THE FINALE of 'Why I Waited 22 Years to Get Married.'
How I Finally Moved That Chess Piece Forward.
Dear Delightful and Cherished Subscriber: If this looks familiar, it is because you may have gotten this from me once before. I posted it a few weeks ago, and then UNposted it so I could work on it a little more. Then I had a moment where I thought I would just never re-post it. Why? Because I am a writer who is prone to a lot of re-writing and these are some of the fun things substack allows a contributing writer to do to make herself nuts. But eventually (as in just now) I decided since I posted so many other parts to my complicated personal marriage diatribe, it was pretty ridiculous not to post the final segment. So here it is. Again. If you read it before, you get additional points for not being annoyed at me
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Finale, part #8: My PRO marriage arguments to myself.
FIRST, A RECAP: As you may or may not know, in the past two months, I have written, exhaustively, (and perhaps pointlessly) on the subject of ‘Why I Waited 22 Years to Get Married’. There are seven separate entries (part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6, part 7) in this pantheon of self-absorption which I was inspired to write because, after finally getting married to someone I had been with for TWENTY TWO YEARS, my worst fears were NOT confirmed. It took me completely by surprise that I did not have a panic attack followed by an asthma attack followed by a suffocating depression. And when these things failed to materialize, it began to occur to me what a massive life-time build-up of raw free-floating terror about the concept of “marriage” I had allowed to become a cyclone of anxiety in my brain. Somehow, this traditional growth milestone, one that many other people see as the theoretically “happiest day of your life”, had, for me, become a one-way portal into a black hole.. No matter how I reasoned with myself, I could see no way past all my many excellent reasons to not get married. (I think you will agree that they are impressive) (though hopefully not so impressive that I create a tear in any relationship that is working out.)
Because I am a very logic-oriented person, I decided to try to unwrap the dark side of this picture that I’d painted myself into.
It was hard not to contrast my relentless foreboding against the wave of enthusiasm for the idea of legal marriage that I remember watching sweep over the gay community in 2015 when Obergefell v Hodges made gay marriage legal. Here were these long term couples, who already had the ability to call themselves a legal partnership (which at the time sounded preferable to me) all racing for the altar so they could take this important tradition-steeped religion-based step. A step, I might add, that was also going to eventually set them all up for the crazy punishments of a divorce. The only way I could understand their motives came from putting myself in their shoes. That was when it occurred to me that if society and the government had always told me that I could NOT get married because my relationship had been pronounced immoral by a bunch of people I didn’t like who also claimed it was unsanctioned and forbidden in The Bible, then my contrarian nature would definitely have insisted that I be allowed to get married at the earliest possible opportunity. I, too, would have been racing to the altar to prove I could not be stopped by my ignorant detractors. My problem was that marriage had always had been EXPECTED of me. And if I couldn’t be the one to pick and choose which expectations I was going to play along with, what exactly was the point of having an identity? Or, for that matter, of living?
And yes, that sounded kind of childish, and also churlish, even to me. So I decided to try to unearth a more adult perspective in myself by creating a list of marriage pros and cons:
1.The Whole Idea of A PUBLIC DECLARATION
PRO:Come on! What’s wrong with making a formal declaration of your love? CON: To who? Who are you pretending cares? Your parents are dead. PRO: Point taken. Probably no one. But what about being denied visitation rights in a hospital? CON: If you say you are married, the hospital will buy it. What are they going to do? Call The National Hall of Records in the middle of a random medical emergency and ask them to do some immediate document research for every unfamiliar couple ? PRO: Is there even such a thing as The National Hall of Records? CON: I don’t know. I think we just made it up. PRO:The defense rests. CON: I need a rest too. Let’s move on.2. Better Noun Options
PRO: For people over 50, the terms ‘boyfriend’ and ‘girlfriend’ are, let’s face it, inappropriate. They make you sound sketchy, like a pair of drug-addicted, unwashed, toothless people who live in a storage container across the street from the main characters in a low budget horror movie. CON:Did you say over 50? I think you mean over 35. PRO: Tho, there are other terms you can use. How about ‘partner?’ Or ‘spouse’ or’ ‘helpmate’ or ‘companion?’ or ‘consort?’ CON: Nah. They sound forced. Though I kind of like ‘accomplice’. PRO: Settled. We’ll use accomplice. CON: Or how about ‘colleague’? Or ‘confederate’? PRO: ‘Confederate’ sounds too racist. Sounds MAGA. CON: Then how about ‘gentleman caller’? PRO: Too emotionally damaged, housebound, anti-social Laura Wingfield. CON: Well, heh heh…if the shoe fits… PRO:Tho now that I think about it, I do have a collection of miniature animals. I also have a wardrobe full of tee shirts, like Stanley Kowalski. CON: Are you ready to rest yet? PRO: Yes. The prosecution rests. CON: YOU said you were the defense. PRO: Okay then. The defense rests.
3.FINANCIAL SAVINGS:
PRO: This is a BIG one. There’s a much larger capital gains tax deduction for a married couple if you sell your house. CON: That’s true. But I’m not selling my house. PRO: You might someday. And therefore the defense rests. CON: Then the prosecution might as well rest too. PRO: You’re just resting because I said I was. CON: Not true. I was needing a rest.
4.LEGACY BENEFITS.
PRO: What even are legacy benefits? I think you made that up. CON: No. I have a good one: The likelihood of a much PEPPIER obituary if you’ve been married. That goes double for the success of a bio-pic sale to a good streaming platform. PRO: This has taken a turn for the stupid. Which is not easy to do, given the stupidity level already in play. Who in their right mind would buy a bio pic of you? I mean me. CON: Haven’t you not noticed how desperate the streaming services always are for content these days? Think about it: The lead character in the scripted married version of our story would be described as “a three-time-loser”. That means she’d be written as a feisty, busty, gun-toting, salty-mouthed dame who told dirty jokes to tattooed men, worked at a place that served alcohol and spit into an empty beer can. She would definitely have at least one son on death row and a daughter who hadn’t spoken to her in 15 years. Their heart warming reunion would, of course, come right before the wedding. And, hang on: the 3-times-divorced-you would likely be played by Helena Bonham Carter or Charlize Theron ( Unless somehow this version of the script attracted The Coen Brothers and then, fingers-crossed, we might get FRANCES MCDORMAND! And how great would THAT be? ) PRO: Yes! And depending on the era they use, she might also work as a part-time detective which would definitely kick the plot up a notch. Though, gotta confess I was hoping for a few super powers? CON: You see yourself in the Marvel Universe? You?? You hate those films. PRO: Just blue-skying. Hold on! Let’s take a second to imagine the script for the never-married version of you… uh..I mean me. A woman described in the script as “never married” is usually portrayed as desperate, barren, damaged, tragic and living in isolation. She dresses in black and has a raven or a lizard for a pet. CON: Gotta admit, that does sound convincingly like you. Except for the fact that you were living with your future husband for TWENTY TWO YEARS. PRO: Before you judge: What about if Glenn Close or Holly Hunter were available to play you? Or, listen to this: what if by some grace of the fates, this never married version of the script is the one that attracted The Coen Brothers? Then, fingers-crossed, I bet THIS TIME we could maybe get Frances McDormand!! And I gotta say, even if the character has never been married, there’s no reason to think we can’t throw in a little detective work for her somehow. CON: Are you trying to tell me that you think we should make an important personal decision like getting married based on a shallow, unlikely proposition that you’ll A) be able to sell a bio-pic to a streaming platform and B) Be able to cast Francis McDormand? PRO: No. Of course not. NO WAY! By the way, the bio-pic was YOUR idea. CON: Ooof. You’re right. So, are we ready to send this to the jury? PRO: I have one more point to make. And its major.
5. LEAVING YOUR STUFF TO SOMEONE WHO AT LEAST UNDERSTANDS WHAT IT EVEN IS .
PRO: If you’re married, you get to put someone who understands you in charge of what happens to all the weird stuff you have been collecting your whole life. I’ll give you a good example: in the event of your demise, (and by you, I, of course, mean me) what are your nephews going to do with the Psychedelic Pez container you bought in 1968? Or the macaroni and cheese boxes you saved because you thought they were funny. What will they make of the chart about wearing plastic gloves that Megan gave you for Christmas last year? What will they do with the disintegrating peanut butter sandwich you bought at Costco twenty years ago that you never threw out because its so full of preservatives that it never decays? CON: Same thing Andy, your future betrothed, is going to do with them. Throw them out. PRO: Ha!. Apparently you haven’t met Andy. He never throws out anything. Nothing. He has every one of his old computers. He still has utility bills addressed to one of the members of his band from 1986. CON :The defense rests. PRO: I thought you were the prosecution and I was the defense. CON: I thought so too. But things change. PRO: Let’s both take a nap.
6. A THING I HADN’T CONSIDERED
A more nuanced turning point came for me after a conversation with two friends, David and Jeffrey: a married couple, who had been together 25 years before they got married. I asked them if getting married changed anything in their relationship, since the principal of “if it aint broke don’t fix it’ loomed very large in my list of cons. And they said “Yes. It was surprisingly emotional.” Because I trusted these guys and saw their situation as parallel to my own, their story shot to the top of my reasons to not be afraid of getting married.
And Then…
And then, it came to pass that an appointment was made at the nearest city hall. Tho par for the course, we forgot to show up for that one. And also the next one. They had to be rescheduled. That involved filing the same paperwork again and re-paying the fee. We did, however, make it to the third one.
THE WEDDING.
We had relocated to a small town in upstate Washington that summer, the result of a house swap. And at the end of our 4 month stay, one of us said “So when should we get married? We’re almost out of time before we are going to have to file again.” And then the other one said something like “Well, we are leaving on Friday, early, so if we don’t do it on Thursday, we are going to have to figure out how to do it in L.A. and that will mean fighting a lot more traffic.” This is the kind of high-maintenance, bridezilla-control-freak uber-planning to which I had succumbed.
Truth is we had already been to a city hall in Los Angeles several years before and gotten a certificate, which expired. We had forgotten about it entirely.
This time we were more committed to going thru with it until we found out that a ceremony with an officiate was going to be required. That was when I learned that my friend Carole Ann Stabile , who lived in the area, had one of those all-purpose Universal Life Church certificates that allowed her to officiate at weddings and god knows what else.
In the late sixties, Carole Ann was my assigned roommate for Freshman Orientation at U.C. Berkeley. We had shared a dorm room for a couple of nights, probably paired up because we were both art majors. She was a tall, beautiful, fashionably skinny girl with long straight blonde hair and the kind of no-nonsense mini skirt that I was too chicken to wear yet. However, to my surprise, she also said a lot of funny stuff. I liked her right away. Here is the actual diary entry I wrote about her.
From that point on, it was hijinx and more hijinx until the end of freshman orientation. The highlight of the next day was making some hand-written leaflets full of odd but vaguely threatening proclamations that we handed out to random students headed for class via the pass-thru area at the intersection of Sproul Hall and Telegraph Avenue, where the political organizers all distributed their heartfelt policy tracts.
After we reconnected on Facebook, FIFTY years later, my four month visit to upstate Washington renewed our friendship. She was a grandmother now but still an artist and still funny. After we agreed that she would officiate, the husband and I decided on a little creek with a sand bar in the middle, behind the trail in a park where we often walked the dogs, for a setting.
On the day of the event, there were three middle school aged boys throwing rocks at our wedding venue. My husband asked if they could pause for a few minutes so we could get married. And because this was upstate Washington, and not Los Angeles or New York, they did not tell us to go fuck ourselves. They quietly left.
We didn’t invite anyone except Carole Ann’s husband of fifty years, to whom, it turned out, she was not officially married. But that did not disqualify her from bestowing the title upon us. I also trusted Carole Ann to write a little speech. And because she has known me for fifty years, though those years were not consecutive, she wrote something that I thought was completely perfect. It was this:
Welcome to the wedding of Andy and Merrill
Marriage is a sacred and transformative event.
You were once two people who went places, did things, cared for the dogs and cleaned up messes, ate food, made music, filled up notebooks and pads with writing and walked on the beach.
From this day forward, you will be two people who go places, do things, care for the dogs, clean up messes, eat food, make music, fill notebooks and pads with writing, walk on the beach, and have a piece of paper in the file drawer that says you are married.
You might choose to frame that piece of paper and hang it on the wall. That way, if you are both walking past it at the same time, your eyes can meet and you will share a little wink, a thumbs up, or a high five if you are feeling exuberant.
You can print it on a card sized piece of paper that you carry in your wallet, so if anyone says "Hey, are you two married or what?" you can pull out the card and give that "heck yeah" smile.
As your chosen officiant, I am legally the one who can make that piece of paper a reality. I need to verify that you are in fact agreeing to be married.
So at this moment in time, using super powers given to me by the state of Washington and a radioactive spider...I declare that you are now, and always, husband and wife.
AFTERWARD:
What happened next came as a shock.
After decades of fear that speaking the words “I do” would bring on a panic attack accompanied by wheezing, I was stunned and relieved to see that not only did that not happen, it felt kind of sweet and endearing and cozy. I liked it.
Of the various reactions I had been predicting, the idea that it might feel ‘nice’ had never occurred to me. And it came as such a surprise that I immediately began wondering what I had been so afraid of for FIVE (5!) decades. I guess for the answer to that, I should scroll back and read the other seven parts of this magnum opus I have been posting in pieces.
CODA
At this writing, it is now relationship year 23, married year 3. And things are…well, as the husband likes to say “Don’t boast while the gods are listening.” Instead I will follow my grandmother’s advice and say “Eh. Who the hell knows?” After which she would probably mumble ‘Kennehurra.’ (see chapter 7, part 2)
And so, to bring us back from whence we began (yes, I just said whence again)…now you have read a verbose, torturous and maybe even palaverous explanation of why you were not invited to my wedding. (see page one. ) And now that you know the full story, I hope you have forgiven me based on my 27 excellent reasons. Plus I assume you will rest easy knowing that when I finally have that amazing party, you will probably be invited. Right now I am thinking of maybe October of 2025, so go ahead and save all 30 of those dates. And while you have your calendar out, might as well also save Oct. of 2026 and 2027. No reason to rush into anything. Might have to wait until after I start and then finish writing a piece called “Why It Took Me 4-6 Years to Throw a Reception.”
I was a committed resister, on a visceral level as well. Just personal for me, I love going to weddings and celebrating the joy of people I love.
Please do invite me to your wedding reception celebration party happening - I hope and pray to the Lord of all that is or isn’t or might be that I will still be in my human body whenever that may take place ♥️