It was the first day of September. As we climbed the rocky spine of Giant’s Stairs along the coast of Maine, the sky above us was the kind of blue that only exists in late summer, and waves crashed against the base of the cliff. It was one of the countless day trips that Chris and I had taken that year; but this time, I carried a surprise in my backpack, and a flutter of anticipation in my stomach.
When we met the previous October, we had each known that we’d met the person with whom we’d spend the rest of our lives; but we kept this quiet for as long as we could, terrified to disturb the equilibrium of our seemingly perfect relationship. We found out later that we were both equally convinced we’d accidentally say ‘I love you’ in our sleep. On New Year’s Day, we stood atop a different cliff at the edge of Acadia National Park, surrounded by the roar of the waves. We’d spent the day laughing constantly as we clambered across the icy rocks. As a vivid sunset formed in the western sky, our eyes met; and the prospect of hiding just how much we already loved each other became basically impossible.
We laugh about this now: That each of us was so certain that we’d met the person with whom we’d spend the rest of our life that we couldn’t risk admitting that we loved each other. Within the same conversation where we finally said ‘I love you,’ we decided to move in together. Seven months after that, we got married. Our marriage has always been the punchline of our other favorite joke: that we talked about our antipathy toward the institution of marriage on our first date, as though a relationship that had begun by talking about the rest of our lives could end in any other way.
The question of marriage officially entered our discourse when Chris found out that my personal hero, Elizabeth Warren, had proposed to her now-husband. He made an offhand remark about how cool this reversal of gender roles was, in a way that made clear that not only would he be thrilled at the prospect of marrying me, but he would be thrilled at the prospect of being proposed to by me.
My first response was, “Wait—I’m allowed to do that?!” After the conversation we’d had on our first date, I had come to view marriage as an unnecessary formality—we had signed the paperwork to become domestic partners in February to ensure that we’d have the same rights as spouses would. But suddenly, a delightful new possibility had opened up before me: I might get to call the best person I’d ever met my husband—and it would be up to me to ‘pop the question.’
Based on the (very heteronormative) stories I’d encountered growing up, I had believed that from the woman’s point of view, proposals often arrived out of nowhere: A man she’d been dating would hide a ring inside of a piece of cake or at the bottom of a champagne glass. She would react with shock and overwhelming flattery, and would face a split-second decision: to devote the rest of her life to him, or to cause the man a great deal of embarrassment and disappointment.
To me, this was terrifying—how were you supposed to make a decision like that on the spot, with the person you loved and the strangers surrounding you all silently urging you to say yes? If this wasn’t the man you wanted to marry, how would you summon the courage and certainty to say no? Wouldn’t this all be a lot easier if they’d just talked it over first? And what if you swallowed the ring?!
It seemed to me that proposals involved no agency on the woman’s part. A man had chosen her, and this should be the greatest honor of her life—like the ultimate promotion, based on the full spectrum of her value as a human being.
The relationships I experienced in my late teens and early twenties did little to correct this assumption. The men I dated would use the prospect of marriage as a dramatic flourish or a method of manipulation: A boyfriend with no intention of sticking around in the long-term once showed me, “This is how I would kiss you if we’d just said our vows.” When I broke up with another boyfriend, he tried to make me feel guilty by telling me that he’d been planning on proposing to me at my college graduation.
But in my first truly serious relationship, I realized that adults should be talking about their future together often—their individual goals, and their goals for their relationship. It was still possible for someone to feel more certain about their relationship’s future than the other; or for one person to care more about hitting the traditional milestones on a certain schedule. When these differences existed, it was still treacherous territory to navigate. But if your partner saw marriage in your future, it should hardly be a surprise, because your relationship had likely already begun to escalate in that direction.
When my boyfriend proposed to me when I was twenty-two, he had been dropping hints the entire time that we’d been together. He’d made it clear that he wanted to get married; and the longer that we were together, the more logical marriage seemed as the next step. I knew that if I admitted that I wasn’t yet ready to decide whether I wanted to spend my life with him, it would be immensely hurtful to him and lethal to our relationship. I also knew that it felt incredibly good to be chosen—after a rough series of relationships that left me feeling unsure of my own worth, it was a way of proving to myself and the world that someone recognized my value.
Women are too often put into a position where we have to be chosen, rather than to choose. We have to prove our value again and again, until our effort is validated with a proposal: the acknowledgement that we are worthy enough for someone to want to marry.
So, my boyfriend proposed, and I said yes. And even though there were aspects of our relationship that continued to concern me, in the course of planning our wedding, it was impossible not to get caught up in the happily-ever-after narrative of it all. I deserved love; someone had recognized that; and now, all of our friends and family were celebrating it.
Though his proposal had made me feel chosen, I didn’t continue to feel this way over time—and I think that this is where many marriages fall apart, once the afterglow of the wedding has faded. He had wanted to get married, and I had wanted to feel secure. He was never able to articulate why it was me that he wanted to spend his life with; and I eventually came to believe that I had simply been in the right place at the right time.
After four and a half years, we got divorced. In the intervening years, I had begun to recognize the agency that I’d given up by marrying someone whose decisions held more weight than mine—we’d already gotten married and bought a house; and in the future, we would have children, and he would ask me to follow him around the world as he chased new job opportunities. I had tried to make peace with this future; but as my sense of self-worth and my hopes for my life gradually detached from our relationship, this arrangement became untenable.
I came to understand that a relationship where one person is constantly compromising in order to keep the peace can never bring fulfillment to either person in the long run. And as Chris and I discussed on our first date, we believed that a healthy relationship was one between two whole individuals, rather than two halves that together formed a whole. I told him how important it was to me to find someone to complement me rather than to subsume me; who respected the love I had for my own life, and loved their own just as much. He felt exactly the same way.
And this was why getting to propose to Chris meant so much to me. I didn’t need him to make me feel valued or secure by getting down on one knee. He had chosen me at a thousand different junctures already, each of which were more meaningful than a showy proposal would have been. Now, it was my turn to make someone feel the way that I had always wanted to feel: to tell him exactly why I wanted to spend my life with him, and no one else; to reflect on the experiences we’d already shared, explaining what they had each meant to me; and to depict a future where we would continue to choose one another, over and over again, while creating a life that was equally fulfilling to each of us. That was the kind of love that I knew we both deserved. Marriage was just a formality.
On the day that I’d decided to propose (which was almost two months earlier than I’d planned, but I was just too excited), I hid a package in my backpack. Inside was a book that chronicled the first year that we’d spent together—our road trips through New England and the Southwest; the time that we’d spent with each other’s families; and the tiny moments of joy that had become ubiquitous in our everyday life. On that cliff overlooking the ocean in Maine, we paged through the book together, reliving all of the memories that we’d shared so far, from our first date up until that very moment. Then, I told him: “I would marry you today; I would marry you in a decade; I would be with you for the rest of our lives even if we never got married. But if you ever wanted to, I’d marry the fuck out of you.”
What I tried hard to convey was that marriage wasn’t the point. I loved him more than I’d ever imagined possible; I knew with complete certainty that he loved me just as much; and I had no doubt that we’d spend the rest of our lives together. If he had no desire to marry me, our relationship would have stayed exactly the same—and that was the foundation upon which we could build a healthy, equitable, deeply fulfilling marriage.
But (spoiler alert) he responded with an enthusiastic yes, and we got married at City Hall eight days later, just the two of us. After the ceremony, we took a second set of vows back at home—ones that we’d written in bed that morning, which reflected the relationship we’d carefully constructed in order to make us both feel valued. We promised to be effusive and specific in our appreciation of each other; to be honest and constructive in our communication, constantly seeking to better our relationship; to respect each other’s autonomy and work toward becoming the best versions of ourselves; to always be by each other’s side, bringing joy to the most menial, stressful, and tedious parts of life; and to never fail to appreciate a great pun or “that’s what she said” opportunity. There was more, but I’ll spare you the details.
On paper, the life I’m living now looks startlingly similar to the life I gave up: I’m married; I recently bought a house; I work for the same company. But this is the life that I chose, rather than a life that I happened to fit into. This time, I chose marriage, because it added to the life that I was building for myself. Marriage didn’t prove my value as a person, and I will never again ask it to.
Yesterday, ahead of our first anniversary, we reread the book that I’d made for my proposal last year; and when we finished, I pulled out a new volume chronicling the second year of our relationship. It began with photos from our wedding day, which turned into photos of our travels, our new house, and—gradually—more and more time spent in our own backyard as the pandemic overtook reality. I told him how lucky I’ve felt to get to spend every waking (and sleeping) moment with him over the last six months—a reality that’s affirmed our deep appreciation for each other, and the immense joy that our life brings us, even amidst the chaos of 2020. And then I asked him, again, if he would grant me the honor of being married to him for another year; and he asked me the same question. We both said yes.
