On days like today, Alex didn’t understand why anyone would get married in the first place. It was all well and good to want companionship, help with household expenses, and someone to have sex with on speed dial, but making it legal seemed unwise for most people.
In Alex’s professional and familial experience, getting married was like playing the lottery. Sure, you had all these hopes and dreams about what you might do with the jackpot before the numbers were pulled. But very few people actually won and got to live out those dreams. For most, it was a waste of resources that could be better put to use elsewhere.
And on days like today, she especially didn’t understand why some other women were so eager to be married. It ended so badly so often, and even her friends in good marriages sounded as though they were suffering from a very particular form of Stockholm syndrome. If Alex had a dollar for every time one of her married friends started a sentence with “I love my husband, but” and then recounted him doing something truly horrific, she could retire. Even though she’d dated a few guys whom she could have seen herself married to, she had never understood why married men were never expected to make sacrifices, other than the opportunity to sleep with other women without hiding it. And, considering the size of her client base, many of them couldn’t even manage to do that.
Somewhere along the line, Alex had decided that marriage wasn’t something she wanted. The grind of her job and the weight of her family history made her feel like she was uniquely fucked when it came to romantic relationships. There were men in her dating history whom she’d thought she’d been in love with, whom she’d pictured spending her life with, but none of those relationships had worked out. Now she made it explicit from the beginning that she only wanted to be in a relationship for as long as it was fun for everyone involved.
Alex’s negative view of marriage could not diminish her love of reality television shows about the institution—like Say Yes to the Dress. She also loved the Real Housewives, but that was essentially client development work. But watching a show where too-young women were emotionally abused by their mothers and future mothers-in-law while they tried on dresses that cost more than a used Toyota Corolla and made them look like cupcakes was more relaxing than candlelight yoga.
Even though she couldn’t envision getting married—ever—she did enjoy critiquing the truly audacious choices made on the show. It would be bad for her reputation if people knew that she had a secret wedding dress Pinterest board. No one wanted to hire a divorce attorney with a romantic streak, so Alex kept her love for the show a secret. But truthfully, it was one of the few things that made her feel better about her own romantic track record. Even though no one had ever asked her to marry them, at least she didn’t have anything with a sweetheart neckline or a see-through panel around her midriff in her history.
So yeah. She loved weddings, specifically wedding dresses. But she had serious questions about them—and marriage in general.
The one thing that truly bothered her on the show was how they never explained how one went to the bathroom in one of those things. What if they were sewn into the dress? Were they expected to hold it until they could take the dress off and perform their wifely duties for the first time? Alex found it fascinating and symbolic of the fact that—unless they won the lottery—wives weren’t expected to be human beings. One of her clients had told her that she’d never taken a dump in the same bathroom her husband used after he commented on her stinking up the bathroom on their third date. Before they’d bought a house with more than one bathroom, she’d waited until she got to the Starbucks to go every morning. For ten years.
As Alex sat down with her Big Gulp–sized glass of rosé, she was prepared to watch a twenty-one-year-old who thought a thirty-five-year-old who didn’t have bed frame was her soul mate. What she was not prepared for was to see a woman who looked eerily like Alex waxing poetic about Alex’s most recent ex-boyfriend.
She’d met Jason speaking on a Black Law Students Association panel at UCLA Law School, featuring four Black law partners under forty. When she’d walked in and seen all six foot four of Jason, she’d been glad she hadn’t found an excuse to cancel her appearance. It wasn’t that she hated giving back, but she always felt exhausted after socializing with new people. She’d planned to sneak out in the first ten minutes of the happy hour after the panel when Jason brought her over a glass of boxed wine. He’d smiled at her, and the rest of the room had fallen away. They’d talked for the whole cocktail hour and then he’d taken her out to dinner. It had been so long since she’d liked someone that she’d been a little helpless to resist him at first.
Of course that had changed later on, but she’d been intoxicated with Jason that first night.
Seeing Jason on a show about weddings was doubly shocking because Jason had told Alex in no uncertain terms—multiple times during the months they’d dated—that he didn’t believe in marriage. That was why Alex had started dating him in the first place. She would never have to wonder whether she’d won the lottery or thrown away her time and money for a dream that only came true for one in a hundred million. There was no danger that she’d end up hog-tied in a Pnina Tornai dress, later trying to furtively poop in the locker room before her third SoulCycle class of the day because a man who hadn’t pushed a watermelon out of his vagina thought she was too fat a month after doing so.
She’d thought they were on the same page.
But Jason had apparently lied to her about his aversion to marriage. As Alex watched the photo montage of his relationship history with this other woman, she started to feel sick. At some point, she put down her wine and leaned toward the television. She clasped her hands together so hard that the joints in her knuckles ached. It was better than what she really wanted to do—throw something at the TV.
She didn’t even know why. They’d had a nice few months together, but she hadn’t been in love with Jason. They were compatible—in bed and out—but she hadn’t thought about him when he wasn’t around. Her feelings for Jason were warm and pleasant, but there hadn’t been any passion between them. They’d parted ways amicably, and she’d thought they would both sail off into another chapter of serial monogamy.
Still, she seethed as she watched this woman pick out a dress to marry a man who’d apparently changed his life plans in the nine months since he’d dumped Alex. She didn’t know why, but thinking about him moving on with this woman formed a sinkhole in her chest. Instead of doing anything about it, like changing the channel, Alex sipped her pink wine and really looked at the woman who was going to marry Jason—her handsome, financially stable, erudite ex-boyfriend who’d told her that he’d rather put his balls in a panini press every morning than spend the rest of his life with one person.
And as the woman on the screen picked out a dress that was so simple and classic that it made Alex’s chest ache, she realized that Jason had only had an aversion to marriage because he couldn’t countenance the prospect of marriage with Alex.