I Got Married

On Nuptials and Relationships and Other Things

Some housekeeping: I had the honor of reviewing Jeff VanderMeer’s newest book, Absolution, for The Bulwark! You can read this review here. Many thanks to Martyn Wendell Jones and Ben Parker for their editorial help with the piece!

“Returning [to Area X] now is at times revelatory, at times frustrating and necessarily anticlimactic, at times like a journey to holy ground; a rhizomatic pilgrimage to some subterranean and fungal Santiago de Compostela, slimy with mold and home to many crawling things.”

—

In other news, I got married!

“I got married” is an odd construction; “I” didn’t just “get married;” we got married, to each other. It’s also both weirdly passive and weirdly acquisitive: I got married, the same way I might get a cold or a nice Christmas present. Other constructions are also odd: “I got hitched” has all the same problems, “we were married” sounds peculiarly formal and also very past-tense, “we were joined in the joyful bonds of Sacred Matrimony” is true enough but has obvious defects. Probably active constructions are better, like “I married my wife” or “I married my best friend” or, best of all, “I married Julia.” “Reader, I married her” has the advantage of communicating that I have read at least one book (or at least heard enough about it to (mis)quote it).

Whatever the best way of saying it, that most wonderful of Qualifying Life Events has occurred, and I am well-pleased with both the event and its consequences. I can now do the Borat Voice without stolen valor. We threw a good party and a good time was had by all, at least as far as I know. Granted, it would be fairly gauche to call up the happy couple and complain about the hors d’oeuvres, but I hope I have been alive long enough to tell the difference between obligatory courtesy and genuine compliments. So now, about two weeks later, here are some scattered thoughts for your perusal.

The professional pictures aren’t in my hands yet, but here’s a preview.

—

Close to a wedding, people start asking you “how are you feeling?” Presumably this is to give the traditional cold-feet script an opportunity to run, if it’s so-inclined. (I did not have any cold feet. I suppose I can’t speak for Julia, but she went ahead with it anyway, poor fool, so now it’s Too Late.) What was funny is that I didn’t immediately realize that was the question at first, and kept responding to people with minor stressors about the Event Itself. Julia’s usual line was “I can’t recommend getting divorced, but second weddings are very fun,” which sentiment I agree with wholeheartedly.

—

We all walked down the aisle to “Frankenstein,” by the Edgar Winter Group. I don’t have any particular takeaway or Thoughts Writ Large about that, but it was very fun and felt apropos of our whole endealment.

—

My dear friend

Joel Cuthbertson

was my best man. He gave a good speech. I don’t know if it was recorded, but wouldn’t post if it was, because that’s not the purpose of such speeches. Many people, both professionals and friends who I won’t name here since they didn’t sign up to have their names all over the Internet, worked very hard to make this event happen. We could not have done it without them, and their hard work paid off exceptionally.

—

There is a certain amount of consternation right now about the state of the Dating Scene.¹ Women can’t stop getting the ick, men are all into Andrew Tate, Tinder is a blighted hellscape, no one is getting married, no one is having sex, the sky is falling, etc. I have little to contribute to this: I have never really engaged with “the dating scene” in any traditional fashion. The first time I tried The Apps I stopped after about a week and began to seriously look into whether or not I would be eligible to become a Jesuit²; the second time I met some nice people but then before things went beyond the occasional video call³ I started dating a woman I met the traditional way: at a weird party in the woods I hadn’t planned to go to. The manner in which I met [Borat Voice] is not open to most people. I cannot really say to a friend who is struggling to meet girls that what he should really do is

1. Get divorced, and run away to rural Minnesota

2. Meet there an interesting coworker: a woman has also very recently gotten divorced

3. Become very good friends for a year and a half before she moves back to New York

4. Stay in touch and chat on the phone and occasionally in person off-and-on for the next few years, before finally:

5. On one of these phone calls, after talking about Life, the Universe, and Everything for a few hours, drink too much whiskey and then, after hanging up at the close of the conversation, call her right back and ask her if she’d like to get married.⁴

This is a difficult experiment to replicate under laboratory conditions; results may vary.

Accordingly I have no idea how to respond to these many thinkpieces. Also, nearly all of my friends are married or are otherwise in what seem to be happy romantic relationships, whether monogamous or polyamorous, so I’m not sure how real this problem is; then again, I may just unconsciously select friends from a pool of people who are successful at love. Of course my set is also generally in their mid-30s, and much of this angst appears to belong to the 20-somethings, to whom I can say only: calm down, baby, it ain’t a race.

No one really ever asks me for advice on this front, but to the extent any disaffected young man ever did, I’d say this: stop looking for “a girlfriend⁵” and just move through life developing hobbies and interests and trying to be a decent person until you trip over someone who is also moving through life developing hobbies and interests and trying to be a decent person. Then, ask that person out. She may say no, in which case you continue moving through the world developing hobbies and interests and trying to be a decent person until you meet another one. Then ask that one out. She may also say no, but eventually someone will probably say yes, and then you can go from there. It is also possible she will ask you out, which honestly removes a lot of the angst from the situation. Regardless, you’ll be a lot happier waiting a little longer for the right person than just frantically grasping at straws. It’s okay to be single, I promise, but also, there seems to be someone for just about everyone, even if you’re a weird little gremlin. I, for instance, am a weird little gremlin, and I just got married two weeks ago. You may have to go outside sometimes, though, since very few eligible bachelorettes make spontaneous house calls.

Also, if in doubt, consider being kind. Chicks dig kindness.

—

I can already see some of these hypothetical Tate-pilled young men objecting to the last thing I said above. “Chicks don’t dig kindness, Bill, they dig Chads with specific jawline phenotypes who make a bunch of money and treat them poorly.” Well, listen: I won’t say such gals don’t exist, but they are not the entirety or even the majority of the women in this world. I have no idea what “most women” want, but certainly many women are interested in a broader range of male creatures. If you think that’s what “all girls” want, then you are going to the wrong sorts of parties. Or, more likely, you are not going to parties at all, and are painting half the human species with a slanderous brush because you have never met an actual human woman and are choosing to say mean things about them rather than put yourself out there.

Anyway, you don’t want to date that gal, friend, and if for some reason you insist on it, then you are going to have to work to become appealing to that gal. If you want to date women who only want men in finance, 6’5’’, etc., then you need to go to the gym and get into venture capital. Or just continue masturbating angrily in your basement, whatever you want: but this is a you problem, not a problem with the opposite gender, writ large.

—

We have wandered far afield from weddings, so here is another picture:

—

One thing I kept saying in the leadup to the Event Itself: “I am well aware that I am throwing a big party this upcoming Sunday, but I have not fully internalized that at that party I will be getting married.” “Getting married” as a concept is supposed to frighten a person some, but I find a lot of the literature tries to frighten you for all the wrong reasons. “You’re tied down! You no longer have the freedom to do whatever you want!” This is, in some sense, true. I suppose I have fewer hours now to sit at home reading large books, since there is another person living in my house who expects me to spend some time with her. (I have no doubt that I will still read large books. Most accurately, this new arrangement means I have less time to sprawl on the couch and aimlessly doomscroll. I feel like this is a point in marriage’s favor, not a valid cause for anxiety.)

Perhaps this is a matter of temperament. I was never the type to pursue some strange on a Friday night, so the fact that I can’t do that any more⁶ is not a problem: I didn’t do it anyway. But I suppose I also can’t just pack up and move across the country on a whim the way I could theoretically have done prior to getting married, or randomly spend a preposterous amount of money on Magic cards without at least running it by my partner.⁷

But all jokes aside, commitments do in fact foreclose some of your options. This is true not only of marriage, but of jobs, specific hobbies, etc. I also can’t just randomly pack up and move across the country without any warning because it would leave a bunch of my clients adrift and make my coworkers’ lives very difficult for a while. But that’s not what frightens me about marriage, partly because, as hinted at above, most of the closed doors were not doors I was very interested in anyway⁸.

What frightens me about marriage is, of course, the many opportunities for failure with which I am now presented. Not failure in a career sense or failure to Keep Up With The Joneses, but failure in the sense that I now have many more opportunities to hurt Julia than I did before. As friends, it would have been difficult to lastingly hurt Julia, short of deliberate cruelty. Now, we are vulnerable to each other, and I can, through action or inaction, hurt her very easily. I’m not upset that I can’t go home with a random hottie I might meet at the airport bar; I am worried that my many flaws will manifest in ways that would worsen the life of the person I love most.

I suppose I could or should be worried that it works both ways, and that she can now hurt me in ways that she couldn’t before. But I can’t control that, whereas I am theoretically in charge of myself. Also, Julia is a saint.

—

All of these things are annoyingly abstract. There is no such thing as “getting married,” really; there are specific marriages, with specific, idiosyncratic strengths and weaknesses. This is not to say there aren’t certain commonalities in all or most marriages, but nothing means anything without specificity.

I am very lucky, because all of my specifics are wonderful. Julia hates it when I praise her too much; once, when I jokingly composed bad love poetry in front of a friend, she literally left the room. So I won’t deliberately make her too uncomfortable here, since she does obligingly read my silly Substack. (She actually edits everything I write, though obviously any errors or annoying phrases are my fault, not hers.)

So I will just leave it at these few thoughts: I am humbled and delighted to build a life with this person, who is one of the kindest and funniest and smartest people I’ve ever heard of. We will have many adventures, and get into a lot of trouble together. I am very happy.

1. This section inspired by this recent post from the inimitable

BDM

. This post doesn’t really have much to do with her piece, but I will take most any excuse to link to a BDM post.

2. I concluded I was not meaningfully eligible to join the Society of Jesus, because I had too much credit card debt. It was not clear to me whether or not my divorce would pose an insurmountable barrier. Also, I was not and am not Catholic, though presumably I could have rectified that, had I been sufficiently motivated.

3. This was during High COVID.

4. That proposal took place before we started dating; the “actual” proposal was more than a year later. I am a romantic, not a maniac.

5. Or “a boyfriend,” but most of the angst in this vein that I read is in the heterosexual universe. The gays appear to be doing much better, though maybe I’m just not reading the right magazines.

6. Obviously “marriage” itself did not mark a change in this policy; we had been engaged for a year and a half and seriously dating for a ways before the wedding itself. But “getting married” marks the final, formal foreclosure of that lifestyle. Which, again, didn’t appeal to me in the slightest. I’m really not making a moral judgment here; I don’t really care how you spend your time as long as everyone involved is a consenting adult. Further, plenty of people seem to make polyamory or other arrangements work, and that’s their business, not mine. But that ain’t our scene, and anyway, it sounds exhausting.

7. This is also good. See above re: credit card debt.

8. Such concerns are also obviously outweighed by the many advantages of my new situation. Sure, I can’t randomly leave for a week without talking to [Borat Voice] but now when we do randomly drive up to Gettysburg or whatever, I will have someone to share that experience with.