It was no surprise that my husband Reid was texting the other woman on just the third day of their honeymoon. He had been in love with her for months. I was surprised that we went through with the wedding despite mounting evidence that our relationship could crumble under the weight of everything we've accumulated this past year. is.
Now, on the patio of my rented apartment in Spain, as I watch Reed smile and think of a woman who is not me, I want to slam his glass of red wine to the ground and throw his cell phone into the Mediterranean Sea.
Instead, I headed to the kitchen and slid to the floor, burying my head in my hands.
In the months leading up to our wedding, friends and family gently asked us if we were still going to go through with it, asking us to “give it our all.” Just a few weeks ago, Reed's brother took her aside and told her to refrain from signing the marriage certificate “just in case.”
The turmoil of the past year has blinded us. Around the time we got engaged, we opened up about our relationship. Even though we were doing research on ethical non-monogamy, we were still avoiding, sulking, and sabotaging. We were reckless, inconsiderate, and reserved.
As I watched Reed fall in love with another woman, I turned to my own antidote. It was casual sex with a rotating male and female cast. Despite our best intentions to build a more flexible and lasting relationship, we had strained our relationship to breaking point.
Now, a few days after our honeymoon, I was thinking about ending our love story, only to find myself returning to the beginning.
Reid and I met in college. He was a green-eyed country boy who played the banjo and ate kelp straight from the ocean. He caught my attention with a laugh.
As I walked around campus, I couldn't help but grin every time I thought of Reid. It didn't take me long to tell Reid I loved him. After I did, the same words fell from his mouth as if he had been holding them in for weeks.
After a year of dating, Reed suggested they write each other a letter, bury it next to a tree on a cliff overlooking a nearby cove, and read it a year later.
It wasn't because of the letters that we spent another year together, and then another ten. They just encouraged us to consider everything that had happened up until writing it and everything that we had hoped would follow.
By the honeymoon, I was ready for the seemingly inevitable end of the relationship. My biggest fear going into non-monogamy was that my lead would fall in love with someone else and leave me. Now, that seemed like a realistic possibility. As I slumped on the kitchen floor of my rented house, I remembered that for the past month, my marriage license had been sitting on the dining room table, an eerie, white tabletop that looked haunted. .
Before leaving for Spain, a friend asked me if I had signed a marriage license.
“Not yet,” I said.
“Maybe you should wait until after your honeymoon,” she advised. “It's much easier to submit a document than to cancel it.”
But since I like to check things off my to-do list, I dropped my signed license in the mailbox the day before I left.
Something that has always frustrated my beliefs about modern partnerships was that marriage is formal. By the time we got engaged, Reed and I had been together for over 11 years. And although we considered ourselves more of an older couple than friends who had been married only a short time, we often answered questions about our efforts. .
People pressured us to formalize our bond, as if marriage was the only way to legitimize our love. Reed and I were skeptical of such a reductive view. We felt chosen rather than bound to each other. We knew our love was real, even if it wasn't legally recognized.
Still, the pressure mounted. As a woman, I felt this even more acutely. When Reed is asked over and over again that he might propose, it's like the question isn't whether Reed and I love each other, but rather whether Reed loves me enough. I felt unstable.
This question addresses a particular anxiety that resides within women who are told that their worth is tied to their marriageability. Despite my feminist values, I had begun to confuse being married with being loved. Eventually, I told Reid that I thought they should officially announce it.
we wanted to celebrate. We've loved each other for over 10 years and it was something we wanted to dance to, but we were wondering if there was a way around convention. We considered rebranding the event as a “Celebration of Love.” While we felt that was more true to our goals, we were worried that our friends and family would not prioritize such an event if we didn't call it a wedding.
At the beginning of our honeymoon, we playfully referred to the trip as “Luna de Miel,” or honey moon. Eventually, we started calling it “Luna de Jel.” The first night, I had food poisoning and ended up eating a six-course meal that Reed had cooked. The next apartment I rented smelled like rotten fish. Stormy skies and raging seas prevented us from lounging and splashing on the beach. We ventured into the hot tub and it was ice cold.
However, these were a welcome inconvenience for us. We can grab a glass of wine and applaud the humor of the universe. What was even harder to laugh about on our honeymoon was the feeling that this might be our last vacation together, the beginning of the end.
I felt it on the days I hiked alone into the mountains and the mornings I spent sobbing at the edge of the ocean. I felt it when we silently held hands on the plane, and our palms were slick with sweat.
Our honeymoon was depressing on the most epic scale. A spectacular failure. Still, by the time we returned from our ill-fated, sexless vacation, we were more convinced than ever that we had made the right choice to get married.
When people asked if I was canceling the wedding, I told them I still wanted to celebrate. Why not? Reid and I had been together for so long and our love for each other was so great that we deserved a grand finale. After all, most rites of passage commemorate the completion of something, such as graduation, retirement, a birthday, or an anniversary. Weddings are extraordinary, a celebration of present love and future future. Wasn't that backwards?
This is what we thought. “What if we got married to celebrate the successful completion of a beautiful relationship?” What if we went out with a bang?
We held our ceremony under a giant oak tree on a high prairie. As we kissed, our friends and family cheered and showered us with crimson and peach rose petals. We drank hard cider and ate paella and homemade pie. we danced.
After the music ended, Reid and I lay on our backs on the dewy grass and watched the shooting stars. I put on my wool coat as coyotes howled in the distance. We stayed up until dawn.
“I get it now,” Reid said as I lay in his arms. “I understand why we needed to have a wedding.”
During the months of planning, all I could think about was the party. I wanted to dance and I wanted to feast. The ceremony itself was merely a formality. But when we look back, we remember the ceremony first. As we both stood under that oak tree, we threw our heads back and laughed as we shared stories of our 12 years together. It was the ceremony, not the party, that brought us back to our roots and reminded us why we party.
After the honeymoon, we did not divorce. Our relationship changed and cracked in the year leading up to our wedding, but the basic shape remained. It was nice in a different way and more interesting. The last four years of our marriage have been our most devoted and happiest years.
why? Like unearthing a long-buried love letter, our wedding forced us to consider how much we value each other. And once the social pressure to enjoy a picture-perfect honeymoon without getting married is released, we feel more comfortable doing things in unconventional (yes, still open) ways. You can go back to Needless to say, the legal complications of divorce helped ease the frustration.
Either way, it's funny to think that marriage, an “outdated” rite of passage that we were so reluctant to accept, was the key to saving our relationship.
