Pop Songs and Looking Back

This post is about Avril Lavigne. You know, tiny Canadian who used to go around splashing in mall fountains. That girl. She’s back if you haven’t heard. Back with a catchy little diddy called “What the H-E-Double Hockey Sticks?” (I’m a role model, you know. Can’t be caught swearing on the interweb). So anyway, surprising as it might be, this song has really got me thinking.

The chorus, (inspirational really) if you haven’t heard it, goes “all my life I’ve been good but now oooohhh what the he*l. all I want is to mess around”… there’s more but it’s immaterial at the moment. What praytell could this possibly make me think about you may wonder. If you don’t know Avril’s story, she recently got divorced and, to me, this song is to her ex-husband telling him what he already knows, which is that it turns out she wasn’t ready to settle down and she just needs some time to have fun and embrace youth and go buckwild and all that. Well, as a gal that’s about to get hitched, this song sort of put me into, let’s call it, feverish wondering.



Let’s be honest. Ever since Nik and I got serious and decided this relationship was going to lead to marriage, I’ve been on the train to Old Fogeytown. I thought I had come to terms with this but now as the actual arrival at the station draws ever nearer, I am a little terrified that I will become irredeemably dull. There’s a myth out there that says that as soon as you say I do or I wed or Yes Please you become an infinitely more boring person. Married people try to say this isn’t true but 1) let’s look at the facts and 2) what else would they say?

So as I listen to Avril I think, did I see and do everything I wanted? Did I spend enough time picturing my life married to someone British? These are the tough questions one has to answer as one embarks on the epic journey of married life.

I don’t want you to think that I’m having serious doubts or second thoughts, I’m not. I am looking forward to marrying Nik with all my heart, and I am more excited about it than I’ve ever been about anything. I know it will be amazing. But this questioning, this looking back and wondering, seems to be the natural product of every life-altering decision we make. And we’ll always be at least a little disappointed by what we didn’t accomplish or experience. How could we not? Life is full of so many opportunities that we have to miss some of them. And the human mind has an unlimited capacity to dwell. So I guess it’s all just a part of life. The trick is to learn to override the dwell function and let go of the missed opportunities in order to embrace the things that really matter, the chances that you do take and the opportunities you do seize—like marrying the love of your life.