Weeks ago, Alex Clark announced her engagement.
I wasn’t acutely aware of her fiance in the way I was of her previous public and serious boyfriend.
I remember when her followers first started speculating about whether they’d broken up.
I convinced myself they were just reading too hard into things and looking for something that wasn’t actually there, in part because they had a tendency of doing that and in part because I just didn’t want to believe it.
Alex and I have followed each other on Instagram since before she got involved with Turning Point. I’ve seen her love life unfold via posts and stories throughout a decade now. I actually sat down with her and one of her exes years ago at America Fest gabbing in the lobby, and admired their relationship. They seemed head over heels for one another in such a real and aspirational way. But obviously, that wasn’t where her story ended.
When I realized she and the guy she dated before her fiance broke up, I was devastated for her because up to that point, I don’t think I’d ever seen her so in love.
And I knew all too well what it was like to believe someone was an answered prayer, to think you could finally make sense of every heartbreak that came before, and feel like things were falling into place at last only to have everything you thought you knew come crashing down in a matter of days.
At one point she wrote something like, “it’s him or nothing” and I don’t know that I believed her when I read it. I’m sure she believed it at the time, but something about her made me wonder if her desire for marriage and motherhood was too strong to actually truly abandon hope that it might come some day.
My fear for her was never that she wouldn’t marry, but that she’d end up spending her life with someone that she had to learn to love because she wanted a family more than she wanted fireworks.
It’s something that you see a lot with women over a certain age, especially on the right.
And I don’t think there’s anything wrong with it, but I want more for the people I care about and I wanted more for her.
When I liked the series of photos of her being proposed to on an overcast day by the water in an American flag sweater, jeans, rain boots, and a trench coat I thought it looked perfect. I thought she looked perfect. But the nagging, militant romantic in my own head still wondered if it actually was because I knew so little about the man she was marrying.
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