Save the Date: The Occasional Mortifications of a Serial Wedding Guest

by Jen Doll

  “Jimmy Fallon!” she said. He looked back at her. “I think he’s handsome,” she added.

  “I don’t really watch TV,” he said.

  It was at some point around then I figured that if we were kissing, we weren’t talking, and I didn’t have to worry about whether he was happy or sad or what anyone else thought. I didn’t have to think about those jeans. So that’s what we did, over and over again, to the exclusion of most, if not all, else. This wedding goes down in history as the one in which I out-PDAed everyone else in the room. When my friends mention it today, Ashok can be relied on to make a lapping sound, as if soup were being eaten, to signify my extensive levels of makeoutery. On the upside, my date and I didn’t subject the other guests to our behavior for long. We left the wedding early, skipping the after-party, but we’d checked out long before that.

  When I woke up the morning after the wedding, he was asleep next to me. My eyes fell on those black jeans thrown over the arm of the white chair across from my bed, and I felt a mixture of confusion and sadness. Regret. I should have stayed later. I should have been a better friend. What was I doing, trading the people I knew and loved for this? For what? A wedding date? I wondered what I’d missed.

  • • •

  I’ve forgotten a lot of the details about that relationship. I can’t, for example, remember how we met. I remember our first date, how he offered to come and pick me up in his car. “Look for the Mercedes,” he’d said, and I’d thought, Oh, he’s that kind of guy, but then it wasn’t what I’d assumed at all. The car was barely chugging along, with the passenger-side window taped up so it wouldn’t fall back into the door. I got in anyway, and we went and ate tapas in Williamsburg, and it was a good date. I remember staying at his apartment but refusing to take a shower there; the stall was coated in a layered grunge that made me fear it had never been cleaned. I remember him later using that against me, accusing me of not liking him enough because I wouldn’t shower at his house. It wasn’t about liking him, I tried to explain. It was about not liking fungus.

  One night, several weeks after the wedding, we got into a screaming match. I can’t remember what set it off. Afterward, I took a cab to Nora’s, where I stayed for the night while he texted me incessantly, so much that Nora and I both became concerned and even a little fearful. I turned off my phone. I knew later he would say he was sorry, and he’d mean it, but it was clear we’d reached the breaking point. I was done.

  I did agree to meet him for coffee once after we ended things. We took our drinks to Tompkins Square Park, in the East Village, and we sat in the grass, in the sun, and talked. It was early spring, but unseasonably warm. He had on cutoff jean shorts. In fits and starts, he tried to explain why we should keep dating, but with every compliment he would say something to undermine it, his grand-gesture plea chock-full of inherent negs. I don’t think he really wanted to get back together with me any more than I wanted to reunite with him. But ending things, letting go and saying good-bye, is hard—even when it’s something you’ve decided you want to do, and even when you know your friends all have your back. Even when it’s only been three months, or two, or fewer. I remember that day in the park, realizing I could sleep with him one last time if I wanted to. There was a strange feeling in my stomach at that thought, the power of the option. It was very clearly not the right thing to do. I did it, anyway.

  Mostly, though, I remember the wedding, because you can’t forget a wedding, and you can’t forget someone who’s been your wedding date. Even beyond the photos, there’s something about the event itself that locks in perpetuity in your mind: I was there, or, if you were with another, we were there. Weddings get their own special place in history. There are, of course, pictures of the two of us at Kate’s reception. Many are too embarrassing to consider. (Wedding Tip: You know what’s not photogenic? PDA.) The dedicated photographer did manage to snap at least one in which we’re not lip-locked. We’re sitting at our table surrounded by multiple glasses of wine. My date is looking at me with an intense expression, his mouth open in midconversation, and my head is turned toward him. I am listening, and I am not smiling, exactly. I recall that throughout the dinner, Marjorie, across from us, tried to interrupt and engage me in conversation. I hadn’t seen her in a while, and she and Brian were in from out of town. My preoccupation with this new guy seemed to hurt her feelings, and I could feel her disapproval, too. This was not a man I could hope my friends might someday not only be proud of me for dating, but also would want to be friends with themselves.

  Later, I thought back to Ginny. I’d been so harsh in my judgment of her for continuing to work at her relationship in the face of what had seemed to me clear indications that her choice in a husband was wrong. We’d been twenty-eight then. I’d had five years to think about it, to miss her, to try to make sense of it all. If letting go of Christoph was complicated and emotionally wrenching in its own way for me, how had it been for her, after getting married in the sand in front of all of those people that day, after taking vows and promising to stick with it regardless of how hard it got? Things seemed good for her now, but I felt a renewed pang for my behavior, for how things had ended between us, and for how bewildered and conflicted she must have felt back then. I hadn’t helped matters, and, of course, there were all the external social pressures, too.

  Even before they married, by our late twenties there had appeared this looming sense that a relationship had to be something important, and that the end goal of all of this was a wedding. If any of us went down one road with a guy for long enough, and it was okay enough, it would be real, we would be on our way. That’s what we wanted, or thought we wanted, and at that point the investment in time and energy would have accrued to such a degree that it would be nearly impossible, and ever so painful, to turn back and have to start all over again. But sometimes in those relationships we were still simply trying to figure out if we wanted to be together at all, not making plans for the future. Despite the need to take it day by day, hanging over our heads was this impossible pressure-cooker question of whether what we’d put in would pay off in the end. It felt unfair, an impossible conundrum. If you’re always pushing for the next thing, the next step, the ring, the marriage, how can you ever consider fully whether the person you’re fighting so hard to get to the next level with is the right person for you at all?

  In the aftermath of a relationship that ends, we tend to think, I should have known, and ask ourselves, Did I just waste all that time? But each person dated and each relationship experienced leads to the next. I dislike the idea of “wasted time” and the term “failed relationship” because these attitudes define success as getting married and staying together forever. Sure, a relationship may be a success if it lasts forever, but there are ways for it to be successful if it doesn’t: if you learn something; if there are moments of enjoyment; if you come out of it more able to move on to something rewarding. If I hadn’t dated Jason and taken him to Emily’s and Marjorie’s weddings, if I hadn’t dated Christoph and taken him to Kate’s, I would have known much less about myself and what I wanted. Of course, it’s not always so easy to appreciate our exes.

  It’s clear to everyone, I think, that a marriage certificate does not a successful relationship make. Even in marriage you can still turn back. In any relationship that doesn’t feel like it’s working, you may well decide you have to. Other times you hang in there and keep going. It’s time in the market, not timing the market. Or that’s the old cliché, but pig-face could probably explain it better.

  • • •

  Four years after their wedding, Kate and Glasses bought a big house in Westchester and moved there from Brooklyn, where they might have stayed forever but for the complexities of having children in the city. “I just want to say, go outside, and for them to actually be able to do it,” Glasses had told me one day when I ran into him pushing the older of his two little girls in a stroller near the park. “Having kids chan
ges everything.”

  Recently, Kate threw him a fortieth birthday party at a winery in Manhattan. She invited their closest friends and flew in his sisters from San Francisco to surprise him. Violet and I took a car in from Brooklyn to attend, complaining about having to go into the city on a weekend, having to drink on a night when we both hoped to wake up sober the next day and get some work done, because that’s what crotchety Brooklynite thirtysomethings with otherwise pretty burden-free lives do. Poor us, the saddest trombone plays on. Curmudgeons or not, we had a great time. When we sat down to eat, Glasses thanked us all for being there, but most of all, he thanked Kate. “To the person who made all of this happen, to the love of my life, my wife,” he said with a grin as big, goofy, and pure as the one I remembered from his wedding day.

  We lifted our glasses and drank.

  15.

  Real

  When you reach a certain age, a certain real age and also a certain wedding age (five of them? Fewer?), an invitation to attend a wedding that doesn’t require you to rent a hotel room, to cross state lines or time zones, or to immerse yourself in a life that’s any different from your own for more than a few hours begins to come as something of a relief. This is a stark change from the thrills, chills, and excitement—not only am I going somewhere, I’m going somewhere to a wedding!—brought about by the destination wedding you attended in your early twenties. At one point, having only gone to a few, I wanted them all to be destinations. It seemed to make a weird kind of sense that the sacrifice I’d made to be there would in some way match what the bride and groom put into planning their wedding and marrying. Later, the joy I once felt when an invitation arrived announcing a far-off wedding locale (What’s Iceland like this time of year, anyway?) was surpassed by my pleasure at a wedding taking place so close to home I could practically walk, and could certainly cab. That’s not to say I’d lost all appreciation for romance in going to weddings. I’d just gotten a little more practical about them.

  I got my wish for a local wedding in the spring of 2011, when my good friend and former boss invited me to hers. It would be a quintessentially New York event, but more than New York, it would be Brooklyn, with all the appropriate hipster bells and artisanal whistles, plus views of the Brooklyn Bridge. Shifting to the borough in our midthirties was an adult move with regard to both weddings and real estate, and Annabel, who was a few years older than me, represented a new kind of bride. Despite her younger-year pronouncements that she’d never do the marriage thing, times and her feelings had changed, and it was happening.

  Annabel and I had worked at a magazine called Radar together from 2006 to 2008. When I first met her, in the large reception area of the temporary office space the company was renting for the third go-round of the publication—it had launched and folded twice already, but there were new backers to be had—we liked each other instantly. We had both grown up in the South, it turned out. We had similar taste in clothes. We had charted eerily resonant courses in love, though we didn’t know that right away. And we were both copy editors by training, but the kind that liked people as much as we liked grammar, punctuation, and red pens. We especially liked socializing with people when we, and they, had a glass of wine in hand. At our initial encounter, though, as employees at a neighboring Internet startup played foosball in the background, it was the clothes that stood out.

  “I love your dress,” she said.

  “I love yours!” I told her. “I just bought mine in LA.”

  “Oh my God, did you get it at Fred Segal?”

  “Yes! I couldn’t help myself. I just wore it to a wedding.”

  “I love that store; I buy something I shouldn’t every time I go there,” she confided. “I was just in LA, too. I bought this.” She gestured to her outfit.

  “I love it,” I repeated. I didn’t even have to lie.

  Though she gave me a take-home copy test in which I had to correct errors in a story about pubic-hair dye (I had dreamed of this edgy gig!), an integral part of the interview had been done in the first five minutes. Could we work together? Resounding affirmative. When she called me to offer the job, I didn’t pause before saying yes.

  As it turned out, not only had it been a job interview, but also, at least informally, it was a kind of friend interview. She was older and wiser and stylish and cool, and her role at the magazine was something I hoped I might do someday, too. And I just liked her. We had a lot to talk about, much in common, and our differences were not such that they prevented us from seeing eye to eye. I felt I could learn from her, and maybe she could learn from me.

  We would both work late during the madness that was producing an issue, and often we’d get a drink after work, and always that drink would turn into several. In those years we probably kept a handful of East Village wine bars in business. Early in our friendship she was casually seeing a guy who was over twenty-one, but still young enough that she and her friends had jokingly dubbed him “the teenager.” We found this hilarious, but there was some deeper stuff going on, I think. When you date someone you call a teenager, you can hardly ask him to be an adult, and in a way, choosing someone so clearly more immature, not just in age but with regard to his life, means you never have to be surprised when that relationship ends. You could have predicted it all along, so you’re protected from feeling hurt. The problem is, those endings can’t help hurting, no matter how we try to protect ourselves. I was beginning to recognize in myself the tendency to try to avoid rejection by choosing unsuitable or unavailable men, because that way any rejection was already a done deal. I knew it all before it even started, and well before it ended. I had orchestrated it myself.

  Before we met, Annabel had had a serious boyfriend, a relationship that paralleled what I’d had with Jason. We’d often share stories about those men and, more important, what we felt we’d learned by dating them. While we worked together, though, we were both for the most part single, seeing someone here or there, hooking up with guys and then not calling them back, or waiting for their calls, which sometimes came and sometimes didn’t. We were the embodiment of a certain kind of New York City woman: independent, committed to our careers, with enough money to buy ourselves nice clothes and drinks and a generally good time. We had productive lives full of fun and friends, but we were rather unfulfilled by what we were finding out there in the world romantically. So we relied on each other, and we filled any emotional voids with work, of which there was plenty—you could fill emotional voids with work all day and all night if you wanted to. Though it might not sound it, I knew then and I still feel now that this time was one of the most enjoyable periods of my life. But it couldn’t last forever.

  Sometimes the right people are right there in front of you and you don’t even know it. Years before Annabel and Ryan started dating, they’d met, but she hadn’t been interested in a serious relationship. At that point, too, he’d been engaged, but part of him had been intrigued by this sophisticated, smart, pretty person. When they met again, his engagement had been broken off. For her, I think, the realization had come that there was more out there to be had than unreturned phone calls, bar make-out sessions, or hookup texts in the wee hours of the night. Our thirties brought a certain understanding that if we wanted families, we also probably wanted husbands, or at least loving, supportive companions with whom we could foster good lives. Annabel had said she didn’t think marriage was for her, but that didn’t mean she didn’t want to find love. She and I both knew we were ultimately after people we cared about deeply who felt that way about us in return. It just took some time—and the right timing—to get there.

  In 2008, I was going to Paris with some friends and invited her to go along. She meticulously weighed the pros and cons until it was too late—the price of the ticket had become outrageously high. She decided to see friends in LA instead. That happened to be where Ryan lived, and a mutual friend dragged him along to drinks. Their second meeting sparked a connec
tion compelling enough that they decided to date, even though they lived on separate sides of the country. They took trips together, and eventually she moved to Los Angeles to give the relationship a real try. I inherited her job and went on in New York without her, coping with the now-struggling magazine and mourning the loss of my best work friend.

  A few months after that, Radar folded, leaving me jobless. Around that time, I went out to LA for a few days to see her. It was just like old times, but sunnier, and with Ryan. We ate at good restaurants and drank loads of wine and talked and talked and talked. While I was there, I reunited with a wedding guest from the past. Cody, from Elizabeth’s wedding, had flown into LA on his way back from a business trip, and since he was there, and so was I, we decided to meet. We all hung out in Annabel’s backyard, sitting on a blanket, eating chips, and drinking beer as we watched a rat work its way across an electrical wire above. Unexpectedly, Cody announced he had to leave. “Traffic is only going to get worse,” he said, and drove away, home to Orange County, never to be heard from again. That was fine, really, I told Annabel and a suddenly protective Ryan when they asked what his problem had been. What happens at a wedding doesn’t always translate to real life.

  They’d moved back to New York by the time they got engaged, and the magazine industry had recovered enough that she quickly found a job at a reputable publication. I’d transitioned to writing at that point, and we’d never again enjoy the luxury of being able to Gchat from a nearby cubicle, “What are you doing tonight after work? Wine?” or pause at each other’s desks to have the conversation in real life, but we made efforts outside of that, and her relationship with Ryan continued to seem enviable. Honest. Adult. I was proud to be the friend she hadn’t gone to Paris with those years ago, because instead she’d found him. It was like I was forever a little piece of their lives, even if only by omission.