Chapter 15: The Meaning of Marriage

On the dangers of entangling our self-worth with the state of being married.

Photo by frank mckenna on Unsplash

In the previous chapter, Covid hit and the lockdown forced me to sit still and look my fear of dying alone straight in the eye.

In the face of possible death by Covid, I started pondering on the milestones of my life so far. When my former marriage came to mind as one of the milestones, I felt a lump in my throat while my upper body crumpled into itself. The remorse of an attained and then destroyed milestone. The marriage ending was my choice too, but the relief of getting out coexisted with the remorse that we didn’t manage to make it a success. 

Getting married meant becoming a respectable woman.

It meant getting multiple female family members off my back once I followed their footsteps and locked in a husband. Many of the women in my family hadn’t been happily married. But that was a milestone you had to reach, it had nothing to do with happiness. 

Getting married was a once-in-a-lifetime endeavor.

The message was instilled in me from the first Disney movies that became available once communism fell and the borders of TV programs opened. You weren’t born twice, nor did you turn 18 twice. You don’t die twice, just as well as you don’t marry twice. 

With every question I’d be asked about when I’d be getting married, my face darkened and I instantly hated the snooper for stirring my shame about it. I didn’t know the answer. How could I know the answer when patriarchy had decided that it was my boyfriend who had to take the initiative of getting us married?

But people were asking me the question because I was the woman approaching 30-and-unmarried, unlike my cousins, even if younger than me.

I was the one in peril of not feeling worthy if a guy didn’t choose to put a ring on it. My boyfriend — he was free to live and build his career. And while he lived freely, no questions asked, I was waiting for him to decide when my shame would end.  

My grandmother asked me when I’d be getting married multiple times a day.

It was not her fault. Alzheimer’s often took her short-term memory. When that hit, a shadow would cover her almost-grey eyes and she would gaze somewhere in mid-distance as if searching for her memory there. Turning towards me, looking like a scared five-year-old who got lost from mommy during the country fair. Then, with a blink, she would be back in our common reality, and she would pop the question right back again.  

It was like dodging darts that were being spearheaded at my heart space, one after the other, faster and faster with every bit of memory loss of hers. 

When it wasn’t my grandmother asking me about marriage, my mother’s voice resounded in my ears as she repeated the story of how she had feared no one would take her anymore after turning 27. How she had feared remaining single, unclaimed.

Every time she would tell me this story I’d perceive a panic that transfered right into my adolescent brain. The way she had said unmarried or childless made me hear unworthy, ridiculed. She was saying one word, but her tone and her eyes were saying something else.

I carried her panic with me throughout the years, all the way to my wedding day. Or at least to the day my then-boyfriend asked me to marry him. My answer was accompanied by a long sigh of relief I didn’t even know I was holding inside. I was worthy of being chosen, after all. 

Once I received the long-awaited engagement ring, I noticed how I’d started to use my right hand to hold on to the handrail while on public transit. Being left-handed, I instinctively use my left hand for most actions. But the right hand now carried not only a ring with a small diamond in the center but all of my 30-year-old-woman worthiness on it.

I was showing off, instinctively, unconsciously not just a piece of beautiful jewelry. With it, I was answering a question nobody had asked me but myself: are you worthy enough for a man to choose you? I was spiraling into a thorny path I would need years to pull myself out of. 

Other relatives took personally my not getting married as early as they expected. All women in the family followed the same path, albeit overworked and underloved. How did I dare to contemplate another way, even if it might make me happier? Why be happy when you could be normal? (Absolutely brilliant question, which is not mine, but the title of a book by Jeanette Winterson).  

Marriage was the outcome of all the fairy tales I had read as a girl, it was the happy ending I was groomed to desire.

On my wedding day, a late-May cloudless balmy day, I walked down a made-up aisle covered in red carpet, friends and family waving at me. I wore the most princess-like dress I could find and indulged myself in being at the center of attention of everyone around.

That day was my personal Commoner Coronation, the day when I became Queen for a day. 

During the morning preparations for the wedding, one of my aunts took me aside and whispered in my ear some words of wisdom she had prepared for me. 

‘The woman is the one who creates the family home and who keeps it together’, she said. ‘Make sure you remember that’, she warned. 

At the time, I thought it was endearing, but once divorced, I pondered on it. Had it been my fault that the marriage did not survive? That’s what my aunt’s logic implied. 

---

When my marriage had run its course and we both decided to separate, I felt my value as a woman implode as well. I’d put on my shoulders the responsibility to make it work as if my entire life depended on it. And when it didn’t work, my sense of self-worth was swallowed by the whale-sized shame of failure. 

And when my mother asked me why I didn’t wear my wedding band anymore, my shame turned into violent anger. I wanted to smash the glass covering a framed photo of me on my wedding day that she still kept, prominently placed next to her TV set. But, being the good girl I had been groomed to be, I let the anger burn me on the inside and fought with her over some trivial pretext. 

When I decided to divorce, all my mother saw was her daughter becoming an unchosen woman again. When, during a trip back home, three months into my divorce, her friends asked me where my husband was, I darted looks of confusion at mother. I understood she was protecting herself from the shame of having a divorced daughter by not telling them just yet. That was her own shame, but I took it upon myself and carried it for many years for her. I absorbed it as your skin absorbs a layer of foundation. It’s subtle and see-through, but toxic. I was wearing a thick mask, I was carrying something that wasn’t mine. 

The shame of having failed at being a wife made me hold on to my dead marriage in strange ways.

I kept telling people I had been married once, two minutes into meeting them. I had an ex-husband, focus on the ‘husband’ part, soft speaking the ‘ex’ part. I was carrying my former marriage like a dead body, showing it around, as proud of it as a veteran boasting his war medal.

The burden was heavy, but who was I without it?! 

At the beginning of 2020, two years after signing the divorce papers, isolated from both family members and society’s expectations, I reflected on this life milestone.

The past decade had shown me I hadn’t been the non-conformist I always thought I was. I fell right into the trap society sets for women, convincing them their “wifedom” worth starts decreasing once they turn 30.

I had to finally bury the dead body of my former marriage that I was proudly showing off. I had to let go of my mother’s shame I’d been carrying for her, and come home to myself again. To hell with fairy tales and beliefs that I only had one chance at happiness. I had one life, potentially shortened if Covid would keep me in bed for a few weeks. I was ready to live in the imperfect present.

And the meaning of marriage?

A genuine celebration of an equal, loving partnership.

Not a masquerade ball with princess dresses and diamonds on display.