The first ex-boyfriend’s wedding I attended was dry: he claimed it was because an open bar was too expensive on their early-twenties budget. I secretly suspected it was a religious thing, though I didn’t really want to ask and open myself to any further religious proselytizing by asking.
But when the wedding party began singing Meatloaf’s Paradise By The Dashboard Light to one another – boys versus girls – my brutalizing sobriety made it easier to stifle my astonished laughter and refrain from telling my then-boyfriend that, against that backdrop, I felt truly secure in all of my sometimes poor romantic decisions.
The boyfriend who was there with me that night is married now, too – I figured he would be, since the insurmountable issue in our relationship (besides his infidelity) was his desire to get married and mine to avoid it at all costs. I ran into him a few years ago on the street after a 5-mimosa brunch with a girl friend, and the woman with whom he was holding hands was wearing a large diamond engagement ring with a matching wedding band. We made small talk for a minute; the last time that Facebook invited me to add him as a Friend, he was pictured with his daughter. I closed the tab.
Most of the once-great loves of my lives are married now – or, in one case, about to be – to women they met in college after we broke up or women they sat with in church, women whose profiles they stared at on online dating sites and others with whom they worked. And though I know, as 40 beckons and I settle comfortably into no-choice-about-it childlessness, that I’m supposed to feel some sense of loss or bitterness that it’s not me in those happy pictures on Facebook, all I can think is thank fucking God.
I’m quite happily unmarried, though single would be a bit of misnomer: it is the box that I check on all kinds of official forms, but I’ve been cohabitating with a dude for two-and-a-half years. He’s a divorcé who also doesn’t see any particularly good reason to take a trip together down any aisle that isn’t in a grocery store. I stopped getting seriously involved with men who wanted to theoretically get married years ago – yet, somehow, I’m the only one still stubbornly resisting the institution.
My unwillingness to marry doesn’t come from an absence of pretty, pretty princess fantasies to watch as a young girl; it’s not because I avoided cultural conditioning that marriage was a life goal (I was raised Catholic); and it’s not some overwrought response to an ugly divorce when I was a child (my parents celebrated their 40th anniversary last year). But I’ve never been much of a joiner-in, I’m a pretty committed religious agnostic and I’ve no aversion to stubbornly sticking to what I think is right, as evidenced by my lifelong insistence that people pronounce my last name correctly when it would clearly be easier to just let people Anglicize it at the DMV. I just never wanted to be married, and it doesn’t seem like something you should do for any other reason.
But not getting married – and openly not wanting to get married – as I get older increasingly feels like tilting at a windmill while my former comrades-in-arms walk to the other side and add to the wind.
Still: do other people really wish they were there when looking at pictures of parties with people they don’t like, or vacations at destinations they’ve no urge to visit? While I am totally sure that each of my ex-boyfriends (especially if any one of them or any one of their wives is reading this) has a lovely, supportive, completely functional marriage to a woman who is his true soulmate that will last until death do them part, their weddings and the social media-generated looks into their coupled-up lives always feel divorced from any reality of which I’d want to be part.
I know from experience that I’m expected to be at least weirded out when my exes marry; a couple years ago, at a different ex’s wedding, I got more than a few meant-to-be-sympathetic looks from our mutual friends. My pristine black eyeliner luckily served as proof that I wasn’t there crying over him, even though I was there alone; I didn’t throw myself at any single male wedding guests or grab the microphone to make a maudlin toast. When they exchanged vows that I could barely hear because the sound system was broken, I wasn’t just happy to be in the back of the audience rather than in front of it, I was happy for them to have found what they wanted in one another.
And then I spent the afterparty in a TGI Fridays letting some stranger buy me tequila shots with 20s peeled off a huge wad of cash, because that’s the kind of shit you can still do when you’re not somebody’s wife.
