I'm never getting married and other fairy tales

Like many little girls, I started planning my wedding at the age of 5 — I was determined there wasn’t going to be one.
No bride, no groom, no maids of honor. No triple-tiered cake, vows or cantatas.
From that day forward, I made it perfectly clear to anyone who’d inquire that I didn’t want to get married. Ever.
I can only imagine what danced through my grandmother’s head when she asked my pre-school self about being a mommy someday.
She must have gaped when her three-foot tall gnome of a grandchild, crayon in hand, matter-of-factly informed her there would be no husband, nor child in the picture she planned.
“There are so many kids who need Mommies ... maybe I’ll adopt one of them.”
Of course, the following year at Christmas I asked for a stapler ... It’s possible she never knew what to make of me.
As youth usually does, things went along quite well for a number of years. My parents were good acomplices for my aspirations: “Don’t get married until you’re 25,” my father instructed.
“Don’t get married until you’ve been to Europe,” my mother laughed.
“Don’t get married until you’re 30,” dad revised.
It also helped that the boys-turn-men I dated were equally as uninterested in walking down an aisle.
No pressure there.
You meet people, you go places. Take this job over that one. You date, you meet more people. Life swims along.
Then, something I hadn’t anticipated went horribly awry. My mother’s grammalogical clock started ticking.
“Oh, she’s never getting married. ... I’m never going to be a grandma,” she’d complain at family gatherings.
Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick.
It also didn’t help that I had just met “Mr. Right.”
(Unfortunately, they way I felt about him was such a cliché, the “I-just-knew” senario and all, that I might as well name him accordingly).
Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick.
My world slowly turned upside down. It didn’t change my opinion of marriage at first, but it made me wonder about what people actually want and what they say they want.
Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick.
Did I really, actually, WANT to get married, or was it the diabolical effect of one biological clock setting off another?
When I started asking myself: ‘Is this it? Shouldn’t there be more? ... What if I’ve made a mistake?’ I knew my axis shifted 180 degrees.
You take an inventory, make your decisions, meet all the wrong people and then, if you meet the RIGHT person, you throw every preconceived notion you had right out the window and start picking out china.
The fairy tales my five-year-old self dreamed up have been dashed, and I couldn’t be happier. Of course, I could still use a stapler.