Save the Date: The Occasional Mortifications of a Serial Wedding Guest (9 page)

My dad, on the other hand, was the man who didn’t have to stay home with the kids, taking garage breaks as needed. He was the breadwinner, a sometimes workaholic. He was the “fun dad” on weekends; Mom was the disciplinarian, the one you didn’t dare cross. And, mostly, that worked for them.

Sometimes it didn’t. “There were times when I thought he was spending too much time at work, and I wanted him to spend time with not only me but also you and Bradley,” my mom said. “I’d go to the school and other husbands were there, and I’d tell him, ‘You’re missing these times.’”

Later, when Brad and I were in college, Dad spent more and more time at work in increasingly important management positions. I remember a family vacation in Turkey one summer when it seemed like their marriage was on the thinnest of ice, melting under our feet. “I was playing the career role more than the husband role, and Mom felt neglected. And maybe she was, because my mind was elsewhere,” he says of that moment in their relationship. I remember a time after that, when they first moved to Florida and were coping with taking care of my ailing grandmother; how hard that was, not just for them as individuals but for them together. They stuck through both of those crisis points, and others, including some I surely don’t even know about.

As my dad told me, “Marriage is a process. It’s the journey, not the destination.”

My parents have provided an enduring example of how to be with someone through the bad and good of a marriage, and why it’s worth it to do so. Their relationship, like anyone’s, has had its ups and downs, but it felt enough like an accepted, comfortable reality that I could take it for granted, so much so that as a kid I’d deliver those bratty censures to my mother for having the audacity to have had a first husband. As I grew up I came to know friends whose parents were separated and divorced, whose moms or dads had remarried, who had extended families with stepbrothers or sisters or both. There were all these different ways of living, I realized, and many of them worked, and some did not. One truly bad iteration was the couple who stayed together and took their unhappy marriage out on their kids. It occurred to me that even though my mom and dad weren’t exactly the Cleavers (thank God), I’d had it pretty good.

Yes, we’ve had it good, my brother and I. Yet we haven’t married. We can wait as long as we like to walk down the aisle and as long as our bodies will let us to have children, if we decide to do either of those things at all. While we may be judged by a few people, prolonged singlehood is by no means the social end it once would have been. In fact, waiting to marry, for some at least, has clear benefits, allowing men and women to finish college and establish careers, thereby gaining maturity and building a stronger foundation for later together-lives. There is a class divide to note, though. Highly educated women who choose to wed later in life tend to have happier marriages and fewer divorces (they
are, it’s said, the most married group of women in America), but they do pretty well on their own as singles, too. Single women who are poor and less educated, on the other hand, often benefit greatly from marriage in earlier adulthood, particularly if they have children. And, of course, everyone benefits from a relationship that is good and stable. But whether people need to be married to have “goodness” and “stability” is another discussion. It’s worth noting, too, that views of marriage are different around the world. In Scandinavian countries like Sweden and Norway, for example, cohabitation and marriage have become largely interchangeable, albeit with a twist: Those cohabitation arrangements are often the more lasting unions.

My own lack of a wedding up to this time comes with an array of possible reasons, among them, well, no one has ever (seriously) proposed. But I think there’s more to deciding to marry than having someone ask and responding with a yes. Maybe I just haven’t “met the right person,” and maybe that’s partly my own doing. I believe we directly or indirectly set up the situations that lead to marriage for ourselves, and thus far in life, I have not actively pursued it as a goal. I live in New York City, surrounded by people my age and older who are frequently unmarried and younger people who almost always are. The social and financial reality that means I don’t
have
to marry is surely a factor in my singleness, as are what may be impossibly high standards for what I want marriage to be like if I do. Timing, too, has been important. I have not reached that moment in a relationship in which I’ve really, truly wanted someone to propose, nor that moment in which I would propose to someone else. While it would be difficult to convince
me that I should have married any of my past boyfriends—hindsight being twenty-twenty, of course—there’s also the fact that the focus of my life up to this point has simply not been marrying and starting a family.

At the same time, I don’t want to cancel out those options, either.

We all have our priorities. I look at my friends and see two groups: the women who have married and had children, and the women who have found themselves, after years of work, at the top or nearing the top of their professions. Both groups have happiness, I think; both are indisputably admirable for what they’ve achieved, but there’s a rare person in the mix who has managed to do it all, that itself not without its own sort of compromise. After all, that’s what life is so frequently about: choosing one thing and in that choice foregoing the other. Even if we believe that “having it all” is the wrong goal—who can fit “it all” in a studio apartment that doesn’t even hold a queen bed?—we still don’t want to narrow the field so that things we might find we want someday, if not now, are crossed off the list and become impossible. For some of us, it may be that the
option
of having it all is far more important than actually obtaining it. We don’t want to regret any choices made or not made, but in our daily, busy lives, our most immediate focus is often not marriage and children and what we hope for in the far-off but ever-approaching future. Tasks like getting a raise, a better job, and a great apartment are feasible to accomplish with some effort and in a certain accessible time frame, while goals like “being in love” or “finding the right one” at “the right time” feel capricious
and very hard to achieve in any strategic, structured manner. So maybe it’s not surprising that we often devote ourselves to the former.

It’s taken me much of my adult life to feel confident enough to admit that whether it’s a marriage, a long-term relationship, or even a short-term one, I do want love, the kind that is practical and makes sense, as my dad describes, but at the same time, all corniness acknowledged, knocks me off my feet. And even now, confessing that feels dangerous. If I need someone else in order to be happy or fulfilled, am I the stereotype, or somehow a bad feminist? Can I be a strong, independent, self-assured woman and also say I’d like a boyfriend, and maybe even a husband, someone to care for who also cares for me, forever-and-ever-amen? But if I don’t say it, will it ever happen? Will that mysterious “right one at the right time” ever arise?

For women, marriage has traditionally meant greater limitations than it has for the men we choose, particularly with regard to life options beyond the family unit. Of course, throughout history, women have faced an array of greater external limitations compared to men. Getting married, as it was in my mom’s day, was one of the few ways to start life away from one’s parents. That’s no longer true, but even now women face gender-based marital challenges ranging from finding work-life balance to determining how to share household responsibilities and child care, responsibilities that still frequently fall squarely on female shoulders. I am proud of my parents for their marriage, but the model that worked for them, in which my mom was the homemaker while my dad surged forward in his work, would not be
sustainable for me. I want my own career, and I want my partner to have his, too, whatever that may be, and I want each of us to respect and value and relate to the other’s choices, professionally and personally. It is for reasons of the past, present, and future that I am wary of the marital institution in principle and reality, to the extent that I would never, past the age of eight, blithely plan a double wedding on a trampoline.

Being single can also seem like the ultimate act of self-reliance, and a not entirely dishonorable one, considering the divorce rate. Conversely, the choice to pair up with someone else for an entire life can look a wee bit terrifying. Yet of all the reasons to marry, the honest desire to take that leap of faith and extend beyond the self and into a state of two—to ask someone to be there always and be answered with a yes; I’ll take a chance on you, if you’ll take a chance on me—is the most compelling to me. The active selection of that mutual compact (with or without an accompanying wedding) is an impressive one, which doesn’t mean it’s not scary, or risky, or that it doesn’t have the potential to end badly. A proposal made without an awareness of the risks, though, is only the most shallow sort of proposal. A leap of faith requires leaping with faith, not blindness or blissful ignorance.

In fairness, it can be hard to tell the difference.

•   •   •

W
hen Hurricane Sandy hit the East Coast, a man I was dating was visiting me in New York City, and afterward, my mom told me, “I was so glad he was there, so you weren’t alone.” That may be the closest she’s ever come to telling me she wishes
I’d get married. Had I not been seeing anyone, she never would have said this, and I would have been fine, if a bit lonely, on my own, or I would have gone to stay with my brother, or with friends. And in truth, I was glad he was there, too. The flip side of that alone coin, though, is how utterly dreadful, how one hundred and ten times worse it would be to find yourself trapped in a tiny apartment with someone you can’t stand for the duration of a massive storm. Weathering out the hurricane of life means you have to find, and choose, the right companion. I feel glad my parents get that. They’ve never tried to guilt me into being with someone I’d never share beef jerky or my last bottle of hurricane water with, much less my life.

One of the questions I asked them was, “Do you think people today lose anything by not getting married?” I was probing to see if they thought I’d miss anything if I remained single forever. I wanted to know if they were worried about me, if they thought I was doing something wrong, and if they felt there was something wrong with me. I also wanted to know what they felt they’d gained over the years, and what they might have lost if they hadn’t followed in the course they had.

“It doesn’t worry me that you’re single,” said my dad (thanks, Dad). “People don’t marry today, in some cases, because they don’t have to. They do what they do because they can. In my day, living together without being married was something only showbiz people might do.” He was concerned, though, about missing out on the benefits of and the ability to compromise, “the rough-and-tumble of fitting in together,” as he put it, if people don’t marry. “You have to bend and fit in and adjust as you go through
it. I guess at this point I’m full of bumps and Mom’s full of bumps, but we’re full of bumps together. If you did get married,” he said, “it would be a learning experience.”

I am sure he is right.

My mom had a slightly different take, about collective memory and the importance of keeping people around to remind you of who you once were. “Your dad and I can sit down and talk about things we did twenty or thirty years ago, things we still have jokes about. You don’t get to have that history or connection or the memories if you’re just meeting and dating and meeting and dating,” she told me. “And the memories of the good times can help you get through the rough spots.”

•   •   •

T
he day of my mom’s brain surgery I sat with my phone next to me, ringer on, waiting and trying to work but unable to complete a single task. I spoke to my brother, and we consoled each other. “You know how she is,” he said, “she’ll be astounding the doctors with her superhuman recovery in no time.”

“Yes,” I agreed. “Of course she will.” We hoped, we hoped.

Finally, Dad called to tell us she was out of surgery, but she wasn’t awake yet, and wouldn’t be for a while. They were keeping her in a medically induced coma as her brain healed to prevent any further damage to it.

That did not ease my mind much. “Do they think she’ll be okay, though?” I ventured, not sure if I wanted to know the truth. “Her brain is . . . fine?”

“Apparently the bleeding was from old wounds,” he explained,
which wasn’t really an answer but was a kind of reassurance, if we chose to see it that way. The previous autumn, they’d gone on a bike tour of New Zealand, and she’d taken a hard fall that cracked her helmet. While bruised, she thought she was fine. She wasn’t. She’d been walking around with the hematomas for months, and they’d healed, and then they’d opened up again, the results of which had sent her to the emergency room. But she’d been
walking around with bleeding in her brain for months
, and during all that, her only complaints had been that she felt more tired than usual and her head hurt now and then. “So, you know your mom,” he said with a raspy laugh. “She’s not going to let
this
stop her.”

Brad and I flew down. Daily, the three of us would visit Mom in the hospital. We’d stand by her bedside and look at all the tubes going into her body, her chapped lips, the bruises on her arms from blood taken, the cap on her head to prevent her stitches from becoming infected. We’d look at her and my dad would hold her hand and say, “We need you back, Marilou. We need you back.” I’d try to will her eyes to open through the force of my own, and Brad and I would both talk to her. We’d tell her things that were happening outside in the world, though we barely knew what those things were because our world had shrunk to this hospital, this bed in this hospital, the person in this bed and the people who needed her to come back as soon as possible.
She
had always been the conversationalist of the family. We’d go home and sit in her too-quiet kitchen trying to eat some of the casserole dishes that kind neighbors and friends had brought over. We’d talk about what was happening or, more often, fall
into an emotionally exhausted silence. The next day we’d wake up and do it again.