Wednesday, Oct. 20, 2004 | 1:02 PM

There was a time when I was in love with marriage. Actually-- that's a lie. I wasn't in love with marriage. I was in love with weddings.

I would pour over shiny pages of Vera Wang dresses, their clean lines shimmering like the first frost of winter. I exclaimed over tastefully thought out flower arrangements and giant tiered cakes reminiscent of Busby Berkley soundstages. I fantasized about the classy color coordinated reception, during which a multitude of toasts would be made by an armada of loving, approving friends in honor of my spun sugar romance.

The wedding concept was a magical talisman that might right all wrongs. (And there were so many many wrongs.) It played into the side of my personality desperate for happy endings and definitive order-- the side that was sure not to miss an episode of Felicity (would she end up with Ben or with Noel?) and cared very deeply about what kind of flatware I should purchase from Crate & Barrel.

I was in love with the air of legitimacy that a gorgeous Cinderella wedding would bestow upon my union. I was in love with that 3rd act happily ever after of the kiss at the altar. And it never really occurred to me to think about what would happen after all the guests went home and there were just two shattered, unsure, immature people left with all that confetti to sweep up, and a dress I'd never be able to wear again anyway.

By the time my wedding obsession reached its peak, I'd forgotten what love really was, if I ever knew it in the first place. My version of love was about ornamentation, and drama, and above all else about being saved from my own demons.

And then everything in my life fell apart. The pretty dream could not withstand the harsh realities I'd ignored for many years, and at core, it could not withstand the person whom I truly was-- the one I'd sublimated and tucked away under layers of trying to please, and the mold-like resentment that infected my very being when such efforts bore no fuition. I became cynical and disilussioned and I saw my love of weddings for what it was, adolsecent and pathological. A bit of neurotic fluff. I was still confusing Marriage with Weddings, and so by associaiton, I hated Marriage too.

I'd see couples together walking hand in hand in the Boston Garden, their identical gold rings sparkling in the sun like twin holy grails, and I would sneer, thinking to myself, "Have fun not getting laid and watching the Home Shopping Network together, you simps."

I promised myself that I would never NEVER fall into that trap. I was smarter than that and far hipper. I had forcibly scrubbed clean the sheen of sentimentality that had once enconsced my outward persona like a layer of sticky vanilla icing and replaced it with a flapper's zeal for good times and independent living. I was out drinking martinis five nights a week and going home with a string of different men and women. I had my own hip pad artfully decorated in one of the city's toniest neighborhoods. I was so cool and so detached. So free thinking and so above bourjois conceits like Romantic Relationships.

And I was so very very lonely.

Despite the whir of activity around me and the revolving gang of cultured friends and interesting, quirky, acquaintences, the need for a deep, vital, and REAl connection grew in my heart like an unkepmt impromptu garden of uninhibited wild flowers.

And then finally, when I was ready, when I had gotten all the fucking and cavorting out of my system, when the dust settled and the final remains of my tower of false selfhood were finally swept away, I met him.

And suddenly, I knew the difference between Weddings and Marriage.

I told my mother when she picked me up from the bus station that morning at 5 AM, after I'd spent the best night of my life talking across the aisle of a Greyhound with a perfect stranger, that I had met the man I was going to marry.

And though I cannot deny the legitimate part of myself that enjoys specatular parties, in the end it wouldn't really matter whether we did the deed at Buckingham Palace or the Cambridge Court House.

There is nothing wrong with weddings. I am enjoying the hell out of planning mine. But the wedding itself is incidental.

Marriage is a sacred thing. Marriage is REAL. It is kind of sad the extent to which our generation shies away from that level of comittment.

How many times have I heard jaded twenty-something mutter over their PBR's "Why do I need a piece of paper to tell me that I love this person?"

You don't, of course. But marriage is the act of bringing your true heart into the World. It is the integation of the heart with the mundanities of Real Life. It is a manifestation of your own ability to tell everyone else on the planet that you have chosen your own Family.

I take such joy in the simple act of waking up each morning out of my own dreamworld, and locking eyes with my intended. I delight in the morning kiss good-bye, and the evening kiss hello. I delight in sharing warm chatty home cooked meals in a kitchen whose paint is peeling off the walls. And I delight in being made love to at the end of the day by a man who has begun to refer to me, proudly, as his wife.

It's been a long long road from lonely nights waiting by silent telephones dreaming up happily ever after scenarios that could never come to pass, to sharing a very real existence with someone who loves and accepts me for exactly who I am, and who allows me to give fully of myself at every turn.

Marriage is an exercise in coming into your own, in taking responsibility, in letting another human being past all of your defences and into the central control room of your heart.

Weddings are nice. I've made my peace with them.

But marriage has allowed me to make peace with myself, and to accept this wonderful complex life of mine in all its contradictions.