constellations #86: i do

Hi again.

I got married last month — a wonderful and joyous experience, one about which I genuinely cannot shut up.

But for a while before I got married, I felt a kind of seasick ambivalence about whether I wanted to, or if I even wanted to want to. The reasons were many, and complex, and personal. But they were not terribly unique. And so I read a lot of writing that dug into the questions I had: about the politics of marriage, about the out-of-control wedding-industrial complex, about feminist responses to the institution itself; about the ways American culture prioritizes the independence of the nuclear family, under the guise of romance, perhaps to the detriment of our collective care. (“Having a successful love life,” as one writer put it, “should not have a determination on whether you live or die.”)

I should add: My feelings were about me (and my partner) alone — not an indictment of anyone else’s choices or desire to get married. On a micro level, on a personal scale, those individual choices don’t really feel like any of my business; and, either way, I have felt so much genuine joy and delight and support for many wonderful people I know and love who have gotten married and/or who dream of getting married. But on a macro level — on the scale of culture, and tradition, and politics — it has all felt a little more muddled to me.

I recently re-read the final essay of Jia Tolentino’s Trick Mirror, called “I Thee Dread,” about her personal aversion to marriage — an essay that winds its way through the absurd average cost of a wedding today, through the ever-changing history of wedding celebrations in the Western world, through the love/hate relationship American pop culture has with weddings, through pop culture’s simultaneously glorified and horrifying image of “the bride.” When I first read the essay, I remember feeling buoyed in my own reluctance by some of the historical and economic facts Tolentino provides: that “Confucius defined a wife as ‘someone who submits to another’” (yikes); about the legal doctrine of coverture, “which held that, as Sir William Blackstone put it in 1753, ‘the very being, or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage or at least is incorporated or consolidated into that of her husband,’” — a doctrine that “was implemented in the Middle Ages and was not fully dismantled in America until the late twentieth century” (again: yikes).

Married men, Tolentino goes on to say, “report better mental health and live longer than single men; in contrast, married women report worse mental health, and die earlier, than single women.” She admits that this fact isn’t due to the act of marriage itself, but to the way that “when a man and a woman combine their unpaid domestic obligations under the aegis of tradition, the woman usually ends up doing most of the work.” This idea made me personally uneasy, and left me with some questions. When the book was published, Tolentino was — like I was — in a longterm, committed but unmarried partnership with a man.¹ Sure, we hadn’t signed the paper and thrown the party — but what, exactly, was the difference between us and those other women, with their shortened lifespans and worse mental health?² If I was comfortable with the other aspects of my commitment, what was I objecting to?

Because even when I didn’t think I wanted to get married, I wasn’t objecting to romantic love as a cornerstone of my life, nor to a commitment to the particular person I love. I have considered deeply whether another path might be right for me — especially as I’ve come to question the myriad ways women are routinely told we’re incomplete without a spouse, or that marriage and romance should be our highest aims. And especially because of all the queer people and feminists whose work and lives have presented me with alternatives to that more straightforward path.³ But still, I keep returning to a deep sense of gratitude for the partnership I have and for the fulfillment it brings me — so much so that I can never see it as some kind of distraction from or impediment to greater aims. My real objections were shakier, and in hindsight feel harder to name, and were mostly a combination of fears: the fear of aligning myself with an institution that had historically sought to suspend my legal existence; of submitting to claustrophobic normativity; of giving in to the idea that my relationship — which felt so stable and secure and time-tested and true to me — wouldn’t be taken seriously, or considered real, without this formality.

A couple years ago, I read Alicia Kennedy’s essay about deciding to get married after a lifetime of not wanting to. “Why I never wanted to get married is perhaps why many women do want to get married,” she writes, “because it makes a statement about our worth (this is both a valid urge and a culturally created one). I never wanted to put that in the hands of a man, any man. The idea still makes me want to puke.” In the end, though, really truly falling in love changed her desire; she did, in fact, want to get married, and so she did. I admire her conviction in that essay — how she acknowledges the contradictions in her choice but is nonetheless at peace with her decision: “When people want me to explain to them how I’m making my future marriage make sense with my politics, I don’t really have anything for them and I don’t really want to,” she writes, knowing full well that she’s getting married for a simple reason: because she loves her partner “more than I’ve loved anyone before.” For her, “getting married is not, will never be, a radical act,” she writes — but whether the act is radical or conservative isn’t the only axis on which she’s making her choice. And anyway, she writes, how a marriage “exists between two people personally … could be another story, filled with possibility.”

In retrospect, I realize what I was looking for in all these essays I was reading: guidance, maybe, or permission; but perhaps more honestly, I wanted instruction. I wanted someone to show me how to make this choice — whether or not to get married; whether or not to want to — in a way that actually, really, acknowledged all the history and inequality and expectations and heteronormativity and didn’t just shirk them for the sake of convention or convenience. Now, I realize that I was asking for something impossible, and not only that, but ill-advised; that this was not only a political decision but a deeply personal one, and that in such cases, it’s unwise to wish that strangers on the internet would make it for you

My partner felt less confused about the idea. He wanted to get married but in an unhurried, un-pressured sort of way; he liked the idea of orchestrating a big celebration of our love, and didn’t feel like a wedding needed to mean much more than that. (He’d admit, too, that he didn’t experience the same external pressures that I did — that it’s a kind of privilege that it didn’t have to mean much more than that to him.⁴) He cared deeply that marriage meant something substantial to our families — which, also, began to feel substantial to me. But he engaged with my uncertainty, too (and I have to think that part of his chill approach to the whole thing was because we’d already made our commitment to each other clear — we were in it, for good, party or no party).

When I finally did decide I wanted to get married — both to be married and to have a wedding, which I realized were two different things — it happened gradually, and carefully, with my ambivalence about it intact. Just this week I read something Larissa Pham wrote about a recent change in her life that captures how I feel about this part of my life, too: “When I think about how I arrived at this choice,” she writes, “I want to find a moment I can point to, some kind of turning point when I chose here and not there, a place where my life swung open like a door, but it wasn’t like that, though it was some kind of opening.”

In the end, I never wound up feeling like I needed or wanted a ritual to authenticate our commitment, even on the day itself; our ceremony felt, instead, to me, like an extension of something we are already doing, in words and in actions and in the practice of building a life together, every day. In my vows, I said as such. It felt like we had created a space to love and be loved and allow our loved ones to witness it, to take part in it. Afterwards, a friend told me she had been pondering, in her own life and more broadly, the question of the very meaning of marriage. She said my partner’s vows — how personal they were, how deeply they charted his love for me — had given her one possible answer. Hearing that, and recalling it now, fills me with such an intense gratitude I can hardly stand it. That was what our wedding was about: a small offering on the altar of love, a testament to its power and magic, a thanksgiving for what it has done for us and what it has allowed us to do.

I know all of that doesn’t negate the hesitations I felt. “By getting married, I could be justifying the whole charade,” Kennedy admits in her essay; later, she makes the important point that “no matter all our good intentions, marriage as a construct is more about how the world sees us and less about how we see ourselves.” I think she’s right. And yet, being in love — so much so that you’re eager to build your life around it — is a gift, as much as it’s tangled up in all these other messes; it’s so precious and so powerful. It doesn’t feel like a denial of all my questions and my skepticism to recognize that, or to make a point of celebrating it — a recognition I am grateful to have found, finally.

photo by lensy michelle photography <3

Here are some other things I have been consuming lately: Tomorrow’s Fire by Squirrel Flower (which I reviewed for Pitchfork); Goodnight Summerland by Helena Deland (which I also reviewed for Pitchfork); I Killed Your Dog by L’Rain; “Explanations Are Not Excuses” by Sarah Schulman, “We Cannot Cross Until We Carry Each Other” from Jewish Currents, and this thread from Marianela D’Aprile, among other vital writing and reporting on the situation in Israel and Palestine; a performance of Lucinda Childs’s Dance by the Lyon Opera Ballet — truly magnificent; flavored oat milk coffee creamers; an afternoon in Williamsburg with my friend Thamy, a dedicated constellations reader who merits (and requested) a shoutout; the very good newsletter The Country of the Story, about the practice of writing, by my friend Courtney; tributes to and reporting about Ryan Carson, who died earlier this month — a friend of friends of mine & a wonderful person and wonderful writer

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This time last year I was: listening to my peak foliage playlist(s); and before that, writing about youth and helplessness and my favorite album; and, before that, thinking about Stockholm and trying not to be scared

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Also: My band Keeper is playing our first show in many years soon (on Nov. 5), at Comet Ping Pong in Washington, D.C. We’re opening for the lovely Ava Mirzadegan who is releasing a new record. If you’re in the area, I’d love to see you there; you can buy tickets here.

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Thanks for reading. I love you!

xo,
M

1. (She has since gotten married, as have I, lol.)

2. When I first read the essay, I detected a whiff of arrogance to Tolentino’s position, a faux pity for all those women who were (unlike the author!) silly enough to want to be brides; re-reading it recently, I didn’t catch even a faint hint of that egotism. Projection?

3. These alternatives do include, I should note, plenty of examples of egalitarian marriages!

4. He also, once, printed me a set of Jenny Holzer’s Truisms, including the one that says, “ROMANTIC LOVE WAS INVENTED TO MANIPULATE WOMEN” — safe to say he both has a sense of humor and isn’t afraid of a little feminist skepticism.