How I Married My Wedding Officiant: My Story of Building my Dream Family

I have studied it a lot from the academic side.

You know, I've thought a lot about this because I've always wondered what happens when you have a broken attachment, when you grow up in a home where you feel like neglected or abused or that you couldn't really rely on your caregivers or your family.

Maybe your family had mental illness or addiction, but Usually when you come from such a background like that, it's what we call an attachment trauma, right? Relational trauma.

So coming from my background like that, I've always wondered like, well, then how do we build a family? Like what does work? What makes sense? How do you do this? And I've really had to unlearn a lot of the coping mechanisms I've had to help me survive through earlier times in my life and actually had to learn what it means to build a family in a secure attachment.

So I'm going to go through the story.

I'm probably going to mess up a lot, but I'm going to give the kind of the unfiltered version here.

So I'll start by saying that I used to believe that willpower was everything.

I really believe that if I worked hard, put in the effort, sacrifice, that I could earn most things in life that I wanted, right? Just like I earned my way into the Duke PhD program when I was becoming clinical psychologist and before and after I was like, you know, the perfect student working really hard.

I was glued to my laptop for 12 hours a day, every single day.

It's not an exaggeration.

Um, trying to do all the things, write the papers, see the patients, right? Like really work hard.

And up until that point, I had poured everything into building a career because that was the thing that was most important to me.

But when I turned 30, that's when my biological clock started to tick.

and I was like, oh, okay, time to make a family.

Now it's time for me to go all in on that, and it seemed like everything was going to plan when, I'll call him Danny, but you probably know his name from previous episodes, but Danny, my college ex-boyfriend, he came back into my life.

I hadn't seen him since college, really.

We were a little bit after, but It had been years since we've been in contact.

And he was like the one who got away, the one that I pined over, that I always felt like not good enough.

And he always like held me at a distance.

So when he came back into my life at a mutual friend's wedding, he told me that I was the only woman he's ever really loved.