How We Covet

I picked out my wedding dress in one hour. It was twenty-eight years ago, but I still remember my mom and the boutique owner voicing concern.

“Are you sure?” my mom said worriedly. “You just started looking at dresses.”

Uh-uh, ladies, I thought. You just started watching me look. I’ve been looking at dresses my whole life. Flipping through magazines, taking photographs, studying form and cut and bias. The dress of my dreams was a sepia daguerreotype nestled snugly in the corner of my brain, waiting impatiently for animation.

When I walked in that store, my peripheral vision rejected every color, silhouette and design until my eyes rested on the one. It was almost comical, how easy it was. It was sitting right there, with movie montage light streaming down on it. Ivory, silk shantung, off-the-shoulder. It’s not a dress I would pick today, my taste has changed so much. But that day, I knew I would wear it to walk down the aisle. That day, it was familiar. That day, we were intimate. That day, I bought it. No frill, no fuss, no Bridezilla energy.

It was already mine, it just didn’t know it yet.

The way I choose the things I love, the things I covet, the things I inherently know belong in my life is consistent across the aisle. I bought my car in an hour, the salesperson looking shell-shocked as he printed out my financial statement.

“You made my job easy today,” he said.

That stung, and I remember telling him that it wasn’t my intention to make his job easy.

“I’ve been researching this car for five years,” I said. “You just happened to be standing there with an iPad.”

He looked at me. “Fair enough,” he said.

I may have high standards, but I know what I love, and I don’t see any reason to quibble once I have found what I am looking for. I picked my dog out of a squirmy gaggle of puppies after one look in his big brown limpid eyes. I chose my beloved house, a house more beautiful to me than any mansion in the world, after a walk around the block. I committed to my undergraduate college after a seemingly casual flip through a brochure in my guidance counselor’s office. It may look easy, the way I choose. But nothing could be further from the truth.

Not everyone chooses the same. I had a friend who years back was looking for an eggplant brocade tablecloth for the table in her formal dining room (I didn’t know people used tablecloths anymore; for that matter, I didn’t know people had formal dining rooms. The formal dining room in my house is when the boys take their cleats off the table before they eat). For months she agonized over choices, visited hundreds of stores and searched tirelessly online. Throughout an entire year she bought and returned over a dozen tablecloths she thought would do, but never ended up with the tablecloth of her dreams.

I thought the waste of time and energy was shockingly sad. But it is how she chooses- trying this one, trying that one, seeing if it fits, sometimes ending up with nothing.

People choose the things they love differently. Some people buy and immediately return. Others may regret their purchase but convince themselves that what they have will do just fine. Others keep what they have for a period of time thinking it’s what they wanted, then chide themselves for settling for less than they deserve, eventually buying what they wanted in the first place.

Is the way we choose the people we want in our lives any different?

You’ll recall I presented to you three theories as to how people get together. What if there aren’t three theories, but FOUR? Could I have been wrong? What if along with the Sunflower theory, the Mismatched Socks theory and the Upgrade theory, there is a fourth called the One Stop Shop theory? What if some people walk the earth alone, happily alone, because what they desire is so rare and so unique to their personal taste, that their eyes and heart immediately rejects anyone who does not fit? And what if this goes on so long that they figure they’ll never find this person?

Malcolm and I missed something very important, I think. And it causes me to ask myself a series of not-so-comfortable questions:

What if my search for beautiful enduring things is the same with my search for enduring new love? What if I am so honed and so completely and absolutely sure of what I want, that I will know him when I see him? What if when I meet him, I feel like I have known him my whole life? Would that spell the end of my journey? Would I feel compelled to continue?

Purely hypothetical questions for another time. Talk amongst yourselves.