I had been engaged for roughly 47 seconds before a stranger asked when our wedding date would be.
“Uhhhh…” I stammered. I wasn’t even sure I was actually engaged yet. It was entirely possible I was having a fever dream from inhaling a thousand stranger farts on the aircraft we were sharing. “I’m not sure yet?”
By that point in my life, I had grown used to strangers — along with my closest friends and family — asking me weird and personal questions about my relationship. After 5 years of dating, I was interrogated regularly about when Jamison planned to propose to me. It was a baffling question. For starters, how the hell was I supposed to know when an event — its very nature an element of surprise — was going to happen, as if men couldn’t even be trusted to plan this one specific occurrence without the input of women. And also, this question, particularly on the heels of news of other engagements, is, well, extremely hurtful. I don’t know why my long-term boyfriend won’t commit to me, but thank you for asking, I always imagined saying when people asked me.
By the time Jamison did propose, part of the relief was sharing the news to everyone in the entire world — coworkers, mailmen, random people I saw jogging down the street — so that I would finally be deemed worthy of a man’s eternal commitment. I fantasized a life where people no longer asked me dumb questions and left Jamison and I alone, to plan our wedding in peace, only again growing unnaturally nosy when the collective decided it was time to harass us about when we were going to have kids.
This fantasy lasted all but a few hours. After our plane landed and we settled into our rental car, I sent out a sea of texts and within minutes, was bombarded with questions.
“Oh my god, congrats! Where are you guys looking to get married?”
I hadn’t thought about it. In a field? In a…cabin? In a cabin…in a field?
“Wow! Finally! What are you going to wear?”
I barely thought about what I was going to wear each day, let alone for a day I hadn’t yet even placed on my calendar. I had never been the type of girl to picture her wedding day. It was not like I had a binder full of dream dresses that I kept under my pillow at night. I had the basic criteria for a dress down — white, cheap— but cut, length, or some other secret quality I hadn’t been introduced to yet, because I was not quite yet a “real” adult female, I had no idea.
All I had wanted was for people to congratulate me. Instead I was left dizzy, a mounting sense that there was something wrong with me for not having planned every single detail of my wedding, well before I knew I’d be having one.
***
As the days after our engagement turned to months, the exciting part had died down and the reality sunk in — we needed to start planning this whole thing. At first I emphasized the we. I did not care about flowers or cake or seating charts and the thought of having to figure that out on my own made me anxious. But the more I talked to Jamison, the more I realized he didn’t have strong opinions on anything either.
Luckily, our mothers did.
“You don’t want a November wedding,” my mother had said, immediately after I had told her we are having a November wedding. “It might snow! And then what?! People will just be COLD?”
I told her it was a small wedding to begin with — just our families for the ceremony and a larger party for friends after. If some people didn’t make it due to snow, that would be ok.
“You can’t have too small a wedding,” she added. “You have to invite your aunts and uncles, and your cousins too, they all invited you to their weddings.”
I am one of 18 cousins. The weddings they invited me to all went the same; I’d show up, forget names of my cousin’s spouses, kids, even some of my aunts and uncles themselves, and sit at a corner table with my brothers, making fun of the guests. It would be monstrous of me to deny this very right to all 17 of my cousins, but between the cost of food, drink, and renting chairs (because somehow that is a huge expense I didn’t even think to factor into the overall budget) I didn’t feel it was necessary to invite people I barely ever talked to on the most intimate day of my adult life.
Jamison’s mom was fine with a small wedding. Yet not with the food choice.
“We really like the idea of keeping it simple. I think we’re just going to order a bunch of pizzas and get a ton of beer.”
In our twenties, beer and pizza might have made up most of Jamison and I’s personalities. If it was the weekend you could find us chugging beer, chasing it down with a floppy slice of pepperoni pizza, a breadstick nearby to use as a napkin to wash the sauce from our lips. I wanted this wedding to reflect the core of who we were; drunk idiots with an addiction to carbs.
I might as well have told his mother we were serving human flesh.
“Pizza?” she asked, masking her horror as best as she could. “You want your wedding to be…a pizza party?”
I sat there, swallowing my anger, and listened to her ideas; a bartender, a simple caterer, maybe a table of desserts. All ideas that sure, were nice. But not anything I wanted. It seemed like people were forgetting — this was not their day. It was ours. And I was sick of hearing pushback on what it was we had planned.
But even more irritating was the fact that the pushback was only directed at me. Along with all the questions of the wedding. Jamison, while somewhat involved behind the scenes as we discussed the event together occasionally, like it was no bigger a task than buying a new kitchen table or planning a small weekend getaway, was never the one in the hot seat. Our mothers only came to me with their hottest new additions — balloon arches! A live band to play my mother’s favorite 1980s band White Snake! A pastor, because although we are not at all into religion as a couple, it makes sense to introduce religion into the mix now, in case that whole God thing turns out to be true!
I was starting to grow resentful of the whole thing and, as a result, of Jamison, too. Planning was reminding me of all the times I didn’t fit into what society considered feminine — like the time I wore Converse to the HomeComing dance instead of heels or all the times growing up my mother scolded me for not wanting to wear a dress. Femininity came with a set of rules I had never seemed to grasp and being the sole planner of a wedding appeared to be just another item on the list. It wasn’t my day to plan. It was a day for everyone else, to perform womanhood yet again for an audience. And Jamison, a man, was not expected to perform anything — just expected to stand there, in a suit no one painfully picked apart, waiting to eat the food and cut the cake he had no help in selecting.
One night, my frustration built up and ready to bubble over, I told Jamison I wasn’t so sure about our wedding.
“What?” he asked, panicked. “What do you mean you’re not sure?”
“It’s not fun to plan,” I said. “It’s a lot of pressure on me.”
“I know,” he consoled and part of me twitched — no you don’t know! “I will help out more.”
I shook my head. Help did sound nice. But months of planning, the details more elusive the more I planned, I didn’t want help.
“I don’t want a wedding.”
He frowned.
“You don’t want to get married?”
“No, I do,” I explained. “I just don’t want to have a wedding. The money, the way people are demanding things from me, it’s not what I envisioned.”
“Ok,” he said, looking a bit confused but not alarmed, “what do you envision?”
It was the first time since I got engaged anyone had asked me that. What a comfort it was to shift the narrative from what do they want to what do I want. When I pictured myself getting married, it didn’t involve walking down an aisle. It didn’t involve a photoshoot before, after, or during the wedding, nor did it involve traditions like throwing a bouquet or dancing in front of a crowd for our first song as a couple. All I pictured was Jamison and I, somewhere quiet, promising to be there for each other through the good and the bad.
“Why don’t we just elope?” I said, surprising even myself. Such a simple concept and yet it had never once crossed my mind. The idea immediately clicked, feeling light inside my chest the way all decisions based on your own truth feel.
Jamison thought this over a second, his eyes not giving away if he loved of hated this idea. I expected him to talk me out of it. I anticipated him saying his mom, dad, aunt, friends, camp counselor from 1996, neighbor who died but would be attending via ghost form, etc, would be disappointed in him for not being in attendance.
But instead he said “Ok.”
“Ok,” I replied.
We both smiled. I knew there had been some reason I wanted to marry that nerd after all.
***
Three months later we stood on Papaʻiloa Beach in Hawaii on a Tuesday around sunset. The san sank in the horizon, emitting a dewy, golden glow on water. It was just Jamison and I — and the random officiant and photographer we hired online to do the ceremony. Near a giant rock, waves crashing up against it, splashing water onto our bare feet, we said our vows. We exchanged flush, green leis, and at one point Jamison was encouraged by the officiant to blow into a conch shell, which he did, poorly, because as it turns out it’s actually harder to blow a conch shell than one might think.
When we were told we were officially husband and wife – Jamison could kiss his beloved bride — I instead leaned into his chest, my arms wrapped around him, breathing in the moment, holding onto the sights, the sounds, the feeling of getting married not because it was a feminine duty I needed to fulfil, but because I loved this man and wanted to go through life with him as my partner.
Grateful for not having to be anything but who I was with the man I was holding, I pulled myself gently away from him, and kissed him for the first time as Mrs. Cook.
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