No One Knew I Was Married for 13 Years
Hands down, this is one of my wildest stunts ever pulled!
If you think you’ve lived a boring life, just take a jog down memory lane by looking through old photos. Trust me, it’ll trigger something!
It may not be fake weddings and 20-year situationships but I believe you'll uncover hidden bits of flair.
As I have mentioned several times, “Wildhood” is basically like shapeshifting. It comes in many forms and sometimes involves squeezing in your cardio by running from adult responsibilities. 😁
The following story is the LEAST adult thing I’ve ever done.
My entire marriage was a lie.
I don’t mean that my ex-husband was a jerk or a cheater. I mean that literally no one knew I was married for 13 years except for the three people who attended my tiny ceremony in the snow on New Year’s Eve, 2005.
Not even my mother knew about my marriage. I didn’t tell her because she put so much effort into planning my real wedding day and I didn’t want to take that away from her.
Confused? I know, right?
Here’s how it all went down.
I’m Canadian and I met my American husband, compliments of the internet. Both of us were members of a very active online travel forum. Several members, including him, lived in Florida and we had all become good enough virtual friends that I thought flying down for a real-life group linkup would be fun.
Long story short, the forum linkup was a BLAST! All of us were women except him and for some reason, he and I hit it off instantly.
The rest, as they say, is history.
Since he’s from Florida and I’m from Canada, our dating years consisted of many trips back and forth to see each other for a week at a time. I LOVED his Florida beaches and sunshine and he adored my Canadian mountains and snow. Being in a relationship with Frederick was like a permanent vacation.
During our two years of dating before marriage, we were that couple. You know, the couple everybody looked at and wished they could be like. We were so in love that we joked that if we ever split up, we’d have to be neighbors so we could continue “borrowing a cup of sugar,” forever. 😉
We were that good.
Long distance always kept our relationship fresh and new but as we learned the hard way, this barely equates to knowing each other well enough to marry.
Foolishly, we did it anyway.
In the final hours of 2005, we pulled a shotgun wedding on New Year’s Eve. We hired a justice of the peace, threw on winter boots and tied the knot in a beautiful, snow-filled park in my hometown.
Nobody attended or even knew about this secret celebration except my son and my two best friends as our witnesses.
Our real wedding date — the public jubilee — had already been set for June 2006. My mother helped me fine-tune all the details such as booking the venue and hand-making invitations and decorations.
My sister accompanied me in wedding dress shopping and footed the bill for my “Say yes to the dress” moment. Exciting times were upon us.
The reason for our shotgun wedding in the woods six months before the real one was to get a jump on his immigration paperwork. Since he was American we’d have to go through the visa process to get him into Canada and all we needed was a marriage certificate to get the ball rolling.
Our clever plan was to quietly marry, start the paperwork, and then attend our ‘official’ wedding in June. Our family and friends would be none the wiser.
This secret was going to the grave with both of us.
(Us cutting cake at our cute engagement party at my mother’s house)
So, where is he now?
I’m glad you asked.
Our family wedding never happened because our relationship didn’t even last six months after the secret nuptials. This was as close as I’ll ever get to behaving like a celebrity — the shortest-lived marriage ever. 😁
We shotgunned on NYE 2005 and by April we knew it was over.
This put us pretty much on par with those whack celebrity unions that only last a few minutes. I’ve Googled “shortest celebrity marriages” and we were comparable with Pamela Anderson and Kidd Rock.
Our fallout made me SO glad that no one knew we had actually done the deed. This way, our families could go on thinking we just broke off the engagement and didn’t make it to our giant leap.
Here’s the best part though…
After it all fell apart, he and I never pursued a divorce. It never felt like a priority and didn’t impact our separate lives in Canada and the United States. We just remained forever friends in our hearts and forever ‘separated’ on tax returns.
Every New Year’s Eve, we’d text and wish each other, “Happy anniversary, baby! Here’s to another amazing year!” It became our favorite running joke.
On our 5th anniversary, I asked all my Facebook friends to spam his inbox with unsolicited HAPPY ANNIVERSARY messages.
One year, I had a pregnant friend make a positive pregnancy test so I could mail it to him with, “Congratulations…DADDY!” written on the card. I wish I could’ve seen the look on his face.
I even remember in 2016, the day Trump was first elected, I messaged Frederick and asked if he’d like to hold off on divorce and reconsider coming to Canada. We were still legally married…he technically had a ticket out.
But, as all great stories must come to an end, shortly after our 13th anniversary, we decided we should probably cut the invisible tie that bound us. I began the divorce filing process.
It was kind of sad coming to that point because we had always joked about making it to fifty years without a single argument. We had no reason to argue because it didn’t impact me one bit if he left the toilet seat up in Florida or didn’t fold his laundry. Not my circus…not my monkies.
For our divorce filing, I needed to make a copy of our marriage certificate and had the bright idea of using my mother’s copier while she wasn’t home. But when I left her house I forgot one crucial detail.
I’d left the original certificate inside her copy machine and weeks later…she found it.
If not for that one little lapse in judgment, no one would have ever known I was married — except for the two friends and my son who witnessed our wedding in the woods.
My only regret in this whole ordeal?
I never got to wear my wedding dress, dammit!
I still have it and still adore it, even though it most certainly wouldn’t fit anymore. But if I’m ever able to slink into it without bulging out of the crisscross strings down the back… I’m totally down for a “trash the dress” photo shoot.
Maybe I should do it on a beach.
In Florida.
With the original husband 😂
I mean, he did just send me some awesome pics of himself frolicking on snowy Florida beaches the other day. It’s like a sign from Mother Nature…carrying my Canadian snow down to his sunny beaches. What are the odds?
Stay tuned for the next twenty years of our saga 😎
Have you ever flipped through your old photos and realized that hey…you have indeed lived out some of your Wildhood in the most unlikely ways?
Well, except for the divorce part, we did the same thing, we met on line, me in Canada he in the USA we got married 6 months later at the courts -- no one knew -- we had strangers as witnesses. We had a "wedding" in June and no one knew. Then spent 3 years with the separate lives flying back and forth to see each other until the immigration came through. That was 20 years ago!
This is a great story!
Mine is good, too — in a nutshell, we had two weddings because he needed emergency medical care (and my insurance—he had just come to the US). One wedding was on my sofa. We honeymooned in the ER. Then we had the simple ceremony we’d planned a few days later, but the sofa wedding was the real one.