I called off my wedding two weeks before the wedding date

When we met in New York, my ex fiance’ was a French ex-pat interning in NYC before returning to France to finish his last year of college, and I was a college senior interning in the city before I was due to return to Indiana University for my last semester. What had started as a summer fling soon morphed into a love story that eventually found me moving to France after graduation to live with him while he finished school. By the time we both landed back in NYC to build a life together, it had felt as though we had been acting on impulse, not allowing ourselves time to think about the very adult decisions we were making, and instead just chasing our emotions.

Flash forward four years and we had made the decision to move-in together, live in a small one-bedroom apartment in Manhattan that ate up the lion’s share of our respective paychecks, and get engaged. Everything seemed to be unfolding according to plan, but for reasons I couldn’t quite articulate at that point, I felt as though my life was rocketing in the wrong direction.

You see, I had always dreamed of being a writer—a dream that had been knocked sideways when I struggled to find a job in NYC and instead stumbled into an entry level position in advertising. As I started to turn focus towards my dreams of writing (and not just writing, travel writing), tension in my engagement began to grow.

It was two weeks before my wedding—a lavish upstate New York affair with over 100 people scheduled to attend. By this point, I had been avoiding my wedding like the plague, running away from it at every chance by busying myself in my budding passion for travel writing. Red flags were raised but rather than confront myself, I avoided myself instead, losing myself to travel and all the wrong decisions.

It wasn’t until I made the choice to solo travel to Argentina two weeks before my wedding and was standing alone in the jungles of Iguazu National Park did I finally stop running. I remember hiking through the jungle alone and asking myself: “what is it you have to say?” Before I could think, a response roared out of me: “I DON’T WANT TO GET MARRIED.” Overtime, this moment has taken on almost mythical status in my life for being the moment where I stopped running and took back my life.

Calling off a wedding is like a throwing a rock in a lake and watching the ripples fan out from the point of impact. The first ripple, of course, are all the financial losses endured by you, your groom, his family, and your family, and the guests who booked travel and hotels. The next ripple comes all the wasted stuff: the wedding dress altered to fit my body, the hundreds of dollars of Etsy decor purchased for the wedding, the three-tier wedding cake, the customized wedding favors, the myriad wedding gifts. The next ripple is the gossip and speculation, which saw people close to me distancing themselves.

Calling off a wedding is not a pretty affair—it’s heart wrenching, difficult, lonely, and guilt ridden, but I made the choice to walk through that storm because I had realized something back in the Argentina jungle that I couldn’t unlearn: this is my life to live.

It took time after I called off my wedding, but slowly my life began to move in the direction of what I hoped and envision it would be. I quit my job in advertising and threw myself into my passion of travel writing, eventually landing a full-time, on-staff position as a travel writer for a budding publication.

As my career grew, so too did my ability to travel and write about compelling stories found along my way. On a personal level, I eventually met my would-be future husband, a creative soul who feels like my counterpart in every way. Not only did he embrace, understand, and support my creative endeavors, but all the drama that I had come to associate with love and relationships seemed to clear when he entered my life.

While I certainly wish I had confronted myself about my wedding earlier on, thereby avoiding such a financial and emotional fall-out, looking back, I wouldn’t change a thing. Every single moment in our lives connects to the next in surprising ways. And while we may not necessarily see that connection when we’re going through it, eventually we do look back and admire how everything flowed into the next thing.

Any arbitrary turning along the way and my life might look different today. I might not have met my husband or have the career I now have. For as hard and trying as this time in my life was, I am endlessly proud of that girl who ran away to Argentina before her wedding and had the strength to decide not to walk down that aisle.

~ Nikki Vargas, author of CALL YOU WHEN I LAND