Random Thoughts

To Clarify

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Last time I wrote a small post before boarding a plane for a trip to celebrate my birthday. In said post I vaguely explained that I had called something off. A select handful of people knew what it was about while others didn’t. To shed some light on the situation I will share a bit more of what has been happening in my personal life for the past few months.

In late February, while having lunch my father, he informed me that Madelyn was going to be in town for her father’s birthday. Madelyn was an old friend that I used to have “play dates” between the ages of 10 and 12. The play dates stopped when Madelyn was shipped off to boarding school in Seville, coincidentally to the same boarding school my older sister was attending. Then came the one thing that turned my life upside down and inside out. My father said, “She’s your betrothed bride.”

My parents had set up an arranged marriage in tween years. While arrange marriages are no longer the norm, they still exists. They also have a higher success rate. This apparently has been the custom in my family for quite sometime. My father, on the other hand, did not marry his betrothed, as she passed away a year prior before the marriage was suppose to take place.

The last few months I have had to deal with a onslaught of planning a wedding I didn’t want. We found time between my busy schedule here in a LA and her life in Cambridge finishing up her MBA. When I was in New York for work, she came out on holiday during Easter Weekend. During that weekend we took time to try to reconnect, introduced her a few friends, and looked at the Plaza Hotel as a possible wedding/reception local. After having coffee we had an altercation over some differences and she stormed out. I thought it was all over, but I was wrong. A few days later I was informed, that she had chosen the Plaza and the wedding would be in autumn. A few days after that, the date was confirmed. November 7th was the day I was to be wed. As you can see, I was being informed what was going to happen. Nothing I did was going to change that.

While I was focusing more on work, our parents (hers and mine) had already started talking about guest list, colours, table settings, etc. A few weeks later I was given a sheet with 150 blank spaces to fill in name of those I wanted to invite. Madelyn also had 150 guest of her own… our parents had already agreed on 500, for a grand total of 800 invitations. I took me a couple of days to finish up my list and still had a few spaces to spare and everything was ready for the invitations until Madelyn decided she no longer liked the invitations she had picked out. She wanted to personally pick out the invitation when she was back in LA. So that pushed back a lot of the planning on her part and made me look bad in front of the few people that knew I was getting married and where awaiting their invitations.

There were family politics why I couldn’t say no. The was constant barrage of congratulations from all my relatives, some I didn’t even knew I had. I tried to find common ground… I tried to to be this person I was suppose to be or least our families wanted me to be. But at the end of the day it was just a mask.

I couldn’t live a lie and try to be with someone that I knew had no connection or chemistry with.

I’m not saying that I’m a catch, far from it… I have many, many faults. But the points stays the same, I was being groomed to be in a loveless marriage. But with this I am going to endure a lot of consequences which I still not sure what’s the worst that can happen.

I had dinner with Madelyn parents last Tuesday night to discuss what they wanted to do with the expenses of what had already been deposited for the hall, reception, and whatnot.

Since then I have been harassed by my own family. While my immediate family is out of town, aunts and uncles disapprove of my choice.

I dislike that my family deems it necessary to tell me how to live my life. Many of them are ashamed that I chose to study music. They are ashamed that I didn’t go to UCLA, Brown, USC, or Cornell. Yet I have done well for myself. I have decent career and somewhat happy for all the thing I have been able to do at my young age of 23.

While there are still other consequences to face when my parents get back, they can disown me for all I care. I will stand my ground. I will fight for what I believe. I will not be broken.

“Never give in, never give in, never; never; never; never – in nothing, great or small, large or petty – never give in except to convictions of honor and good sense”

-Winston Churchill

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