongest part of our relationship while we were together, and I was proven right during our many months apart.

Much to the confusion of our friends and family, we continued to spend weekends together as friends, enjoying all the things we once did before our relationship hit hard times. Without the pressures of our relationship and the impending wedding, we were able to begin rebuilding the friendship that had always been at the core of our relationship, and over time we began to address a lot of the unspoken issues that eventually lead to our breakup. With the distance that our breakup created, we were able to talk freely about our past issues, and we spent many evenings pouring our hearts out to each other and sharing our fears and pains from the past. We finally began to heal old wounds that had never had a chance to heal.

Time passed, and then around the second anniversary of our engagement, we took the step from friendship to more than friends. It was a natural progression for us, but we moved with caution, keeping our reunion on the down low until the following October. One year after our breakup, we both confessed our renewed love for each other and our desire to take our new relationship to the next level. Sometime after we began talking about our wedding again, I began wearing my ring again and we began planning a wedding. In typical Mr. and Miss Cotton Candy fashion, this all happened with no big second proposal and no big announcement to our friends and family.

Looking back, I truly believe that our time apart not only made us stronger as a couple but also reaffirmed our belief that we are with the person that we are truly meant to be with. Not only has the friendship that we shared grown stronger, but we have also been able to come to terms with a lot of emotional muck from the last 10 years. This June I will be marrying my best friend, and on that day I will go into our union knowing that our relationship is the strongest that it has ever been—something that I wouldn’t be able to do our first time around.

Oh, and just because I love the song and because it sums up everything I feel when I look back on the past couple of years:

Did you and your FI spend time apart before your engagement?