Personal Struggle — Part Three
This is a continuation of my personal story. I recommend reading it in chronological order starting with Part I.
This is a very personal account that I’m sharing with the world to bring awareness of several atrocious events that happened to me almost 19 years ago and were left unpunished.
On our wedding day on July 28, 2001.
Part III:
So there I was, stuck with a ring on my finger and a feeling of being completely trapped in this relationship. Can you imagine proposing at somebody’s wedding and totally stealing their wind? One has to be a special kind of individual to do something like this.
The next 9 or 10 months between the proposal and the wedding were a total blur for me. On some level, the marriage was arranged between him and my family without any of my involvement. I was a troubled kid and he was a mature adult who promised to take good care of me as long a they supported him financially. Or as they thought, would just give him an initial financial boost.
My ex spent as much time with my dad as possible. One might have thought that he was getting married to him instead of me. They wined and dined together. They played chess, backgammon and poker together. My ex put more energy into courting my family than he did to court me.
After I didn’t get into Stanford, my dad completely stopped giving a shit about my future. Not that anyone was ever much interested in it or tried to encourage my talents, education, or career. From an early age I was labeled a black sheep and a loser of the family and nobody expected much from me.
It didn’t matter to my parents at the time that I was actually enrolled in one of the top art programs in the country at CCA (it was still CCAC back then). As an artist and designer I was considered a financial failure and they basically wanted to sell me off (preferably in my prime at 19 years old) to the best bidder who could provide a comfortable living for me. Very feudal of them. I know.
My ex was definitely far from being the best suitor for me, but he talked the talk and promised to strike big with only a little initial investment. To his credit, he did manage to build a massive dental and medical empire with the money he got (hmm stole) from me and my family, but more on that later.
So when I announced my engagement, nobody tried to stop me. Actually, there was this one distant relative who took me out for lunch to talk some sense into me, however, she was too cowardly to tell me exactly what she knew about him that was so bad. She knew him for a long time from before he even went to med school, but she was very vague about why he was not a good person. It also didn’t help that this disturbing lunch happened right before the wedding and maybe if she had thought about telling it to me a bit sooner, I would have listened more.
There was a brief moment of hesitation within my family when my bourgee parents were first introduced to his working class folks. It came as a bit of a shocker to them and they did question if this union was in fact a good decision. However, all of their doubts were subdued by the fact that everyone was already so invested in The Wedding.
My mom had already gotten a brand new facelift and 3 couture gowns. My dad had already outfitted my ex with the latest sports BMW, a Patek Philippe watch, and custom Italian suits from Gene Hiller in Sausalito. Forty thousand roses were ordered to be flown from Ecuador, three of the biggest Russian celebrity singers, twenty backup dancers, and sixteen musicians were booked to perform at the wedding, which was so epic that it became a thing of its own.
There was me getting married and then there was The Wedding. As soon as I announced that I was getting married, my narcissistic parents seized the opportunity to throw themselves the ultimate party, a three day affair to manifest all their glory, success, and celebrity status. I was just used as an excuse and as part of their entertainment.
Of course, all of my teenage dreams of having a fairytale wedding were still strong and I happily went along with all the planning, buying of the princess dress, and picking out the cake and the flowers. I prided myself at doing it all on my own without a wedding planner, yet I was in a state of such oblivion and denial that I couldn’t even comprehend that things were beginning to completely spin out of my control.
About 4 months before the set wedding date, I started getting cold feet and panic attacks. I could feel that something just wasn’t right, that I didn’t have much in common with my fiancé, that I wasn’t all that happy in this relationship. At the same time, the thought of canceling the wedding this late in the game felt even more terrifying. How could I disinvite over 300 people that were coming from all over the world? How could I cancel everything that was already ordered? At that moment I was so scared of my parents and their reaction. How could I cancel after they spent so much money? How could I bring so much humiliation?
I thought to myself that if I didn’t go through with the wedding, my parents would never forgive me and view me as the biggest failure in life. With the low self-esteem that I had back then, this wedding was something that gave me a sense of some self-validation. I also hoped that it would finally make me look more accomplished in the eyes of my parents. Ironically, they have completely forgotten about how eager they were to marry me off and consider me to be the biggest moron and the biggest loser for having married that asshole.
I told myself that I was better off at the time to avoid major scandal, go through with the wedding and then in the worst case scenario get divorced afterwards. I also convinced myself that I was being silly, that it was just a case of cold feet, and that I was very lucky to be getting married to such an amazing person. What can I say? I was just a little kid. I couldn’t even legally drink at my own wedding.
That’s how I got married. The wedding took place at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco in the summer of 2001. It was so epic that the 90 minute wedding video that was produced afterwards was copied and watched by hundreds if not thousands of random people in different cities. People would host watch parties to watch my wedding video tape.
My most vivid memory of that day is how I started suffocating under the thick layers of my veil, which were accidentally thrown over my face, and the bright spot lights that were shining on me as I stood under the chuppah. I felt that I was about to faint in that stiff corset under that Vera Wang dress. I felt that I was about to die. I probably already knew on some level that this marriage meant the death of me.
To be continued…