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

by Jen Doll

  • • •

  We packed up and checked out and said good-bye to all his friends, the people I’d just gotten to know. I felt a pang of embarrassment about how I’d behaved the night before, but no one appeared to be holding it against me. The occasional Wedding Tantrum is inevitable. Surely something like it had happened to more guests than me. Despite or because of that ubiquitous wedding phraseology of the “perfect day,” it is ever so difficult to be perfect at a wedding.

  This wedding wasn’t like Jamaica, or the Dominican Republic, or even like that long-ago wedding in Alabama or the more recent one on the Jersey Shore. There were no grand vows to keep in touch or efforts at further friendship, because Will and I had gone as our own little team, a unit of two, in the first place. He’d visit me in New York, and we’d see his friends, and he’d see mine, and the same thing would happen in Seattle, but there was no need to make promises other than to each other. If we continued to see each other, the rest of them would be in our life, too.

  On the boat back to Seattle, I took a picture of him, his hat cocked askew on his head, dazed and comedic in his wedding hangover state, wearing wrinkled pants and an untucked shirt. I threatened to post it to Facebook. “That will only make you look bad,” he said, and I found that very funny. It didn’t matter if he looked bad in that photo because he didn’t look bad to me, and, I realized, I didn’t mind if I looked bad to anyone else so long as he didn’t feel that way. The good was enough to outweigh the bad.

  I stayed in Seattle a few more days before going back to New York, and it didn’t rain once.

  19.

  Thank You for Having Me

  I took a plane trip recently, one of those flights during which the attendants are bent on making that glorified bus ride in the sky feel fun. After they introduced themselves, they announced to the cabin that we should all get to know one another better. “Does anyone have any news?” they asked. No one came forward to confess anything, so they prompted: “Anybody gotten engaged recently?” Nothing. “Married?” Still nothing. “Divorced?” A tentative hand was raised, to some obligatory laughs. “Really, no one’s gotten married?” the flight attendant leading the charge asked incredulously. She couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t, either.

  Engagements, weddings, and divorces, but especially weddings: These are the main events of our lives, punctuating our twenties, our thirties, and on and ever on. Yet sometimes they appear to stop, and you look around, and you feel their absence. It feels, oddly enough, like a loss. What, no weddings this year? No built-in party, no joyous event to both look forward to and resent in equal, diametrically opposed measure? No request for your time and energy and money that’s a gift itself from the bride and groom, who want you to experience this moment with them, and who are, in inviting you, placing you forever in a common history of you and them? If they didn’t ask, you would be so hurt—not that that means you won’t complain about their asking. The weddings never stop, and then they do. Just when they were getting good.

  Not to worry; the weddings never really stop. There will always be more weddings. My boss’s wife’s best friend. A guy I used to work with. A guy I still work with. My friend who met her fiancé in a cheese shop. The woman whose birthday it was the night I met Will. Surely you’ve been invited to your own set of parties for someone’s impending nuptials, and maybe you’ve attended one or several ceremonies in the time it’s taken you to read this book. Maybe there is one, maybe there are many on the horizon. “I’m moving in with my boyfriend,” a coworker confesses, and you know where that’s headed. A photo of a ring on a finger appears on Facebook; you don’t need anyone to interpret that. “Guess what!” your best friend gasps in a late-night phone call, and you know, you already know.

  There will be gaps between wedding seasons, times when there are droughts and times when the floods rage high, but the second it seems everyone’s paired off or settled, another invite shows up in the mail. It might be from that middle-aged guy you used to date ten years ago and have remained on good terms with. He’s finally decided to tie the knot. Maybe it’s the friend who’d been married in her early twenties, gotten a divorce in her thirties, embraced her new singlehood, and then, in her forties, met someone new worth going down the aisle with. Maybe it’s a parent or a grandparent who, having lost a first love, has found another. It could be your little brother. He and his fiancée have finally decided to have their ceremony. No, it won’t be in any of the places that have been discussed over the years—Saint Lucia or Jamaica or in a Brooklyn park or Tucson or your parents’ Florida backyard. It will be somewhere else entirely, somewhere you never would have suspected. Just because people get married doesn’t mean they won’t keep you guessing, when and how and why and where and even, sometimes, who.

  If there’s one thing you can count on, regardless of how you yourself feel about marriage, it’s that there will always be weddings. They will be as different from one another as can be, while sharing that key aspect at their core that, I think, has a lot to do with why we keep getting married at all. A New York Times Vows article shed light on this notion when, in January of 2013, Margaux Laskey wrote of ninety-seven-year-old Ada Bryant, a widow, who was marrying eighty-six-year-old Robert Haire, a widower. The first time he asked her, as with my own grandmother and her boyfriend, Henry, she said no. “There’s a great difference in our ages, as you can see,” she told Laskey. Yet her mind was changed for reasons that combined the romantic and the practical: “I didn’t think it was the thing to do because I don’t have that many years ahead of me, but he said, ‘That’s all the more reason,’” Bryant explained, concluding, “I like him very much. I love him. So we’re going to be married.”

  Perhaps there is no better reason than that.

  • • •

  Years ago, while I was still in a relationship with Jason, and several of my friends were dating the men they would go on to marry, there was one evening, several drinks in, at which one of us proposed a contest. “We should all place bets on who will be the last to marry,” she suggested. “We’ll pool the money, and the last single person standing will get to keep it. Then she can throw a big party or something!” I don’t know why, exactly, but this idea infuriated me. Was it because even though I had a boyfriend at the time, I thought I’d be last, that I knew that relationship would end? Or was it something else, indignation over the sense that marriage was a kind of game-based achievement, with winners and losers—the ultimate loser of which would have to be soothed with cold, hard cash? I’m not sure if my instinct was selfish or something broader-minded, but I said, in no uncertain terms, that I did not want to play along. “Lame,” said my friend. She might have been right. I could well be the one holding the bag of money if I’d joined in. But for what? Marriage as a game seems a thankless pursuit. If I’m going to choose to do it, it won’t be for a bag of money, nor will it be to avoid the dubious win of a bag of money, either.

  Then there was a cab ride I took far more recently. It was a weekday evening, and I was on my way from Brooklyn to the downtown Manhattan apartment of a man I’d been seeing. He was cooking me dinner, but instead of thrilled, I felt panicked. Our relationship seemed to have shifted so quickly from romancing in candlelit bars to spaghetti and meatballs (to use up the beef, which would soon go bad, he said; that’s a metaphor if ever there was one) and practical conversations in the fluorescent light of a kitchen, then bed with his Breathe Right strip positioned just so by ten p.m. I could feel my world getting smaller before I’d had time to consider what I even wanted, what size, exactly, I wanted my world to be, and more important, what size it needed to be. I worried that I was just dating this man because he seemed to offer what I, somewhere in the back of my mind, thought I was supposed to want. At the same time, I worried that it would be stupid for me to give up that something, even if the signs pointed to me not wanting it at all, not that, not with him. The creeping fear, of course, is that we won’t g
et another chance. That we won’t know we knew until it’s too late. That this is as good as it gets. That we’re running out of time, and that if we don’t do this thing, there must be something wrong with us. So sometimes we hang on, even when we know in our guts we shouldn’t.

  “You must be going to the apartment of a man,” said my cab driver.

  “Why do you say that?” I asked.

  He turned in his seat and looked at me. “It’s a Wednesday. You’re . . . how should I say this? . . . not a party girl. You look like you worked all day.”

  I was wearing sneakers with jeans and a T-shirt. I had, in fact, worked all day. “Are you saying I look tired?” I asked.

  “Yes,” said Mr. Charming. “You look a little tired.”

  I don’t know why I told him—to compensate for the insult, to prove that I was not just a tired, non-party girl?—but I did. “Yes, I’m going to the apartment of a guy who’s going to cook me dinner.”

  “He must be very nice,” said the cab driver, who spun into a speech about how he had so many passengers, ever so many, women in their late thirties and forties and fifties, who complained about being alone. “Their families die,” he said, snapping his fingers, knocking off humans like flies, “and then they have no one, because they never married.”

  Somehow, I had hailed the cab from hell. “Mmm,” I said, hoping he’d just stop talking if I appeared disinterested. No cigar.

  “I had one woman passenger who was on the phone, crying and crying, talking to someone, and she got off the phone and told me her father had died. She had no one; she didn’t want to go on. I convinced her not to do anything crazy. I told her, it’s okay, you could still find a husband,” he said. He dropped his voice as if he were confessing a horrible secret. “She was probably too old, but I told her that anyway.”

  I doubted this brave-cabbie-prevents-suicide tale (more likely she was crying because he kept lecturing her about marriage), but I nodded. “You’re a real lifesaver.”

  “I know,” he said. “It happens all the time, these women crying, women alone. You ladies wait too long. You wait too long and then you don’t have anyone. I have been married for forty years!”

  “I’m sure your wife is very happy. Oh, you can let me out here,” I said, still several blocks from my destination. As a small gesture in defense of single women, I did not tip him.

  A week or so later, my relationship with Spaghetti and Meatballs ended.

  • • •

  I am not married, and most of the time I do not feel alone, and even better than that . . . I’m, dare I say it, pretty happy. But I haven’t decided I don’t want to get married, either. I know that if I do get married, I don’t want it to be because of fear of aloneness, or because I think I’ve waited too long and won’t have any options left, or because I might end up a girl in the back of a cab having to justify to a judgmental driver why I’m still single, and why I’m okay with that. I don’t want it to be so that I “win.” I want it to be for the right reasons, and with the right person, for me. I have quite a few married friends who have given me an example to live up to. Whether or not their reasons for marrying would be the same as mine isn’t important. What is important is that we all figure out our own reasons and find our own paths, knowing that those paths can, but don’t have to, involve marriage.

  More than ever in contemporary society, deciding to marry is a choice. No one should settle, I’d never recommend that, but settling is not about whether you get married or not, it’s about not wanting the choice you’ve made as much as you really should. It’s about picking the wrong thing. It’s also a judgment that tends not to come from a bride or groom, but instead from someone looking on, who may not be privy to the full details of that choice. If we’re being honest with ourselves, we don’t settle. But it can be very difficult to be honest with ourselves when it comes to addressing a defining life choice like marriage, which carries both so many expectations and so many unknowns.

  It goes back to all of those confusing messages about finding love and “the one.” Do you set a goal and then work at making it come true (and if so, how best to do this)? Do you passively sit back and cross your fingers and wait and hope for it to happen, for the knight in shining armor (or skinny jeans and a T-shirt proclaiming your favorite band) to arrive? It’s hard to know how much to actively choose, particularly when you’re someone who’s spent her life working to make dreams come true that don’t relate to love or marriage. Sometimes, not choosing at all becomes a point of stasis. If you don’t choose, you don’t lose, or at least that’s how it can feel. And yet marriage, like anything else in life, requires choosing, picking one thing (married life) over another (single life) and sticking with that decision, day in and day out, even on the bad days. It’s not something that just happens. It’s not magic. Nor should it be forced, done as a rote performance piece or to adhere to some one-size-fits-all ideology.

  I don’t have the absolute answers because I don’t think there are any. But I do know this: When we try to be what we’re not, forcing square wedding pegs into round wedding holes, or when we don’t think and instead simply do because that’s what’s always been done before, that’s when things tend to go wrong. When we cease to see the forest for the trees, or the marriage for the “perfect” wedding day, whether we are brides, grooms, or wedding guests, that’s when friendships are ruined, shoes are lost, hearts are broken, and someday much, much later we wake up to realize we’ve made a mistake. But of course, we all make mistakes—the real mistake is not admitting that. Whether we’ve too harshly judged a friend for the person she’s chosen to marry, or we’ve gotten drunk and done something we later deeply regret, or we’ve, perhaps, mistaken a person who was only good for us for the moment for our “forever person,” none of us is perfect, just as there is no “perfect day.” All of our choices have consequences, but we need not be so plagued with shame or feel like failures when we realize we’ve chosen the wrong thing. The best we can do is to try to learn and keep moving forward, to know ourselves better and be a little bit better every day, every wedding. And, if necessary, sometimes to say we’re sorry.

  When as a small child I was asked by family members and friends of family for a kiss, the story goes that I would run from them in hysterical laughter, find a mirror, and kiss myself in it exuberantly, so whoever had asked could see exactly what they were missing. Eventually I grew up, I stopped wearing diapers, and I stopped preferring to kiss myself. I think at some point we all realize that not only do we want but also that we need others whom we love, and who love us back, in our lives. It gets boring to keep running away and kissing ourselves for laughs. But also, just because someone asks for a kiss doesn’t make another person obliged to deliver it. Just because someone assumes we all want to grow up and get married doesn’t mean that’s the reality for everyone. There are choices to make, and with luck and thought and trying, we will tackle them in the most informed, beneficial, world-opening way for ourselves.

  You know, what’s funny is that in order to get married, you don’t even have to love the idea of a wedding. You just have to decide to do this thing. You find another; you do or you don’t say “I do.” And then you take it from there.

  In some ways, that’s not all that different from what a single person does with a wedding invitation.

  I opened my mailbox, and there it was.

  Acknowledgments

  It is the exceedingly rare couple who expects, in offering an invite to their wedding, that the guest will go on to write a book about it. For the openness and generosity with which I have been allowed to witness—and, later, discuss, clarify remembrances, and write about—my friends’ pairings, I offer each of them the deepest, bottom-of-my-heart thanks. You have all taught me much about love, and this book truly would not be possible without you.

  This book would also not be possible without two amazing people. To my agent, Ryan Harba
ge, who got in touch one fateful summer day and asked, “Do you want to write a book?” (Um, yes!), who listened to my ideas and supported them wholeheartedly, who listened to my concerns and told me it would all work out, who most of all listened (and keeps listening), thank you. To the lovely Ali Cardia, my editor-soul mate: You are a wonder—you really are. Every day I’m more impressed with your poise and intelligence and how you just get it. I can’t believe how lucky I am to have found myself working with you. Thank you. Thank you, too, Emma Straub and Julie Klam and Meg Wolitzer, who enlightened me early on as to the many and substantial merits of my publisher, Riverhead, where special thanks are due to Elizabeth Hohenadel, Glory Plata, Megan Lynch, Geoffrey Kloske, Jynne Dilling Martin, Margaret Delaney, Lydia Hirt, and Mary Stone. To all of you at Riverhead Books, I can’t believe how lucky I am to have found myself a member of your publishing family.

  There are a host of friends who offered thoughts on early versions of the book. One of them, Paige Clancy, read it more than once, offering keen insights and sensitive, considered edits each time. So much love to you, always, my dearest BFF. Sara Barron, Kathleen Baxter, Abby Gardner, Sarah Griffin, Drew Magary, Wendy McClure, Maureen O’Connor, Lizzie O’Leary, Francesca Stabile, Courtney Sullivan, and Jeff Wilser: Your readings, comments, and support have been invaluable and are deeply appreciated. The intrepid trio of Jennifer Perry, Courtney Perry, and Tamal Mannan listened to chapters read aloud into the wee hours of the night and offered critiques and wine (T., you’re an asshole, but I love you!). Over the months I spent working on this book, there have been many others who have read snippets, sometimes in bars on my iPhone. I thank all of them. I realize this party trick may have grown old.

  Nick Greene, you are my one-man Gchat support system; drinks are on me. Joe Coscarelli, will I ever forget what you told me about rhetorical questions? Katie Drummond, you were right about opening the document. Spike Friedman, Caitlin Sullivan, Kirsten Magen, Camille Dodero, Richard Lawson, Philip Bump, Maris Kreizman, Michele Filgate, Jason Diamond (and Vol.1 Brooklyn), Jessanne Collins, Jami Attenberg, Laura McMurchie, Myles Tanzer, Esther Zuckerman, and, oh, so many others who’ve bestowed upon me friendship and kindnesses great and small . . . thank you for being you. I’d also like to extend my appreciation to Gabriel Snyder, Kate Julian, Nicole Allan, and The Atlantic, and to the folks at the many media organizations that have kept me in a close relationship with words throughout the years. (Extra-special love goes to The Hairpin, where an essay containing seeds for this book first appeared . . . <3 you, Edith and Emma!). To Alexandra Shelley and the Jane Street Workshop: You were there in the beginning, I haven’t forgotten. Stephanie Coontz, I’m honored you took time out of your busy schedule to discuss your excellent research on marriage with me. Maureen Corrigan and Beth Kephart, consider me ever grateful for your wisdom and kindness—you are both such inspirations.