We decided to get married, and then the questions began.
“Have you set a date?”
“Where will the wedding be?”
“What kind of wedding do you think you’ll want to have?”
These are polite questions, and I know that by announcing our engagement, we invited people to ask them. Honestly, it felt like they were mostly asking me — like I’d been keeping the blueprints for our wedding in my dresser drawer, while my fiancé hid the ring in his. But I had no blueprints. I checked.
For a long time, I just knew I wanted to be married and have kids someday — no more, no less. Then, I met someone, and I became pretty sure he would be that person. We moved in together, and we talked about it. I talked about it like it was a trip we would take one day; he measured the diameter of my ring finger: “I’ll just do it in advance so it’s a surprise later.” I thought marriage was something you checked off right before getting pregnant; he told me he wanted to be engaged for a little while, then married without kids for a little while, so we could enjoy those…statuses. What would they do for us? I didn’t know. But if it would make him happy, I would take on any title in the world. I didn’t give it much more thought than that.
One night, we were fighting — I have no idea what about. I started arguments I refused to lose; it was how I asserted my standards for the relationship. And I had high standards, which he generally exceeded — it was just in a few instances, that I really needed him to be better at handling my moods, and his own. “Or else.” It was never there, but then in those moments it appeared suddenly, and we both felt its weight in the room, no matter how much I said nothing could threaten us.
Lately, when I had feelings he couldn’t fix, and “or else” was lurking, he became consumed with so much worry that he struggled to put anything into words. It was alarming, and I didn’t like it. When he repeated that he was just really stressed out right now, I wouldn’t accept that. “Work is the same as ever, what’s going on?” That evening, finally, he cracked. He said was working on something that he couldn’t tell me about — and he was probably ruining it by saying anything.
I had to go take a hot shower, I was so shaken. I sat in the tub and stared at the porcelain as the water ran off my hair and over my face. It was one of those heavy stares that transports you through and outside yourself, so you’re looking at yourself staring, so that the only thought in your head becomes: this is happening. Beyond that, I didn’t know, except that it did seem a little bit ruined, and it was my fault. I was the type of person who ruined the best things.
Before the question, and before the answer, there was this: when I came out of the shower and wrapped myself in the sheets, he sat on the bed’s edge, by my side, and held me like he does. In so many words he proposed to me — told me everything he was offering, drew his vision of what we could be. He was more stunningly eloquent than I’d ever heard him or anyone else, on the topic of love, and marriage, and him, and me. I held him like I do, and in so many words I said yes.
I couldn’t sleep that night. I was more excited than afraid, but I was both. It wasn’t him — he’s an astonishingly good person and partner for me. It just felt like my life was about to solidify in a way it never had before, and I wasn’t sure I was ready. I’d just left my job and didn’t know what I would become. I was all stem cells, and now this. I didn’t want to return to my single 20s, or to the person I had been in a previous relationship, but I did have to actually say goodbye to amorphous youth, and step into an identity I’d wear for the rest of my life. Like endings do, this one had arrived somehow sooner than I’d expected, and it was right on time.
“I kind of think we choose something, and then we make the best of it,” my mom told me. She and I had talked about it, but now for the first time we were really talking about it — turned out being engaged wasn’t an abstraction. A day before, I might have been surprised at the way she put it, so practical, but I was realizing that marriage is practical. People say that; I had to get there myself. Yes: deciding to get married is taking responsibility, for that person, and for making the best of your lives together. You pick a teammate, and you promise to be on their team, to love and support them forever, no matter what. It’s a concrete commitment, not a status, and I realized why we needed it, and why I needed to actually think about it.
I thought back to whenever I was emotional and insinuating that maybe we didn’t make a good team, or maybe he wasn’t good enough in some way. I thought about the leap he’d made, on his own. I saw him standing on the other side, arms outstretched to catch me, the way he saved me from falling off a mountain when we were hiking in Yosemite, the way my dad saved my mom from being swept off a cliff by a wave when they were hiking in Hawaii. Cautious and (dare I say) challenging women, and the brave men who love them anyway.
Nothing was ruined, and certainly not the perfect clarity and happiness of that moment, a week later, on a bluff by the beach.
“Were you surprised?” everyone asked me.
This, I did have an answer to: “Not really,” I said, and I smiled.