Dismantling my wifey complex
I don't want to be obsessed with marriage anymore.
Consider this “to be continued” before it even begins...
You know those bouncy, ping-pong match conversations when you don’t necessarily agree, but you’re not adversarial, either? When you’re just lobbing thoughts over the net, two armchair philosophers seeking provisional truth?
That was my friend and I the other day when marriage came up.
Marriage is one of those topics that turn everyone into an unreliable narrator, our answers invariably compromised by honeymoon or loss. Having spent half of 2021 in the stale purgatory of “Should I stay or should I go now?,” this was the perfect springboard for reflection.
It all started when we noticed a local couple had recently gotten married within 2ish years of dating. We agreed that it was fast-paced, but I applauded their momentum. I even half-joked, “When I know, I know after three days.” It’s peak pragmatism, a decisiveness refined by serial monogamy: You love it. You lock it down. You make it work. They were onto something and I was ready to defend it.
After a few exchanges about timelines and where we’re both at romantically, she said she’d be ok not getting married as long as she has a strong relationship that bears children. She theorized that most people only get married for kids, or due to societal or familial pressure—that modern arrangements have eclipsed the institution for the better. This is obviously not a hot take, but one that made me raise an eyebrow. I respectfully disagreed, noting the uptick in deliberately childless married couples. What are the odds that they’ve all succumbed to external pressure? These unions cannot be majority products of people-pleasing and ultimatums. There have to be people like me who don’t just view marriage as the logical next step in an archaic system, but something deeper.
When my partner started pursuing me, I told him I didn’t want to be anyone’s girlfriend unless we could see ourselves getting married. I’ve never seen the point in taking yourself off the market for anything less than forever. But why marriage? Is something wrong with me that I can’t, like my friend, be satisfied simply being with someone for the long haul sans contract?
I’ll find any excuse to reject the wedding industrial complex. I revere the tradition and the grandiosity is fun (when it’s not predatory); it’s just not for me at all. I live and die by imagining myself in a killer pantsuit at a courthouse podium. All white, wide-leg trousers, oversized blazer with nothing underneath, I’m anyone’s dream girl. But ceremonies aside, marriage has long been the nucleus of my dating life. And anything you plan around so exclusively that depends on another person to happen is bound to blow up in your face.
Every person I’ve ever dated has planned to marry me (as if they have a choice). They tell me. They tell their family. They tell their friends. But as time passes and no ring appears, my suspicion toward whether they actually love me forms a wall between us. This wall becomes insurmountable.
My friend Mark made a bet with his buddies that I’d be engaged by the end of summer. I shrugged it off while quietly wagering my own. When I broached this with my partner, giddily thinking his only possible reaction could be blushing because oh, she got me, it was like watching a computer malfunction. All I heard was harsh static and the person I love rejecting me. If you ask him how this went down, you’d get a very different story. But to someone who thinks they’ll soon be called “fiancé,” anything less than dropping to one knee feels like abandonment.
That talk turned the proposal timeline into a fresh point of contention. He felt like I wasn’t considering his unreadiness. But in honoring this traditional dynamic, is full control not in his hands by default? Why don’t I get a say? Am I not completely marriable? Don’t you see what you have? As my dreams of shared eagerness crumbled before me, I realized it was time to wiggle out of this institutional chokehold. I am ready… to not be ready.
The first step in dismantling my wifey complex is admitting that I understood his hesitation. Why would you rush to marry someone who left you? Let’s go ahead and chronicle our partnership:
December 2019: He DMs me a month after meeting at a party. We meet at Gran Caffe L’Aquila. He orders the pappardelle al ragu per my recommendation. I order the chocolate mousse. We bond over hip-hop and UNIQLO.
March 2020: We are official at this point. COVID hits, and I move into his apartment with him and his friends. Knee deep in one sticky-sweet honeymoon phase, we clock hours on the couch of wine and The Wire.
August 2020: His lease is up. We’ve been living together like we’ve done it all our lives, so we secure a place of our own. All is blissful. I didn’t even know it was possible to be this happy and sure about someone.
January 2021: Two become three. Welcome Mousse, aptly named after my dessert order on our first date. Boy, does a puppy test your strength as a couple. I feel myself unraveling.
May 2021: It has been five months of indescribable pain, living like strangers under one roof. Between the pandemic, seasonal depression, catching bad cases of COVID ourselves while tending to Mousse around the clock, etc., we are at wits end. Not only am I certain he doesn't love me, I’m convinced he doesn’t even like me as a person. I break up with him and move home to my parents’ in Danville. I am approved by my boss to keep working remotely while traveling for six months. Nomadic girlboss level unlocked.
June 2021: Suddenly this man finds new resolve. We’re FaceTiming every night, making plans to have lunch in Philly to “talk about things.” He wins me back, and so begins the arduous pursuit of making it work.
Today: I am proud of us. Much progress is made, but there’s still a ways to go.
Life, and consequently, love, comes at you fast. How much could we attribute to the pandemic, and how much was my own urgency at play? For me to think about marriage anytime soon is to have learned nothing from our breakup (which, historically speaking, is pretty on brand). Who we are today is not who we’ll be in a month; you have to experience that unpredictable fluctuation with someone to know if forever is viable. My partner’s not ready to marry me because he shouldn’t be.
Let’s get back to that initial question, though… the reason, dearly beloved, we are gathered here today: Why marriage? Why isn’t love enough?
I tend to believe people are with me because I love them, which makes them feel good, and it couldn’t possibly be reciprocated. Thus, I’ve long fantasized about the day I get engaged when I can finally believe someone loves me back. When the tension dissolves and I no longer feel the urge to run away. Did I mention that I’ve never been dumped? I have broken up with every partner out of panicked self-preservation, scared that the longer I stay, the more susceptible I am to getting hurt. Such is the paradox of being a martyr for love with an aversion to sustained intimacy.
In college, I studied the big three attachment styles: secure, avoidant, and anxious, automatically assuming myself the poster child for anxious. Further exploration reveals I may fall somewhere between anxious and avoidant, teetering on a fourth style called “fearful-avoidant” or “disorganized.” According to recent research, "The type of environment that influences disorganized attachment involves a caregiver who is frightening or traumatizing, leading the child to experience a deep sense of fear and a lack of trust in others, despite wanting close connections.” It breaks my heart to relive my childhood. A fragile little girl grew into a suspicious woman, hypersensitive and wary of everyone’s motives. I even sent that passage to my sister, promising to give my future children the love and gentleness we were not afforded. My attachment style informs this fixation on marriage as a panacea. Because I struggle with the uncertainty required to trust, I romanticize the certainty of lifelong commitment. The mere thought of uninterrupted monogamy floods my nervous system with a deep blue haze of calm.
My partner asked how I could possibly know marriage would bring me security. “What if nothing changes and you still don’t believe I love you?” I had no answer. I still don’t. But I’m finally at a place where I don’t even want to know, I just want to stop thinking about marriage altogether to enjoy the here and now. Anxiety is parasitic; it feeds on one’s preoccupation with the future: What could they do to me? What if I’m wasting my time? To love without expectation is to ground oneself in the present. I want to know what that feels like. In Be Love Now, Ram Dass says:
“Our culture treats love almost entirely in connection with interpersonal relationships and interactions. Emotional love is based on external gratification, having our love reflected back to us. It’s not grounded in feeling love from the inside. That’s why we keep needing more. When we love somebody emotionally, that need for feedback creates a powerful attachment. We get so caught up in the relationship that we rarely arrive at the essence of just dwelling in love.”
There’s a perfect love inside all of us, even people like me who feel hopelessly bound to romantic idealism. To find that is to know heaven.
I might make a good wifey someday. Perhaps even a great one. The kind people write books about for girls like me to dog-ear the pages of our favorite lines. In the meantime, should I need something borrowed and something Blue, I’ll just thrift a Joni Mitchell album.
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