My Little Almost-Married Spiral

Wedding bands! Marriage license! Intrusive thoughts!

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at a dance music festival last month where Andrew did not have fun

“WANT A TEA?” I shout from upstairs, competing with the TV blaring some Swift/Kelce banter that sounds like kids playing the recorder. I fucked up dinner and my feet are blistered and I don’t know if I can get married.

“Yes, please,” he answers sweetly, audibly grateful, “the apple kind. With honey, please!”

Andrew likes a lot of honey in his tea. I squeeze the bear over the mug and, watching its seductive drip, golden as summer skin, stop at roughly a teaspoon. And I know it’s not enough. I know it’s not the tea he signed up for. But something in me refuses to add more, takes offense to the notion that I should. The other day I accused him of wishing I’d get a nose job. I don’t know where I got that from.

So I come downstairs with the tea and a pastel de nata from the Portuguese cafe where we had breakfast. I am thinking to myself, I look like shit. Who would want to marry me? I’m in old gray men’s sweatpants from Wal-Mart covered in holes and a huge purple tie-dye from the Salvation Army covered in more holes, greasy-haired and bespectacled. But Andrew accepts his dessert gleefully, asks, “you’re gonna come down and have yours with me, right?” I was planning to drink my tea and eat my pastel upstairs where I could fret over this whole marriage thing in peace. (Real anxietyheads know you can fret in peace.)

“Sure, I will,” I reply with a reassuring smile.

Andrew shows me this subreddit, r/tvtoohigh where people literally just post photos of TVs hung too high. Lots of boomers craning their necks. 178,000 members. We laugh our asses off between crunches of flaky pasteis. This is the brand of mundane that binds us. Our laughs assume the same pitch, fusing into one happy chirp—a frequency that hits me like a benzo. Deep breaths, Dia. For once in your life, don’t say what’s on your mind.

“I’m gonna go upstairs,” I say, the electric recliner buzzing me upright, slow and groaning like a dying toy. Andrew lets out a whimper. 

“But I was really enjoying our time together.” 

“I know. I’m just having a lot of anxiety right now… about getting married.” 

–

Because Andrew and I aren’t having a wedding, we’d done little to cement this marriage as Actually Happening beyond getting engaged and booking a Jamaican honeymoon that we already canceled. (Neither of us really wanted that trip; we just thought it’d make things feel real.) Last Saturday, though, he wanted to see if our jeweler could turn his grandfather’s gold chain into a wedding band. I’d planned to take advantage of the bad weather and not leave the house, but I could tell he wanted me to go, so I did. It was a special afternoon. Andrew was able to memorialize Luigi, and I unexpectedly left with my dream ring: a dainty mix of baguette and round diamonds in white gold. We were wedding banded up in an hour’s time.

Then on Monday, we went to City Hall for our marriage license. I’d gone non-verbal all morning leading up to the appointment, freezing over simple decisions like what to eat for breakfast, how to dress, whether to wear makeup, if I should rocket launch myself onto an island of nudist lesbians, etc. I wore all black.

Searching for a parking spot around City Hall is a fool’s errand. Tension thickened as it became clear that we were going to be late. It was one of those scenes where you know a guy is taking this thing that is completely out of his control as a blow to his ego, as if it reveals some lack of masculine ingenuity to drive around in circles for a while. My patient man was cracking. Meanwhile, I was still quiet, hunched in the passenger seat, taking blown out selfies in the harsh sunlight. Anything to distract myself from the growing sense that I was just another idiot-woman, convinced a man can shape her world without one day blowing it up for someone whose thighs don’t touch. (For what it’s worth, my parents are still happily together. So are Andrew’s.) 

City Hall is an unserious place. Or is it just that the Delco accent is an unserious sound, and that everyone working there sounded like they were from Upper Darby? Going through the metal detector, the security guard started like, hollering laughing. She said, “baby, I know you never know when a bottle of wine is gonna appear. And I’m with it! I’m with you! But you cannot bring this in, and I cannot give it back to you when you come out.” My face was blank. I had no fucking clue what she was talking about. She pulled a wine key from my purse and we both lost it. “Somethin tells me you got another at home,” she said. I winked.

There was a piece of paper taped to door 413 with the words MARRIAGE LICENSE BUREAU typed above some clip art hearts and rings. And in the room itself, Valentine’s Day decorations abound. I wondered if this place even celebrates Christmas or whatever, or if it’s just little plastic cupids year round. The pièce de résistance, though, was this Philadelphia-themed mural:

Nothing about getting your marriage license is romantic, which is kind of romantic in itself. You answer some administrative questions about what you do for a living and whether your parents are alive and then some city employee who clearly hates his job swipes your credit card and you’re out $90. From there, you have 60 days to get married. 

Exiting the building, back into the cold air and my least favorite part of the city, I felt electric, energized by my girlish devotion, this big love I’ve found. I wanted to get a midday cocktail to celebrate. We settled for Starbucks. Sipping my matcha on the ride home, I felt the velocity of life, indeed, coming at me fast. You go from this vague, nominal commitment to someone—the liminality of fiancé—to legitimizing it in the eyes of the state. Forever takes shape, casts a threatening shadow on the walls. I am not a lesbian and I am worthy of love and I am interesting and beautiful enough for him and he will not cheat on me and if he gets an intern she will be ugly and I am not a lesbian and maybe he doesn’t think I’m annoying and that it’s pathetic that I still listen to dubstep and he likes my cooking and doesn’t think I’m fat and I am not a lesbian and marriage will not destroy me.

–

My friend George texted me this story that he’d been agonizing over for three weeks. He was at a dinner party when this girl mentioned she had a friend—we’ll call her Ava—who’d been sleeping with a married doctor for months. During the affair, the doctor’s (unknowing) wife got pregnant, and what does the sadistic fuck suggest they name the baby? Ava. They named her Ava. The stain of his infidelity on every monogrammed onesie, every “congratulations” card.

Like George, this is the shit that keeps me up at night. This is the flame that forges the iron of my guard. 

That night in bed, I stared up at the ceiling while Andrew slept. I tried very hard to picture my life without him. I don’t know what I was testing, my love for him? My independence? My psychic abilities? The image wouldn’t render. I saw nothing. But what I felt was worse than pain—a remote numbness incurred by denying myself the opportunity to be loved, specifically by Andrew. Because the feeling wasn’t at all general. It wasn’t some amorphous, dull ache. It was that I was without this one heart, encased in this one body that reaches this one temperature set to warm me and me alone. Only losing a love so singular can scare your hypothetical self into apathy. So I guess that’s really what it all comes down to. The thought of marriage makes my head spin clear off my neck because I am scared to lose it. Scared to move through the world as an Andrewless zombie.

But then he rolled over and, half asleep, pulled me into his arms and mumbled “I’m so in love with you.” I said it back. It’s an exchange we have often, always unprovoked and in private, in varying states of consciousness, which is how I know it’s real. And I think that if I’m going to live this life in pursuit of truth, the best place to start is right beside me.