Dave, Part 1

If you’ve been following along up to this point, you may have noticed that there has been a considerable delay between my last entry and this one.  It’s been harder to write about this than I thought it would be.  There are so many things I want to discuss, but how does one condense 10 years of relationship into a few memories?  I want to convey how absolutely madly in love we were in the beginning.  I’m sure most teenage girls in love think that their story should be a movie, but I really believed that ours could be a blockbuster.  Then after 10 years together, it ended horribly and in a way that even to this day still affects me.

Dave was just the kind of guy that everyone loved and respected.  He was loved at work – he worked at Target.  His siblings all looked up to him.  Other musicians in our community respected him.

Our relationship moved quickly.  He shared an apartment with a friend, but that didn’t last long.  Then he moved into a small, apartment, by himself, and we spent a lot of time alone together.  I had told him that I wanted to wait until marriage, and he said he understood, but it wasn’t long before he was pushing the boundaries just like Michael had.  The difference was that I loved Dave.  Because I loved him, I didn’t want to disappoint him.

About 4 months before I turned 18, we made love for the first time.  I wasn’t forced, but I did feel pressured.  Still, I participated enthusiastically.  When it was over, Dave said he wanted to pray, which was bizarre, because he’d never had any desire to go to church with me.  I felt awash with shame.  I started to cry, and he asked me what was wrong.  I told him that I didn’t want to do that again.  He became angry and mocked me for the things I had said during our love-making.

I justified what we’d done by telling myself we were going to get married anyway.  I was a senior in high school, and we’d begun to discuss what I’d do after high school.  He told me he wanted me to move in with him.  I told him I couldn’t live with him if we weren’t married.  I didn’t want to lose him, but I felt like things were moving way too quickly.  I had a recurring dream, that I was in a car speeding down a mountain and my brakes weren’t working.

I’d stopped going to church out of guilt.  I spent so much time with Dave that I would skip school to spend time with my mother.  My grades crashed.  My life was sliding out of my control.

Then a day came when Dave proposed.  He took me to Ellis Lake in the middle of Marysville, walked me out to a bridge, and got down on one knee.  We got married one month to the day after I graduated from high school.  I knew it was too soon, but I didn’t know how to stop the momentum.  It was a formal wedding.  I wore a white gown and he wore a white tuxedo.  We had a reception in the dining hall next door.  It was as much wedding as we could have hoped for; he was 21 and I was 18.  Neither of us had parents of any means.  He worked at Target and I worked at KFC.

We went back to our apartment and had our first married love-making.  My heart was heavy with the slow realization that none of this is what I’d always dreamed of.  I laid in bed and sobbed into my pillow.  Dave held me and tried to understand, but I don’t think he did.  Hell, I didn’t understand why I felt like this, how could he?

The next day we went to what was then Marriott’s Great America, and that was our Honeymoon.