But things never really did feel OK, and the more life happened to me, the further I got from feeling as though I'd ever figure out what I wanted so I stopped trying to figure out anything and took the road most traveled.

I am always lamenting what I looked like in my twenties, not just because I was about sixty pounds overweight, but because if I look hard enough at those pictures I can see how hard I was trying to bury down deep the person I never took the time to try and find. Trying to figure out what I wanted meant I'd take the chance of choosing a different road, one that might not make everyone happy. So I covered her up not in booze and drugs and sex and food, though there were elements of all of those things, but mostly she was hidden in a safe relationship with a nice man in a lovely neighborhood in Chicago in a massive apartment with central air decorated with assorted knick knacks and a wedding that cost tens of thousands of dollars with her name in lights on a marquee in downtown Joliet.

The newspaper in Joliet even wrote a story about me, christening my accomplishments. If I had any doubt in my decisions, that all but extinguished them. As it's well-known in our circles, as far as the people in Joliet are concerned, until they've decided you've made it, you haven't made it.

I'd finally made it.

The day we got back from the honeymoon - and I've recounted this before, I know - we headed straight for the emergency room because I was convinced I had a brain tumor. Midway through the trip, after being stunned by how very little I actually had in common with the person I married, how very much I wanted to be back home with my family and friends, I could not relieve this dull stabbing that was happening on the left side of my head. It was like being pricked intermittently with a knitting needle. I took Advil and Xanax. I rubbed worry stones I'd picked up in Blarney. I tore through Jennifer Weiner's latest novel. I stopped smoking. Nothing worked.

Nothing was physically wrong with me, and as soon as I was back home for a few days I was fine.

I poured myself into other things, other activities, and one of those was writing for Chicagoist. The book was finished, my job was no longer new, and I needed something, anything, to distract me from how sad and numb I felt upon realizing that I'd made a very big mistake.

When I talk about Scott as my best friend, it's not because he makes my heart leap, though he does that. It's not because he makes me laugh, though he does. He's not my best friend because there is something chemical and innate about our bond, though it's the sort of connection some friends have said they envy deeply. It's not because he brings me the new Wonder Woman comic every month, or because he will get up and take Glinny out so I can sleep in on Saturday mornings, or because he always lets me take up the majority of the couch when we're watching TV without fail.

Scott is my best friend because when it could have been very easy for me to fall right back into living the unexamined life, he pushed me to be more. He challenged me, and supported me, and made it so that the life I was so desperate to figure out - one that include more than the status quo, than the OK - was one the I'd find and on my own terms. I was miserable and he gave me the courage to be brave enough to figure out what was true.

And he did all this while I went kicking and screaming the whole way through. I think I even scratched and bit a few times, to be honest. I was a bear to deal with. But Scott? He licked his wounds, dusted me off and set me right back on the road.

It was inevitable that I'd eventually reach a breaking point, that I'd eventually get sick of trying to carve out some perfect life for myself and just stop. What I also believe now is that just as inevitable was that Scott would be there to make sure I'd see it through. It was fate. I'm sure of it.

We're getting married, me and Scott. And soon. And unlike my first wedding, and his, it will be the smallest of small affairs. We want more than anything to place all of the emphasis on our marriage, and during no occasion more does that emphasis seem more sacred and necessary than during the ceremony itself. I don't want to worry about caterers or seating charts or gift registries. Neither does he. It seems rather antithetical to our entire belief about our marriage anyway.

Besides, I already have a mixer.

I'm no longer naive enough to have any hard and fast rules about marriage. Scott and I live our lives with the commitment in mind, every day, that we have to each other. The rest seems to have fallen into place. It's not easy, but it's a good guide. Mostly for me, I hope to live the rest of my life giving to him what he's given to me. I don't know that there is enough time to be able to accomplish that, but I'm going to try.

Every day, I'm going to try.