by Jen Doll
In 2011, the wedding invite came. This would be an utterly Brooklyn affair, complete with a photo booth; tattooed, bearded waiters; and green-market-esque food, with Momofuku Milk Bar cookies as party favors. It was all just a cab ride away from my East Village apartment. I RSVP’d and, though I was given the option of a plus-one, decided to go alone rather than convince some friend or passing fling to accompany me. I was sure to know lots of people: former magazine staffers and friends of Annabel’s I’d met over the years. Plus, it was in Brooklyn! I could leave early and responsibly. I might even wake up without a hangover the next day.
We met for celebratory wine, and there, Annabel informed me that there was but one single guy invited to her wedding. He was, it seemed, the only single guy they knew. My, the tides had shifted.
“I don’t know that you’ll like him much,” she said by way of warning.
“Why?” I asked.
“Well, he’s kind of opinionated. He seems like someone you’d fight with. Because, you know, you might not like his opinions.”
“Or maybe not fight, but debate,” I suggested, remembering Boyd and Jamaica. “Am I really that opinionated?”
“Yes,” she said. “I’ll probably put him at your table.”
That sounded about right. I couldn’t wait.
• • •
At home in the East Village on the Saturday afternoon of the wedding, I showered and put on a flowy lavender dress with cutouts at the shoulders and an uneven, bias-cut hem, cinching it with a large black belt I’d bought on a shopping excursion with Annabel. I slipped on black patent stiletto-heeled Mary Janes I’d purchased back in my days at the magazine, when I could afford such items, and transferred my necessities to a tiny gold clutch. I grabbed a cab and was, of all things, early to the ceremony. The restaurant had not yet opened, so I stood outside with a former coworker named Amy, who’d arrived just moments after me. We watched a couple walk their two giant dalmatians, the dogs taking surprisingly mincing steps on the cobbled Brooklyn streets before us. I felt a little nervous, that pre-wedding anxiety that comes before the first glass of Champagne when you contemplate what will happen in the hours to come. The moments before a wedding can feel like anticipating a spaceship launch, and then, if all goes well, the evening is steeped in the euphoria of We have liftoff. The opposite is too terrible to contemplate. It will be great, I reassured myself. I was over the wedding ridiculousness of immature times past, puking and fighting and crying.
“Your shoes are awesome,” I said. Amy’s bright blue pumps were covered in steel spikes. She’d been telling me about a new guy she liked; he was Swedish and only in town through the end of the summer. They’d met at a bar in Williamsburg several nights ago and had been hanging out nonstop ever since, until she had to break away for the wedding, of course.
“Aren’t they great?” she said, turning her shoe to the side and looking at it. “I love them.” She peered inside the windows of the restaurant. “Jen, the waiters are sexy. Only Annabel would have tattooed hottie waiters!”
Within minutes we were being let inside and handed drinks from trays, then ushered into the large space where the wedding ceremony would take place. Lining one wall was the bar. In the middle of the room, chairs were set up around a spiraling staircase. Floor-to-ceiling windows let us look out at the street and beyond, allowing the sun to join us inside. As other guests arrived there came the standard kissing crush of weddings, one cheek or two, sometimes even three, and hugs for people I hadn’t seen in weeks or months or years. We traded compliments over outfits or accomplishments or both, not always because we meant what we said but because compliments are a good way to break the ice, and everyone is cheery and bright and fresh and on their best behavior at the start of a wedding, so people do look better, too. The beginning of a wedding is when anything can happen; the ending is when everything did.
We settled into our seats in the middle of the room, facing the spot where the bride and groom would be wed. As we waited we gazed outside and admired the nearer views, too—white cloth-covered tables with arrangements of white roses on each; tall, flowering branches positioned throughout the room; candles adding a warm glow to everything. The expectant hush was interrupted by the sound of a crying baby. It was Ryan’s sister’s child. She’d decided, Annabel had told me, that she wanted to be a mom, if not a wife. She’d considered the options, arranged for the necessary procedures, and gotten pregnant. With the help of her parents, she was now raising her child on her own. I admired and also feared her choice. For me, the partner came before the child; if I didn’t marry or commit to someone in a serious way, someone who also wanted kids, I wasn’t sure I’d go down the road of motherhood at all. But I was impressed that she’d known what she wanted and had been brave enough to go after it in a nontraditional way.
The ceremony was fast and full of love, with touching, funny speeches delivered by family and friends, including one about a girl dinosaur and a boy dinosaur who despite the odds manage to find each other. Annabel wore a long, slim ivory dress with one architecturally jutting sleeve that passed both of our fashion muster but which she did not purchase at Fred Segal in Los Angeles. She had on a delicate veil made of French netting that covered just a smidge of her face, coquettishly. When the ceremony ended we headed upstairs to another spacious, windowed room. There we snacked on bacon-wrapped shrimp speared by toothpicks and sipped colorful cocktails. We admired the wonder that is the Brooklyn Bridge at sunset and waited to admire the bride and groom, who joined us shortly. I ran into our former editor in chief, who was there with his boyfriend. “She looks gorgeous, doesn’t she?” he said. “This wedding is just so Annabel.” I knew what he meant.
• • •
As the bride had told me ahead of time, I would share a table with the only single guy at the wedding, who in the world of the orchestrated wedding ecosystem might as well have been the only single guy in New York City. He was seated right next to me. Tom was bald, or had shaved his head to be bald, but either way, the effect was the same, and maybe, just maybe, he reminded me of my old boyfriend, Jason, though with a stockier, athletic build. He had on a crisp suit, paired with an expensive-looking tie. Though he was the only single guy at the wedding, there were more than a handful of single women present—next to me was Ingrid, a novelist and friend I’d met through Annabel, and down at the next table there was Amy, to name just a few. Amy would not be interested in Tom, though. She was already captivated by the bartenders, not to mention her Swedish love, and Tom had no visible tattoos. Worse, he appeared to work in business.
I was already at the table when he sat down and offered his hand and his name. “I’m Tom,” he said. “And you are?”
I took his hand and shook it. “I’m . . . well, let’s see. Who am I?” I picked up the place card inscribed with my name that sat in front of my plate and studied it. “Today I am Jen Doll.”
“You need a card to tell you that?”
I leaned toward him and dropped my voice. “I’m a wedding crasher. I do this nearly professionally, or at the very least, competitively amateurly.”
“Fascinating,” he said. “How did you get in?”
I pointed toward the windows behind us. One of them happened to be a glass door, which I’d noticed earlier. “Fire exit. The alarm is disabled. It’s so easy, it’s almost embarrassing. No one ever suspects. You’d think they’d have better security at these things.”
“But what if the real Jen Doll shows up?” he asked.
I looked at him sadly. “I’ve taken care of that. Sometimes unfortunates get in the way. Wrong place at the wrong time, you know. I’m not proud of it, but I’ve got to eat.”
“That’s right, food. What are you going to order?”
I’d already decided. “I’m having the chicken. It comes with mac and cheese.”
“And I’ll have the steak,” he said. “We can share, Jen Doll.”
• • •
There is something that occurs at weddings when you are single and you happen upon another who’s single and you find each other moderately attractive and tolerably pleasant. Two such people might decide they are better together than alone at this fair, if temporary, juncture, and they might abandon all pretense and just be together, as if they’re a real couple, for that night. There’s love in the air, who can resist? We’ve all heard the great wedding legend, the tale of Someone who knows Someone who totally met his or her Someone at just such an event. If it happened to Someone, it could happen to you, too.
Let us call this pairing the Wedding Insta-Couple. The force is powerful. Always in the moment it feels like the right thing to do. We are vulnerable at weddings. They’re not comfortable like old shoes or our own couches in our own homes, or even like the grimy barstools at our favorite bars. They are big, important events at which we need to be on our best behavior, or at least, we’ll do our best to try. But the bride and groom, who may be our closest friends there, are busy. Many of the other wedding guests may already be coupled. If there is only one single guy, or one single girl, at a wedding, chances are they’ll have the opportunity to go home with someone else who’s single, too, if they play their cards even remotely right. That’s not to say that weddings make us easy, or anything else you might pick up from a shallow reading of the movie Wedding Crashers. It is to say that almost every human on the planet wants love and companionship in some form or another, and inserted into an environment in which such things are the stock in trade, we may be inspired to take a chance and try to find them for ourselves, too, even if only temporarily.
Being alone at a wedding can be terrifying, but the promise of love found at a wedding is the opposite. Think of how many movies depict a female character who hires or bribes or convinces some guy to be her date to a wedding, because she can’t stand to go alone, for fear of humiliation, or perhaps because her ex will be there. These plots are silly and sometimes belittling, too, but there’s a kernel of truth there: Sometimes we don’t feel like being by ourselves, and a wedding is likely to be one of those times. In the movies, the couple that connects at a wedding frequently falls in love and goes on to get married themselves. This is a real kind of American fantasy, even if the majority of its examples live in Hollywood, not reality.
My insta-coupling with Tom had in my mind been a done deal, probably from the time that Annabel had told me he and I would not get along. I love a wedding challenge, as we’ve previously determined. And so that evening, after he gave me bites of his steak and I cut up portions of my chicken and moved them to his plate, we walked around together as if we had come to this event as each other’s dates, as if we’d been dating for years, as if we, soon, might head down an aisle of our own. He had his arm around me, and we introduced each other to the friends and family members (mine the bride’s side, his the groom’s) that we saw. “How did you meet?” they’d ask, taking us for more than side-by-side assigned dining companions, and we’d say, “At the dinner table!” and everyone would laugh at our adorable couple antics. I thought, Hey, this is sort of fun. I could get used to this.
When the restaurant closed, we walked down the street to the bar where everyone had agreed to converge for the after-party. In contrast to the white-petal-strewn airy brightness of the previous venue, it was dark there, even a little ominous, with crimson-hued lighting and a pool table surrounded by men in concert tees. By that time I was pretty drunk, as were most of us. But as I’d promised myself, there would be no puking, no crying at this wedding. Instead, I became ever so slightly confused about the status of my fake relationship. Was this guy with me or not with me? Was he now, suddenly, flirting with a waitress? I looked. It appeared that he was. Was he spending time talking to that other woman, another single woman at the wedding? I looked again. Yes. Had this all been just a game to him?
In an instant, my wedding insta-relationship, the one that I had never even cared about, not for real, began to crumble, and I to crumble along with it. The unit of two that had seemed so protective and nice and safe, a fake relationship that felt even better in this moment than one that was genuine, was gone. I was alone again, on my own, having to fend for myself. I didn’t even want another drink. I wanted to go home, climb into bed with my dress on, and pull up the covers, shut my eyes, and go to sleep, only to wake to the brightness of morning. That was the moment in which I should have gone home. Instead, I confronted him, interrupting the conversation he was having with a girl who did not look familiar.
“I think I want to leave,” I said.
“Well, silly, then you should go,” he told me. “It’s late.” Wrong answer.
The girl yawned, looked at her phone, and she herself left. Smart girl. I persisted. “You should come with me.”
He glanced at his watch. “I have to be up for this thing really early in the morning.” (Wedding Tip: This is a death knell that means precisely what you think it means! Do not proceed!) I proceeded. I gave him what I felt was a charming come-hither sort of look. It may have only served to convince him that I needed an escort to get home without injury for which he would later be blamed. “Well, all right, I guess,” he finally said, finishing his drink, and we were in a cab back to the East Village.
What I wanted, I think, was to end the night in a way that felt compatible with how we’d experienced the wedding itself, him cutting me pieces of steak from his plate and taking some of my chicken; us walking around the venue together, arm in arm. That is to say, together. I wasn’t ready for our newly constructed twosome, which had felt surprisingly good, to be over just yet. Maybe our insta-coupling had legs. And, yes, probably I wanted to make out with him a little.
We got back to my studio apartment. There were not many places to sit. I took off my shoes and found a spot on the bed, and he joined me. We kissed for a while, until he again looked at his watch. “I better go,” he said.
“Really?”
“Yeah, I have to be up early in the morning,” he reminded me. “I have that thing.”
“Oh, yeah,” I said. “That thing. What thing is that again?”
“It’s just some stuff I have to do,” he said.
Well, if he was going to be that way. “Fine.” I pouted.
He was going to be that way. “It was great to meet you, Jen Doll,” he told me, getting up. “Or whoever you are.”
“You, too,” I said.
And he left.
It was funny, though. After the door had shut and I was again my onesome in my little apartment, I wasn’t angry he had gone at all. So much can change in the matter of a few minutes, outside of the grasp of the wedding. Now I could go to sleep, happily single, comfortably on my own. The next morning I could wake up alone in my own bed, which I could sprawl across if I felt like it, hogging the blankets and sheets and pillows with abandon. I did not have to be concerned about a stranger next to me and what he wanted and how I might need to care about what he wanted, too. I did not have to worry about brunch. I felt relieved. He hadn’t been the one. He was just one.
Before I fell asleep, I ate my Momofuku Milk Bar wedding cookie, the favor from the bride and groom. It was delicious.
• • •
Several weeks after that, I sent Tom a Facebook message saying I’d had fun meeting him and thanks for helping me get home. I felt the need to counter any behavior that might have been interpreted the wrong way, and I was curious, too. Had there really been something there after all, or was it only Wedding Insta-Couple Haze? I figured I could be an adult about this and told him, if he ever wanted a drink, I owed him one.
He never wrote back.
The word was that he’d just gotten out of a relationship and he’d tentatively gotten back in it. I don’t know what happened for sure, and it certainly doesn’t matter now, if it mattered even then. He wasn’t really the only single guy in New York, much l
ess the world. He was merely the only single guy at that wedding. But he did me a favor. I could thank him for helping me realize that the only true relationship shame was in not being real, in not being honest with myself, and honest with those I dated, too. There is a not insignificant amount of fear associated with saying, Yes, this is what I want: a partnership that looks and feels like this, because on the other side of that lies the paralyzing possibility of rejection, of failure, of choosing wrong. But it’s not very fulfilling to go through life passively, guarded and not taking chances, trying not to let things hurt you. And if you don’t at least try to say what you want, it’s very unlikely that it will suddenly appear on your doorstep with a shiny red bow on top. Sure, you can fake who you are in an effort to keep your heart safe, but that will never make your heart feel that other thing most of us truly crave. If I wanted a relationship, really and truly, it was time to admit it.
Before Annabel met Ryan, she’d explained her lack of interest in marriage by saying, “I want to make that choice to be with someone every day, not have it be a foregone conclusion.” Now that she’d done the thing she never thought she’d do, she took a different view. “It feels really good,” she told me almost two years after her wedding day, as we shopped at a tiny Brooklyn boutique, her baby sleeping peacefully in a stroller in the corner. “But to tell the truth, I don’t even think about it, being married versus not being married. I’m just living it.”
16.
At Last
In 2011, I was a full-time staffer at the Village Voice. Though I wrote a few cover stories for the paper in my time at the alt-weekly, my duties were primarily confined to Runnin’ Scared, the news blog, which had a focus on New York City but incorporated a range of global and viral topics as well, all the better for page views. At first I wrote eight to ten posts a day. They could be short, riffy things, because, for goodness’ sakes, it was eight to ten posts a day. We were told as bloggers that we should always try to make the phone call, always try to get more information. We did try, but I had the feeling a lot of the veteran staffers, those who’d been around as reporters during the heyday of the paper, thought we largely just produced a bunch of garbage as the bottom-feeders of journalism. They weren’t all wrong. I very much looked up to those reporters and did not want it to be that way, but I didn’t know how to do everything I was required to do and leave my desk, too. In some ways, my background in print journalism had prepared me little for creating online content, and most days I felt like I was flailing. I kept writing and got faster, and I slowly got better, too. Our post quota was downsized to a more reasonable five or six daily, which seems insane to me now but was a relief then, and reporting (the kind you could do without leaving your desk, mostly) was encouraged.