Fiancéd

I’m going to attempt to deconstruct two things today: the fact that I, Bri Castellini, am engaged to be married, and recent discoveries in therapy. Because it’s not a Bri’s Own World blog if it isn’t multitasking!

Thing the first: I am engaged! To my partner of 7 1/2 years! I’m very excited, even though marriage is functionally meaningless in modern society aside from some archaic tax laws. I don’t care, though. I wanted to be married, and now I will be, to the person in the world I love and treasure the most.

Thing the second: I have discovered that I have an intensely hard time being sincere, everywhere but particularly in person, and becoming engaged has brought a lot of that to the surface because I realized I was dreading having to tell people in a way that genuinely conveyed my excitement without attempting to minimize the vulnerability through jokes and glibness. Even the title of this blog is glib!

Thing the third: the featured image on this post is a TIE fighter pancake my FIANCÉ and I made on our first date.

Thing the fourth: black lives matter, defund & demilitarize the police. This post will live on as evergreen content but it would be disingenuous of me to not acknowledge the day in which it is originally being posted. Educate yourself and donate what you can to relief efforts and bail funds to support the incredibly brave frontline revolutionaries. For education, I recommend this very thorough resource, and this one, as well as this video and this other video.

I will delete any comment about thing the fourth that is anything but 100% supportive. I am not interested in your both sides nonsense today or any day.

Over the years, I’ve gotten more comfortable with earnestness and honestly, but have continued to run scared from sincerity because of the symptom of vulnerability. I hate being vulnerable; emotionally, mentally, physically, professionally, [insert thing]ally. I hate it so much I’d buried the fact that I hate it, thinking for years that I was perfectly well adjusted, aside from all the anxiety and depression.

TURNS OUT! A lot of my anxiety stems from how hard I am on myself, which stems from doing so much work internally and externally so as never to be (or even be perceived as) vulnerable. I’m incredibly defensive, I’m argumentative, and I think my back muscles have been in the same knot since high school. Just one big knot. With vulnerability comes the possibility of failure, and thus the possibility of loss (of a job, of a friend, of an opportunity) and shame. To admit vulnerability would be to admit that sometimes I need help, which in my head makes me a burden, which makes my position in a professional or personal sense even more tenuous. I desperately don’t want to fail or be abandoned. I am, if you long-time readers will remember, in the business of losing best friends.

All this has trained me to keep my own emotions (I have emotions, apparently, and I’m supposed to feel them instead of repressing or solving them. News to me!) buried so deep that when I have something vulnerable to say, I shroud it in jokes and sometimes in overly academic blog posts to use them as productivity; proving I’m funny (I want to work in comedy) or thoughtful (I want to be impressive, so I have more professional opportunities to work in comedy) or on brand (audience is currency, audience prefers consistency, and I want to work in comedy). I have seemed to lose the muscle to be sincere because of this training. IS THIS BLOG POST MORE OF THE SAME? Yes. Leave me alone. It’s how I process, and change doesn’t happen overnight.

How is your engagement related? Also, congrats!

Thanks, person I made up who I’m still somehow feeling uncomfortable taking a congratulations from! There are a few ways my engagement is causing me to reexamine my sincerity allergy.

1. It’s not a traditional story. There was no proposal, there is no ring, and we’ve known we were going to be…. “announcing it”…. since late 2019. The delay is related to Quinn not liking the word fiancé and my not liking the word “girlfriend,” and since the plan is to get married next fall sometime, June 2020 was the compromise to make the language change. We had what I’ve been referring to as a “gentlemen’s agreement” about marriage, because neither of us truly proposed to the other, and we just sort of talked about it for a long time and now we’ve mutually agreed marriage is imminent and Quinn can deal with fiancé for a year. So there’s not really a story, or a surprise (for us), or a reveal, which makes it harder to not make jokes and be a little glib about the announcement
2. It’s not a traditional engagement. Our wedding will, if we do what we’re currently planning, not look much like a wedding. I’m extremely excited. But if the wedding itself is gonna be a little insincere because neither of us are very traditional (I don’t like jewelry and thus didn’t want an engagement ring, Quinn is suspicious of the whole process, neither of us are religious and neither of us want a big wedding), so the announcement being sincere is a bit at odds with what the rest of the process will look like.
3. Modern relationships are more complicated. We’ve been dating for 7 ½ years, living together for 3 ½, and living alone together for 2 ½, so in many ways we’ve been functionally married for a while. Marriage is more of a contract/legal thing plus a party and a vacation. So because it wasn’t a surprise to me (the traditionally proposed-to gender), there’s no ring, and it doesn’t mark a major change in our living status, literally the only thing changing in our day to day is the transition to “fiancé” instead of “boyfriend/girlfriend/partner.”
4. And yet, love. Even with all of this said, I’m genuinely excited to make the transition to “fiancé” and then to “husband.” I fell in love with Quinn within a month of dating. We spent half of the first three years of our relationship long distance (for a year and a half we were in fully different countries), and I never doubted it once. I love him. He’s the best person I know by a margin too large to be comprehended by human brains, and I know a lot of good people. So while the relationship status change and its associated reasons 1-3 (see above) I’m feeling like being glib, I do not want to be glib about the relationship. So I’m really trying hard to commit to sincerity.

I also think it’ll be a useful exercise for me, to be sincere. To present sincerely. Despite my body really really really hating it. I hate sincerity so much that a decade after I performed a chapter from Sarah Vowell’s book about how she used to watch The Godfather multiple times a day for months, I still cannot bring my body to attempt an Italian/New Jersey accent to say “leave the gun, take the cannoli.” That line hAuNtS me to this day. I was 18 years old when I performed that for speech and debate for a year, and I remember the hours my speech coaches spent with me trying to get me to perform that single line, the only quoted line from the Godfather in my performance, with an accent.

Why? Because I’m bad at accents, and I know I’m bad at accents, so my body rejects my attempt to do accents. I can do the Stitch voice (and its variants: Jar Jar Binks and Gollum) on command, but I cannot even try to do an Italian New Jersey accent. I open my mouth and nothing comes out. Because to attempt an accept would be to do so sincerely, to potentially (likely) fail, and to do it in a way people could hear. People would hear and watch me fail and so my body won’t produce the sound. It would rather not attempt it and find a way around it (in this case, by just reading the line in my normal voice) than do it badly. I can hear an attempt in my voice in my head, and even now, sitting alone in my bedroom writing this blog as a 28 year old, I cannot do it out loud, like I’m trapped in one of those dreams where you open your mouth to scream and nothing comes out.

I don’t want to keep screaming soundlessly. I just want to scream. So let’s do something excruciatingly vulnerable and sincere and talk about my love story.

November, 2012

So there’s this boy I’ve been aggressively and loudly flirting with in Creative Nonfiction class, and his 22nd birthday happens to fall on a day we’re in class together. What a coincidence! What if I… made him a present? Based on our year-long inside joke about how I hate octopuses but he loves them? What if I crocheted him an octopus hat? That’s a pretty solid first move.

The day comes, and shit, class is cancelled. He lives off campus. But I made the hat! And it would be weird to just keep it over the weekend! I must find him. I send a quick text, demanding he stay on campus until I find him after his class prior to the one we shared. He did, confused but polite, and then when I finally found him, I demanded we take this picture.

Success! He loved the hat.

Failure! He made this photo his Facebook profile picture and cropped me out of it.

PROOF

Clearly, this was going to take a bit more effort.

January 19, 2013

It’s Jan term (a shortened, 2 week “semester” in January that’s optional), I’m back on campus after my Jan term internship, and I’ve recently acquired a pancake pen (aka a squeeze bottle with a narrow nozzle to make fun pancake shapes) for Christmas. My 4 roommates are nowhere to be found and not responding to texts, and I want to make fun pancakes. Wouldn’t it be funny if…

SHIT. I’d just painted my nails an atrocious color for fun, the dorm is a mess, and I have 1 hour and 19 minutes before the cute boy from class comes over. I’m also in the middle of watching Mission Impossible 4 and I’m not gonna, like, stop. So I carry around my laptop and Tom Cruise keeps me company while I clean the apartment, scrub off the awful nail polish, take a shower, pre-make pancake batter, and panic. Finally, one of my roommates appears about twenty minutes before Quinn is set to come over, having been on a run, and I demand they leave. First, they take a shower and scream-sing musical theater songs, right as Quinn gets to the door downstairs. I scream-sing that they need to finish their song and GTFO, and they sneak out just in the knick of time.

We made all sorts of pancakes, my favorite of which is above, the pancake of a man eating a pancake. We talked for six hours, then… well, read the text to my roommate who I kicked out sent at 3:31am:

January 31, 2013

My 21st birthday is a week later. First, my gift from Quinn:

It’s made of modeling clay and cardboard, and it’s beautifully detailed and a lovely follow up to my hand-crocheted octopus hat for him. We already had a theme! We had dinner at the University Center, but I’d already made plans to go drinking with some girlfriends, so after the gift and dinner, he bid me adieu. Later that night…

My first drunk text to my fiancé! The screenshot is from the next morning, but the text was at around 11pm. I am, and remain, a huge lightweight.

There’s no story with this photo, it’s just from my “official” birthday party a few days later and it’s very cute. What babies we were!

March, 2013

Two months into our relationship, we found our official dynamic. The L word was said this month for the first time as well, but the H word came first, don’t get it twisted.

May, 2013

It’s summer, and I’m home in Colorado while Quinn’s still in Oregon. Thus begins our bad service FaceTimes, and our first few months apart since we started dating. It sucked, but we made do.

February, 2014

Skipping ahead a year, things are going great! Here’s us after walking a mile and a half through a blizzard from his house to my dorm because the roads were too icy to drive and parking on campus was covered in snow too deep to get around.

May, 2014

I’m about to graduate college and we’re both preparing to move; me, to New York City for my MFA in Writing and Producing for Television, him, to Glasgow for his Master of Letters in Creative Writing. We’ve decided to stay together, because the alternative is unthinkable, so we take our first (and to date, only) vacation together on a long weekend to the beach in Oregon. It rains the whole time, and we’re thrilled and in love.

August, 2014

Month 4 of long distance. We decided to send one selfie a day to one another to ensure we’re staying in touch and can still see each other, even if the picture is all we get for that day.

I don’t remember the context of this conversation, but I assume it’s about me getting catcalled again.

November, 2014

Quinn visited me in New York once before heading to Scotland, and in November, I went to him, sadly the only time I could afford to head across the pond while he lived there. We’re hoping to honeymoon either in Ireland or Scotland, and looking through the photos from this trip makes me even more excited.

HE WENT TO SCHOOL HERE. IT JUST LOOKS LIKE THAT ALL THE TIME!!

October, 2015

Finally, at long last, Quinn’s 1 year graduate program ends and he moves to New York. These are the texts I sent him while waiting at the airport to pick him up (at 6am). In my defense, he IS terrible at turning his phone back on after getting off an airplane, an intensely frustrating experience to me, his girlfriend, who hadn’t seen him in months.

He moved in with me and three classmates from my MFA program (our program was 2 years), and we shared the biggest room of a four bedroom apartment. All I can say is: thank GOD we had two bathrooms.

April, 2017

Quinn and I moved to our first solo apartment together. Here’s him in the moving truck!

February, 2018

Our apartment complex wouldn’t let us renew our lease because they were planning to “renovate” (that’s Brooklyn for “repaint and up the price substantially”) to we had to move again, less than a year later. Here’s me in the moving truck moderating a work event using my cell phone WiFi hotspot.

June, 2020

Still at that same apartment, preparing to move to LA in Spring 2021, modeling face masks my mom sent us because there’s a global pandemic. Our most recent selfie together.

There’s a lot of gaps in this love story timeline because for the most part, we’re an excruciatingly boring couple, and truly, sincerely, it’s one of the things I love about us the most. We settled into old married people status almost immediately, we have our own interests and friends we spend time with separately (virtually these days) as well as shared interests and friends we spend time with together, we cook dinner and bicker about the toilet seat getting left up and we are in love.

I don’t believe that things happen for a reason, I don’t believe in divine intervention, I don’t believe in love at first sight. I believe love is a choice, that I choose every day, and so does he. I love being in love with this supportive, kind, funny, unapologetic dork.

The congratulations are going to be uncomfortable to me, because being congratulated on non-work things makes me uncomfortable. I don’t know how to accept complements and congratulations on intangible “achievements” because my only options are to be ironic and insincere and make a joke, or to smile and earnestly accept a nice thing someone has said to me, and the latter is something I didn’t learn. I’m gonna work on it. Thanks in advance.

Love,

Bri

Update from October 2022 😉