Weddings have the paradoxical effect of simultaneously making me feel thankful I haven't gotten married and lame for being single. It's baffling. The same moments at weddings that make me want to vomit up greasy, bland wedding buffet food in my mouth are the ones that make me feel sick to my stomach in a different way, in the gut-wrenching, God this is awful kind of way. From the name cards indicating your couple or single status to the cake cutting and slow dancing, I find myself thinking two wildly different thoughts: "thank God that isn't me" and "God, why isn't that me?"
Weddings hit on everything I resist about marriage as an obligatory social performance and rite of passage. The parading around of the bride and groom as spectacle, the huge, poofy, (usually hideous) wedding dress that probably cost as much as my Honda, the cutting and eating of a cake that almost always tastes like cardboard, but again, probably cost as much as my Honda, the endless kissing-on-command prompted by increasingly annoying choruses of clinking, and of course, the snagging, tossing, and replacing of a garter the bride has been hiding all day up in her hoo-hah.
And sometimes, I think, the performance of these expected rites of wedding bash bliss are analogous to the nature of the marriage itself--performed by the bride and groom out of a sense of obligation rather than a sense of true joy and will to share their lives together.
Of course, not all weddings feel like this. But the wedding I attended this weekend for my little cousin and his new wife was the epitome of everything forced and showy. I don't know how long they'll stay together, or if they even love each other. The wedding was straight out of The Wedding Singer. But no matter how silly the rituals, no matter how cheesy the marriage...I still felt almost the entire night that I was living without.
It baffles me. When I say I don't want to get married, I mean it. I was engaged once and called it off. I don't daydream about having my own wedding someday, or about having kids. I've been the one to break off every serious relationship in my life because the man in my life wanted to marry me and I didn't want to marry them. The people I care about in my life keep saying, "oh, you'll change your mind when you meet 'the one'!!" But I'd bet them every meager penny to my name that they're wrong. I love my life the way it is. But I don't care how happily unattached and independent you are...there is something about a wedding--any wedding--that makes you feel deep inside that something is wrong with that. Maybe it's the fact that a wedding is a celebration of two people sharing a life together, maybe it's the pitying eyes my elder family members shoot me when I'm the only one at my table not getting up to slow dance with a significant other, or maybe it's the smugness of the bride thinking she's a fucking princess for a day just because she's valuable enough to some man that he put a ring on her finger. But weddings almost always make me feel like shit.
These are some but not all of the reasons I was counting down the minutes until "Medina" picked me up in his big truck to take me out for some after-wedding drinks. We laughed and talked and those liquid eyes bore into mine while the world around us disappeared, as it did on the first date, for three hours. I was drunk on something when he dropped me off back at the hotel, and it wasn't alcohol. And then he kissed me...and I don't quite think I've returned to the real world yet.
On paper, we're opposite in so many ways...he's tattooed and tough and republican and chill, and I'm polished and girly and WAY liberal and uptight. He told me he snores like a person with sleep apnea, and I can't even stand to sleep in the same room with someone who breathes audibly. We're die hard football fans for rival teams. We live in different cities.
I'm a list maker, so let's be fair and make a list of the things we have in common. We're both scorpios, which explains the liquid eyes thing. We're have close relationships with our families and have parents who have been married for 35+ years. We're both hard workers...he's the first person I've met in a long time who goes into work earlier than I do. And I think if you compare this list to the last one, the commonalities are far more important than the differences.
But if I stop thinking and just feel, none of the lists really matter. Because when we're in a crowded room his eyes never leave me. When I'm around him the space between us is practically buzzing with electricity. 24 hours later, I can still feel the way his hand tangled in my hair and his scruff tickled my cheek while he kissed me. And that, my friends, is the za-za-zoo.
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