Marriage Is a Reiteration of Convention, And That's OK

Before we got engaged, Thomas and I watched one of my childhood best friends pledge her love to her wife against the backdrop of the Golden Gate Bridge. We had whined and complained about having to go to this wedding—how expensive it was, how inconvenient, how we wouldn't know anyone but the brides, how we didn't know how to dance—but it was perfect in a way I couldn't have expected. Every part of the wedding could have been tiresome, or silly, or weird, but instead it just simply worked. Nothing felt obligated; everything felt magical. It was a day lifted out of the stress and banality of ordinary days, where all that mattered was a celebration of two people's love.

It was the first time I wondered if I could have what they had, if the people I loved would assemble for me and the man I love, pouring their joy outwards into ours until the air seemed to sparkle. I found myself imagining who would stand up with me, who would toast, who would cry, whether we could envelop our accumulated people in our love as thoroughly as these two friends of mine did. When I got home I didn't tell anyone this; both I and most of my friends had long said none of us ever wanted to get married, and I was sure that people wouldn't understand or would make fun of me. I assumed this was an experience for which I couldn't assemble my own community.

Instead, by the time I got engaged, I felt like part of a trend piece. So many friends or people I knew got engaged or married at around the same time I did that we weren't even the only couple to get engaged that exact weekend. It felt as though the randomness and wonder of human experience had turned into a comically crowded subway car. Marriage was happening on a larger level, in a grand encroaching wave. It had felt like my engagement was an individual considered choice, but the rush of other people of my same age and demographic made me wonder if some of the reasons I had been wary of marriage were still unavoidably true. That so many of us moved in this direction at once made it difficult to argue that we weren't just playing out roles society had conditioned us to fit ourselves into, falling into line with cultural expectations that exerted a larger pull than individual choice.

On a personal level, I was overjoyed for each new friend who got married or engaged, but looking at the larger pattern made me feel unsteady, uncertain if my choice was truly private, truly my own

I'd never dreamed of or planned a hypothetical wedding, in part because I never figured I'd have my shit together enough to have a serious relationship, let alone a marriage.

When I fell in love, I kept assuming I'd never engage in certain obvious tropes and milestones until, each time, I discovered that they were things I actually wanted. I thought my boyfriend and I would never move in together, until I realized it was not only convenient but that I wanted to come home to this person, to include them in the small triumphs and dull failures of my day. I said I never wanted us to link ourselves at all financially, but then we got a cat and started a savings account in case she had an emergency. I said that marriage wasn't something either of us were interested in, until we started thinking about it, mentioning it without meaning to.

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