K and I are eight weeks out from getting married, and there is something to do every night. We get home after work and have these rapid-fire conversations about whether you picked up the rubber lobster stamp and who is researching the morning-after brunch plans and please don’t forget the roast chicken for Jane, who is deathly allergic to crustaceans and will probably spend our entire wedding in bubble wrap. (I just had to stop writing this so I could write a note about the roast chicken for Jane.)
Eight infinitesimal weeks to get all this stuff done, eight weeks till we stand up and sign a wedding license in front of just about every person we know and love. Is my frenzied tone coming across? Because I am panicking, and not just about the gluten-free options, and boy oh boy, is our house fun these days.
I started crying on the way home from meeting with our clambake caterers the other night. (God, I hate sidewalk crying, but not as much as subway crying!) “We should have gone to City Hall like I WANTED,” I sniffed. “If we went to City Hall, it wouldn’t even be thirty seconds later that you’d be sad that your people weren’t there,” K said reasonably. Of course she is right, of course, but what if she’s not?
I suspect that this is normal, that everyone who is already on the other side of marriage has felt this way at one point or another during wedding planning. But what the hell do I know? A well-meaning friend said to me that I should enjoy every moment of wedding planning, even the hard ones! Because they’re all part of the two of us working on the most important decision we’ll make in our lives.
I almost choked on my tiny artisanal slider when he said it, because first of all, that’s the kind of thing that someone only says when they are not currently in the situation that the other is in, and then I felt so instantly guilty for not savoring every tender argument about our wedding website header. Like I single-handedly just let down all of the Corinthians who are patient and kind and not easily angered. I was already feeling a little baffled and isolated, when over the course of a month, I started hearing about one unhappy relationship after another. There was a week straight where I heard about people having relationship problems almost every day.
One night in the middle of all of this, K came home and cheerfully stepped out of her shoes in the dining room. She started shedding her clothes and casting them aside while talking over her shoulder on her way into the kitchen. This is nothing new. This is what she does every night. Usually I appreciate how hunky, albeit faintly ridiculous, she looks cooking dinner in socks and briefs. Not so, not so that night. Instead I remained sitting at the table, staring at her shoes. “There are going to be shoes in my dining room for the rest of my life,” I thought. And I couldn’t stop! Every tiny and not-so-tiny annoyance loomed large, and my lobster stamp worries were quickly eclipsed by an insidious terror that we were making a mistake by getting married, that we’re too different, that we’re not the right match.
So I did what I usually do about big, hard, scary things: I decided that it was better to silently process them on my own until I calmed down a little, in the hopes that they’d go away. I’m thirty-four, so that’s what, about thirty-two years of making decisions about communication and my emotions, and has this approach ever worked? Never.
A week or so later, we were headed home from work, and somewhere between Fort Greene and Flatbush, we started talking about the folks we know having problems or getting divorced. Finally I couldn’t stand it anymore, couldn’t stand talking around the lump of fear and worry lodged in my stomach somewhere. “K,” I confessed, “what if that happens to us. What if we’re making a mistake?” Then I waited for everything to splinter apart, since I’d finally said it out loud. Except all that happened is that K said SHE’D BEEN WONDERING THE SAME THING.
We talked all the way home, and my relief was so palpable that I felt instantly exhausted. Why haven’t we been talking about this stuff, with our friends and with each other, thus making the stuff so much harder when it finally bubbles up? So I’m formally announcing what my partner already knows—I’m going to marry her in eight weeks, and I’m damn nervous about it, and even though things are so much better since we talked about it, I’m still nervous.
But I’m going to stay the course, because K and I are on the Same Team. This is one of the core, articulated tenets of our relationship, one that became very clear when we started discussing the possibility of marriage. When we disagree, when we’re trying to figure out where to move after NYC, when we buy groceries and check the ingredients for rogue gluten, we articulate and embody that we are united. We have each other’s backs, and agree to support one another, in spite of when it’s hard and especially when it’s hard.
We are not a couple that immediately agrees on much, so it’s not really enough to just put this statement out there. It requires active involvement and is easy to forget, especially in the middle of an argument. There might be times where we love each other but cannot figure out how to like each other, and there even might be times we forget that we love each and wonder why the hell we agreed to this commitment. But, because we’re on the same team, we’ve agreed to stick around through the difficult stuff because we believe that the work is worth it.
When the wedding is all over, I want to remember the good stuff, while not ignoring the fact that wedding planning was really hard for us. How happy K looked when she brought home her suit, how much I loved picking out a fascinator with dear friends before we drank all of the margaritas in the East Village. How crisp and clear and cold it was that night on Cortelyou when I realized I was ready to marry K, and how I walked home simultaneously sobered and elated, and didn’t tell anyone, not even K, because I wanted just a few more moments before everything changed.
Photo: Kara Schultz
