You know that feeling you get when everything seems to be right with the world?  When the planets seem to be in alignment?  One of those days when you’re actually running on time, your apartment is (relatively) clean, and you haven’t gotten into an argument with your mother/ best friend/ boss/ therapist in at least a week?  That was exactly how I felt as I walked up the steps to Trip’s wedding.  I was wearing an impossibly sexy vintage Halston dress (if only two sizes too small) and brand new stiletto heels (that I could almost even walk in), flanked on either side by my two best friends.  Nothing could go wrong.   

When I told my mother that I was going to Trip’s wedding, she said, “Trip’s wedding?  Trip who?”  (As if Jewish girls from Long Island know that many men named Trip.)  “Trip from law school Trip?  What woman, in her right mind, would want to go to that?”

Vanessa, my best friend from law school, initially RSVP’d ‘no’ to the wedding, since she assumed that I wouldn’t want to attend.  When she found out that I wanted to go, she later called Trip to tell him that her “big case” had settled and that she and her husband, Marcus, would be there --- but not before asking me approximately four hundred and seventy-two times if I “wanted to talk about it?”

And when I told the partner I worked for at my firm that I would be out of town for a four day weekend to take my boyfriend to L.A. to go to Trip’s wedding, even he asked me, “Why the hell would you want to do that?”

I could have sworn that I even saw my therapist look at me sideways when I told her that I was going to my ex-boyfriend’s wedding.

Okay, so I understand that this isn’t exactly your typical “girl goes to wedding” kind of situation.  But, just because Trip is my ex-boyfriend from law school, don’t take that to mean that I care more about this wedding or am more nervous about this wedding, or that this wedding is any different from any other wedding in any way at all!  Because it’s not.  Trip’s wedding is just another wedding.  And Trip is just another friend of mine.  Even if he is my ex-boyfriend. 

What’s an ex-boyfriend anyway?  Everyone has an ex-boyfriend.  Everyone.  I mean, even some lesbians I know have them.  Nothing special about them, right?  I don’t care any more or less about him just because he’s my ex-boyfriend.  He’s just a person.  And staying friends with your ex is a piece of cake.  I barely ever think about him and how he may or may not have been my last chance at happiness in this cruel and unforgiving world.

Really.  I have the satisfaction of having a great career and a great independent life filled with fabulous friends and, of course, even more fabulous shoes.  I am such a woman of the new millennium that I can go work a full ten hour day, keep in touch with friends through email, do a few errands on the way to meet my friends for dinner, and then go meet cute guys over martinis at the bar after I eat.  All in three and a half inch heels.  I am such a woman of the millennium that I can do anything, even things that previous generations would have thought completely impossible --- Betty Friedan be damned!  I can even stay friends with an ex-boyfriend.

Excerpted from Scot on the Rocks © Copyright 2012 by Brenda Janowitz. Reprinted with permission by Red Dress Ink. All rights reserved.