And then I was a fiance. Creepy.
Filed under: Grooms
On New Year's Eve, 2006, Amanda and I took a really long walk. Plagued by months of the exact same, half-assed, kinda sorta, Maybe-We-Should-Think-About-Getting-Married conversation over, and over, and over, we finally set aside some time to talk about commitment, the future, and the reason we'd been avoiding matrimony for the past year and half.
I was 23-years-old at the time, and the two of us met when I was in high school -- meaning that, if we got married, we'd be like one of those couples from 1957 that met in Mrs. Sweeney's junior year math class and never saw another person naked ever again. From there it'd inevitably be one, long, downward spiral into home ownership, dog ownership, block parties and minivans -- with Amanda telling our kids the story of how we met ad nauseam like Marty McFly's loser parents at the beginning of Back to the Future.
But we'd been living in sin (which made her family like me even less), and were missing out on all the legal goodies that accompany getting hitched (which my parents vocally objected to on more than one occasion). We trusted these people, so, despite the fact that Amanda and I both spent adolescence rejecting "the archaic institution of marriage," we began discussing the possibility that maybe forming some kind of legal union wouldn't be totally selling out our previously held notions of matrimonial defiance.
After plenty of tip-toeing and careful prodding we both got the other to admit that the idea of being married wasn't so terrible -- and really, we couldn't remember why we hated it so much in the first place. I had no intention of parading around the house like a king in his castle, demanding my good wife made me dinner and did my laundry -- so Amanda's feminist ideology wasn't really being threatened. Plus, all that stuff I used to tell old girlfriends about open relationships and society's outdated notions of commitment was kind of true, but mostly just a means to an end -- so the commitment-phobia I'd experienced earlier in life wasn't an issue either.
Still, however, I was apprehensive. Married people, as far as I was concerned, were more or less fictional. Friends I'd heard about from back home that tied the knot immediately disappeared into whatever people do with the rest of their lives (after you've figured it out, and found some direction -- whatever that means). Plus, I'd only been to three weddings in my entire life -- two were family, and one was a college friend of Amanda's who got married in a community hall out in some unmarked quadrant of Ohio (she kept making loud jokes about getting down to business with the new hubby, and played the chicken dance at her reception while nobody moved a muscle). The only other married woman I'd met under 30 was an 18-year-old high school dropout I worked with as a teenager -- she used to live on an armed family compound until the FBI eventually broke in and arrested her dad for tax evasion.
The point is, while most of the women I knew had grown up with wedding stories, bridal showers, and dreams about dresses, most of the men think marriages appear from nowhere -- like babies dropped by storks into the homes of pregnant ladies. I had no guide, no frame of reference, and only a vague idea how I'd be expected to act as an about-to-be-married person. And, unfortunately, that vague idea looked like a combination me, my father, and the dad from Leave it to Beaver, which is borderline freakish.
On the other hand, the only future I could see for myself was one with Amanda in it. Qualms about marriage aside, the decision to be together was surprisingly easy, so when we talked about making a commitment to one another, it was easy to speak with conviction. Amidst all the chaos, it was the choice that seemed undeniable -- the one that simply felt...right.
So, when our long walk was over, we agreed to make it official: the two of us would be husband and wife.