I take you

…to be my lawfully wedded wife.

I helped throw a really big party six years ago. It may have been the best party I had ever been to, and was most certainly the best one I had ever hosted. My recollection of the day is hazy, but fragments remain indelibly imprinted upon my memory.

I recall the dead silence of an empty event hall and the resonance of lone voices echoing off its rafters. Then, the loud rumble and chorus of laughter, hours later when the room was filled with seats, bodies, and sound equipment. I can hear the sequenced, dulcet tones of Frou Frou and The xx coming from the night’s playlist in my mind’s ear.

To drink, I remember wine and a keg of local microbrew; people were invited to bring their own spirits. A bottle of Fireball made its way around the dance floor, followed shortly thereafter by Tuaca — a peculiar favorite of one of our guests. To eat, there were three kinds of antipasti preceding wood-fired pizzas from a food truck. And for dessert, Hungarian kifli — soft cookies reminiscent of rugelach, with jam and nuts enveloped between flaky, gossamer crust; concentrated doses of sugar to fuel late-night dancing to the succession of bangers I remember coming from a very, very, good DJ.

That party, thrown on September 12th, 2015 in a Philadelphia brewery turned trolleycar repair shop, was my very informal, incredibly fun wedding.

To have and to hold

When I announced my engagement at the age of twenty-three, many who were close to me were wholly unsurprised. I was a romantic. I felt like I had waited my whole life to marry. Not to assuage loneliness, but to ride the high of mutual benevolence that comes with falling in love and spending a life listening to, caring for, and being thoughtful towards another person. In a wedded universe I was offered a version of myself that I could admire and respect, one worthy of my own esteem. Dependable, loyal, there to help — my mea culpa to the universe for my self-serving teenaged years. Sign me up.

Before marriage, of course, came love. But some months before the party, I sat in my backyard with a friend and expressed to him what I believed to be a foundational truth of my relationship: my soon-to-be wife could never love me as much as I loved her. It wasn’t that I didn’t feel loved by her; I did. But I felt so deeply that I had to earn her love — that without enough given, I could not expect to receive any. To be loved felt almost unfairly undeserved — who was I to feel joys and passions of this depth? In exchange, I compensated, tipping the scales of affection in my partner’s favor, doting and trying to be the best man I could be.

The rough reality is this: the motivations behind what we come to recognize as love are complex — in my case, love for my wife was driven from a deep sense of duty towards her, an extreme romantic bent, and yes, a font of my own insecurities. But in marriage, the ends justify the means, right? I thought I could afford this one bit of selfishness.

For better or worse, in sickness & in health

It was all worth it. Being married to someone I loved so deeply simplified so much of my life. The most existential of questions I used to ask myself now all seemed impertinent: What am I doing with my life? Why am I doing it? How long do I have to keep going? Answers to these and more were in the wedding vows.

Just as soon as I had finished writing those vows, I started thinking about what I might add to them when the time came to renew, ten, twenty, or thirty years later. I imagined my own parents and how marriage for them, after forty-five years, must have required so much effort and thought, committing and recommitting, evolving and changing. I couldn’t wait to do the same.

The long, unknown stretch of time ’til death — with all of it’s good, bad, sickness, and health — that inspires cold feet in some was a shower of relief upon me. I was aboard the ship, and all that was left was to chart a course. The thought of a lifelong commitment was a warming balm on my cold, anxious, nomadic soul.

’Til death do us part

To end a marriage at twenty-six is to feel loss on a scale I was not ready to accept. In the days before my divorce, I steeled myself against heartbreak. It’s what you see in movies and often in real life, in a country where half of marriages end in divorce. It’s what you feel when any relationship ends. Yet for as ready as I was for that heartbreak, I was unprepared for the grief. I was unprepared for the sorrow. I felt feelings you might ascribe to death or limb amputation, not divorce. I was whole, and then I was broken.

It’s torturous work to call your parents, friends, and loved ones and tell them that the lifelong commitment they watched you make years ago is to be dissolved. Perhaps the worst task of all is reassuring everyone who asks that you’re fine, even if you’re not. There is no option but to lie to these people, for as much as they care about you, they are unequipped to heal you, and powerless in the face of this kind of despair.

After I called my parents, a call it took me a month to make, I wept openly for the first time in years. On my knees, at the foot of what used to be the bed I shared with my wife, I cried deeply. I was surprised. The tenor of this anguish was different than anything I had ever felt: disoriented, forsaken, and confused, like those of Christ on the cross. Eloi, eloi, lama sabachthani? But my cries, no matter how loud or pained, only represented the voices on the outside. The ones on the inside cried out much louder and didn’t exist on the other end of a line that could be hung up, or in a room where a pillow could muffle my screams.

The things that well-meaning people say when you tell them a marriage has ended are by and large unhelpful or hurtful platitudes. Some echo the cliché of “it wasn’t meant to be.” Others read your pain as anger and offer some of their own as an empathetic reflex. Then there’s those who recall readings they made in tea leaves — some as early as the wedding day — that made them certain the marriage wouldn’t last (no comment on why they didn’t speak up). Finally, those that you meet after the divorce interrogate you for details of the longevity of your courtship, or any number of other factors, in search of corpus delicti under which to try you, as if to suggest you must have done something for there to be a divorce; that there is no divorce for those who are un-divorceable.

Amen.

My divorce was what many call “clean” — no alimony, no custody, no complicated division of property. When I began the process I leaned hopefully into that word, trusting that I’d come out of all of this spotless, or at the very least, like-new. Unfortunately, the reality is that there is no clean divorce. Old anxieties about my self-worth have returned, joined by new ones inspired by the end of my marriage. Rejection stings in a way it did not used to. An ability to trust remains, but takes much more effort to engage.

In the wake of divorce, I have a new set of existential questions, with fewer answers: Will I marry again? Will I love again? Do I have a moral duty to do so? Life without marriage is certainly possible, is life without love? I don’t know the answer to any of these questions, but at least I threw a really good party.