I grew up thinking that marriage was an institution. Vows made by two people who then could not leave, even if it was healthier for them to do so.
Who taught me that? The myriad unhappy couples I have seen, and Elizabeth Gilbert’s Committed.
I saw marriage as something that was optional, something extra, something you did to have a legal status with the governments of the world, and not anything about two people in love and wanting to spend their lives together.
It was just something people did, after school and work. Part of the list that guides people who don’t think about what they want, i.e. go to school, get a job, get married, buy a house, have kids, retire.
I viewed marriage with suspicion — why would anybody with a mind of their own agree to legally binding your future together and making it extremely difficult when you need to leave?
You don’t need permission or a license to live together or spend your life together, so why bind your finances, present and future, why set up life so that you invoke the law and the court, and allow someone else to have the final say about your relationship?
If you’re going to live together, you’re going to live together. Why need someone to pronounce you man and wife?
To add to the list of dislike, I have not enjoyed a single wedding I’ve been at. The “hazing” of a groom to prove his love to the bride was a waste of time, looked like extortion, and was humiliating. The walk-ins and photo sessions with the bride and groom felt forced, rushed, and managed, like we were zoo animals that needed to be corralled. The gathering of loved ones makes sense only to the couple, and everyone else has to suffer awkward conversations, boredom because you’re ignored, and terrible food that had been left out for too long.
A marriage, a wedding, felt more like brainlessly accepting government control, caving to parental pressure, doing things simply because “that’s how it’s always been done”, which never made sense to my brain, and locking your future with someone who might turn into your worst enemy, and now you need someone else’s permission, and a team of lawyers, to be set free.
To say I dislike the idea of marriage might be an understatement. I was set on never getting married. I had neither longing nor desire for it, and wanted the complete opposite.
And then Jarrod proposed.
And I’m trying to rewrite the story of what a marriage and a wedding means.
Unlike a lot of girls who began dreaming of their wedding since they were eight (a concept as equally alien to me as the women who have always wanted to be a mom, but y’all exist), who would be thrilled at the prospect of marriage… I’ve got to turn my own head around.
The furthest I’ve walked before Jarrod came into my life was due to “Say Yes To The Dress” and baking shows — I saw a wedding as something that allowed you to dress up and order a massive cake.
Then I started buying dresses and I found out that wedding cakes are styrofoam, and the light on that path fizzled out.
Right now, I’m collecting reasons.
The list of why marriage / a wedding is a good thing:
- I get to dress up — in something special.
- I get to order a massive cake — to eat.
- Immigration won’t stop or separate us.
- Jarrod finds it important, it’s important in his system of beliefs and values.
- If I own property and die unmarried and without a will, the property goes to my parents and sibling.
I’m making this list by chronological order, because by importance, it being important to Jarrod’s beliefs, values, system that because we’re in love, we get married, should come first.
In some ways, that is enough. In other ways, I can do better than that. I love him and I will do things that I won’t necessarily do simply because it is important to him. I also know that I can change my own mind, and to be able to step into marriage and a wedding for my own reasons would allow me to view it with more pleasure and excitement.
The second reason, for immigration, makes sense too, because the worst-case scenario happened to Liz when she travelled with her boyfriend, and they re-entered USA one too many times, and he got stopped, brought into a room, interrogated, and deported without so much as a good bye and banned from returning for a year. Liz knew that the word “boyfriend” wouldn’t carry much weight, and was filled with worry while having no answer for hours.
The property reason is silly, and easily settled with a will. But I don’t want my estate to go to my brother, which is what would likely happen after my parents pass. If I am married, it goes to Jarrod.
As for the dress and cake, well, Jarrod’s thinking of batik, and while that isn’t the white dress I’d been looking forward to trying, he’s Peranakan too and a kebaya might not be too strange… And I am eating the cake. No styrofoam fake cake for me.
I still feel like a wedding is a bother to everyone else involved, and I won’t ask my friends to pay for a ticket to travel because that’s a cost I wouldn’t wish on anybody. (Our initial elopement plan of a local McDonald’s has evolved to getting married in Denver.) I’m more preoccupied with wanting to make sure the witnesses don’t feel like they’re wasting their time. That they at least have a good time, after driving up and showing up and helping and being part of the paperwork.
I never had the dream of a roomful of people you love and who love you.
Showing up to celebrate someone else’s love story feels more like social obligation when gifts and egos are involved — and perhaps I’m the only one who feels that way. There are people who will happily drop everything, tighten their budgets, sacrifice their own wants, and come join you on a 24-hour travelling day just to be there for a three-minute ceremony with strangers you then have to hang out with… I guess.
2:22 am. I’m falling asleep.
A marriage, a wedding, is about two people. That was all it started with, and is everything it means.
It’s a vow to stay together, witnessed by others, given the stamp of “this has happened”, and celebrates finding the one you are willing to try to do the work to be healthy with, to love and care for and be the one to appear in the “next-of-kin” box.
It’s another day of choosing the person, just today with more fanfare.
And maybe that’s enough for the other part of me.
✒️✨🧭
Illustration of daisy-like flowers and stems of leaves by Dung Tran from Pixabay.
