I met my fiancée Tracey the first week in October and we were spending a lot of time together. Besides enjoying each other’s company and our friends dating one another we lived just three blocks apart on the East Side of Manhattan.
I enjoyed all the time I spent with Tracey and decided to invite her to my best friend Ian’s wedding over Thanksgiving weekend. But I left out a few details – I was the best man and my parents and sister would be attending. I filled her in the day before the wedding. Afterwards, I took note that many girls would have gotten angry, but she took it all in stride. We had a great time at the wedding and it made it easy to introduce Tracey to my family and friends.
As New Year’s approached I hadn’t booked my annual trip to Miami. I had gone down to Florida to hang out with my friend Dan for five straight years. A group of fraternity brothers from Indiana would go down and “crash” at his apartment at the Flamingo in South Beach. One year as many as eight of us stayed in his one bedroom apartment. The Flamingo, or as we liked to call it, a college dorm on steroids, had two pools facing the bay and was filled with kids in their 20s. But this year was a little different; I was dating Tracey. So I decided to stay in New York.
We made plans to spend New Year’s with my best friend Ian and his new wife Dana. We went out to dinner at Prime House on Park Avenue with three other married couples. I just remember being very frightened of the thought of going from partying at clubs on New Year’s to having a dinner party.
Honestly, the thought of commitment was starting to give me anxiety. Mixing alcohol and anxiety is not good, particularly on New Year’s. When we got back to my apartment at about 3 a.m. Tracey and I got into an argument. Who knows what the argument was about, but I know why it started. We broke up and didn’t speak for three weeks.
Being single in Manhattan, dating and getting to know different women, going out to dinners, bars and clubs with your friends every weekend and doing what you want when you want are all a great part of being in your 20s. Parting with that lifestyle is not easy!
But I learned a great life lesson in that you don’t truly appreciate what you have until it’s gone.
