Scenes From a Remarriage

It turns out if you don’t copiously document and subsequently post every milestone of your life on social media, people not only don’t know what’s going on with you, they are unaware of if you are alive or dead. I regularly run into acquaintances I haven’t seen in a while who, when I inform them I am married, express shock. I have been married for three years. 

In fairness, if I had posted Instagram Stories at the time of my nuptials calling the man I had known for two months the love of my life, I probably would have been 5150ed. When I told Anna in the parking garage of the Glendale Galleria that I just married a man I had known for less than one fiscal quarter in the vulgar wasteland of Las Vegas, she looked at me like I had just told her I figured out a fantastic new way to navigate this crazy thing called life, and the thing was called Dianetics. (Shout out to auto-correct for not acknowledging Dianetics as a word in the English language—if only the IRS didn’t acknowledge Scientology as a religion, perhaps all those poor souls wouldn’t still be languishing in The Hole). 

When you marry someone you have only known for two months, you have no idea if it will last. You are certain you are making the right choice, but you also question the veracity of your own brain. Logic, after all, would dictate you are being rash, impulsive. I know that I thought I couldn’t simply be a girlfriend, that the title was too flippant and impermanent for the level of level of love I quickly found myself overwhelmed by, but I also used to think beat poetry was good. The human mind is malleable. Mistakes are made.

But it turned out, thank the fuck Christ, that my fallible mind was correct in telling me I needed to marry a man I hardly knew. As time went on, I found myself, in spite of myself, more and more convinced of this fact. And so, as our three year anniversary approached, it felt as good a time as ever to make it official. 

Because I am me, and I am cripplingly cheap (a character trait everyone who made speeches after the ceremony made sure to reference, much to the audible delight of my mother and grandmother), the idea of spending more than negative fourteen dollars on my wedding made my tits break out in a rash I had to take antifungal medication to rid myself of. Not once as a child did I ever dream of being queen for a day, making my best gal pals line up in matching polyester while my uncle watched me kiss a man he had once grilled with on the mouth. I saw the marriage of my own parents as a cautionary tale, a byproduct of the toxicity of societal expectations of heteronormative ideals. Listening to them scream at one another through the other side of my closed bedroom door, I would pray for their divorce. A framed photo of their Reno, Nevada nuptials sat by the fireplace; I would study it like a riddle. Were they ever happy? 

In the photo, my father was wearing jeans, the sure sign of a man devoid of respect for any institution, up to and including that of marriage. My mother’s wedding dress, an off-the-rack white Gunne Sax, is currently sitting in a box in my garage labeled “Debbie’s first wedding dress.” I once let a group of comedians borrow it to film a sketch in which one wore it while pretending to be butt-fucked by another.

My first nonphenomenal wedding took place at the Ventura County courthouse, witnessed by a girl I went to high school with whom I never particularly cared for but tolerated me at the time of our pubescence which, if you’ve ever grown up in a small town, is the only requisite for friendship. She immediately, unhesitatingly, chose my ex-husband in the divorce. My dress was an off-the-rack vintage Sears babydoll, which now sits in a ball at the bottom of my closet because the zipper is broken and I’m no longer anorexic enough to fit in it. Grainy, pixelated photographs of the ceremony exist—my hair is in plats, feet in ostentatious green cowboy boots. A lollipop I had grabbed from the counter dangles from the corner of my mouth. I remember the officiant stopped me at one point to admonish me for acting so flippantly during the ceremony, which took place under fluorescent lights.

Friends love to bring up the fact that I am a divorcée. They see it as exotic, as we are of the first generation in which getting married in your 20s was not a compulsory act. I, however, don’t count my first marriage as anything but a mistake, one I rectified the day after its point passed. I am now of the mindset that you legally should not be allowed to marry until your brain is fully developed—mine was still cooking when I thought it a good idea to marry the Australian I was dating, the alternative being his deportation. He’s still here, living in a suburb of Detroit with the woman from Orange County he cheated on me with while we were married, making unlistenable noise music to zero fanfare alongside a white drummer with dreads. Love wins! 

I never thought I would get married again, by which I mean to say for real, but then I found myself in the backyard of Clare’s Airbnb introduced to a mutual friend I found ever so handsome and ever so fascinating but assumed would have zero interest in my craven ass so I pretended to be disinterested in. 

Apparently I had already met him at her wedding, an interaction I had no recollection of but was later told made an indelible impression. My reputation, that of a glorified blogger who publicly overshared the details of my miserable life for $0.03 a word, had already rendered me a person of interest to him. As I stood in the smoking section, where I holed up for almost the entirety of said wedding selfishly lamenting the fact that I had not yet found the legally binding love my friend possessed, he approached me and asked if I thought the cater waiters were just sitting in the seatless cargo van waiting to be put into service.

“I don’t really feel like riffing right now,” I am told I dismissively spat, presumably while exuding the smoke of a Camel into the face of the man I would eventually spend the rest of my life riffing with. For reasons I cannot understand but am nevertheless grateful for, this exchange made him even more interested in me, to the extent that he fantasized for years about courting me if ever presented with the opportunity.

When we met again, I was single, and riffing was on the table. We spent the subsequent days quickly becoming infatuated with one another. Playlists were obsessively made and shamelessly shared. Desert Airbnbs booked. Staring into each other’s eyes was viewed as a viable pastime, its intimacy as thick as it was terrifying. Cut to roughly three years later, and our mutual agreement upon a public ceremony of sentimentality. 

Could I maybe, my therapist asked, consider getting the event catered? I’d rather get another divorce. A meal wasn’t in the (self-imposed) budget. The solution was a “cocktail” wedding, in which the ceremony took place at post-dinner sundown. While the choice may have seemed miserly, it was, in practice, an act of benevolence. Who among us cannot say they’ve had to sit in direct sunlight for an hour sweating through synthetic fabric while two people read vows that name checked television shows we had never seen, then trotted out college roommates who shared inside jokes we had no frame of reference for?

Side Note: The above is a specific reference to the most egregious iteration of this phenomenon I’ve ever experienced, that being when my cousin, who I have perhaps spoken a dozen words to in my life, invited me to her Lake Tahoe destination wedding where even the Econolodge cost over $200 a night and the groomsmen all worked for, and copiously spoke of, the groom’s start up app.

Anthony told me I was thinking too much about the financial and not enough about the emotional aspect of the wedding, but in THIS ECONOMY? Can you blame me?

I purchased wine at Grocery Outlet, specifically during their 20% off wine sale, a task I handled with bitter jealousy and contempt. How dare people with a healthy relationship to alcohol celebrate my healthy relationship with a fellow alcoholic?

In the interest of getting something nice, I traded a (new with tag) Speedo that had been languishing on my eBay to a man I found on Craigslist for two non-dented bottles of top shelf wine. “It’s a really kinky story/reason as to why” the man wrote me, explaining his interest in said Speedo. “Perhaps I’ll tell you in person if you seem cool!” You may find this impossible to believe, but I did not ask him if I “seemed cool” enough to be privy to said story when we met.

And since we now find ourselves in the realm of stories, I will tell you that ever since I read the Page Six story about Mary-Kate Olsen placing “bowls of cigarettes” on every table at her wedding to an ogre-esque Frenchman, I felt the only reason to even have a public ceremony would be to replicate this perverse and beautiful act. And reader? I am delighted to inform you that the replication of said act was not only the biggest hit of the night, it was performed at such a nice price point!

While en route to my Palm Springs (don’t get too excited, I used a promo code) bachelorette party, I made the car stop at the Morongo Reservation so I could purchase $51 cartons of Signals. What are Signals, you ask? Why, they’re cigarettes that are genuinely native made and $10 off the first carton when you join “The Tribe,” their rewards program. 

Side Note: While the packs still feature the silhouette of a man in a headdress, American Spirits have actually been owned by RJ Reynolds since late 2001, a dastardly deal with the devil that took place right when America was distracted by 9/11. 

I found my wedding dress in a paper bag of trash my friend Sara was getting rid of (other highlights included a collection of chipped mugs and a beat-to-shit branded water bottle from an obscure Star Trek property). It was synthetic, which was not ideal, but it also didn’t require the usage of Spanx, which I wore anyway (if you can’t get high on your own supply on your wedding day, when can you?). Will I lament the fact that the dry cleaners charged me $30 to de-stink the dress I was previously going to wear because it was floor length, and therefore a “gown,” for the rest of my days? And I will.

DIY until I die, I continued to wear the dress while carrying bags of detritus to the dumpster immediately after my own wedding. This didn’t bother me much—I was happy to do it, as I was grateful to my friends for letting me use their so-beautiful-it-looked-art-directed venue for free. And anyway, I could never be queen for a day. Being a trash woman is a life sentence. 

As people at the ceremony told me they were moved by my vows, and I would hate to have written without the words being publicly disseminated, as my parents paid little attention to me and as a result my self-worth is predicated on external validation, I present them below.

I hate being married to you. I hate being married to you because it means I can’t be self pitying, self loathing, self destructive—because the most interesting, idiosyncratic person I have ever met sees so much worth in me that they are willing to forsake all others, even the well adjusted ones, until death. 

I hate it because I am programmed to disbelieve I deserve such absolute devotion. I hate it because your love extracted me from the complacency of my assumptions of self. 

I hate how you saved me by challenging the default iteration of me, humanizing a character I had embodied so deeply I didn’t even know I was playing a role. 

I hate the fact that you make me think, make me talk, make me emote. I hate the patience you exude while I struggle through these tasks, gently blowing into the floppy drive of the obsolete PC that houses my archaic mind. 

I hate how much we grow with each passing day. I hate how I no longer resent the days—the grim future awaiting our generation, which once felt like a comfort, now terrifies me as, when we die, it may be the end. 

But when the water wars start, I know you’ll be there, doing push ups in 100 degree heat in order to defend our minuscule quadrant of undeveloped land. 

Side Note: I hate how handsome you are, and how I once said onstage that we were like Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller in reverse and people laughed TOO hard at the comparison.

I hate how much you make me feel unalone in a universe I once found cold and isolating. I hate the acceptance, the knowing. I hate how easy comfort came with the introduction of you. I hate how, when we first met, Clare informed me, in a manner that implied her lines were written by a gay male Sex and The City writer grasping at straws, “and…he’s single!” I hate how I told her to shut the fuck up, that I was FINE with dying alone. Welcomed it, even. I hate how I was before you helped me dismantle my non-self serving self. 

The period in which we knew one another but weren’t married was brief but intense.

Our first de facto date was in this former parking lot—I used access to the Panorama as an excuse to ask you out, as I’d made a passing reference to its existence on the night we met. 

Pragmatism be damned, from jump I could never call you my boyfriend. To do so felt flippant, reductive. Evenings were spent in bed, desperately wanting to ask you to marry me. And dumb as the impulse felt, when I finally succumbed to it? You told me you had already wanted to do the same. We were both 38. True love is not magic. It’s certainty.

We knew so little of one another when we first married but one thing we knew was that it made sense, and it continues to make sense. Hells are manageable, insecurities are malleable. When you know you are not alone, existence isn’t just tolerable, it’s pleasurable. I hate the pleasure you provide. 

Marriage is hard, but it is infinitely rewarding, as people say the jobs we refuse to have can be. Being married to you, then, could be considered my job, but when you love what you do, you never work a day in your life. I love you. Thank you for convincing me I deserve to be loved by you in return.