Trick Mirror

by Jia Tolentino

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  Despite my personality, or what you might guess if you’ve ever talked to me after I’ve had a single drink of alcohol, I have been in straight and monogamous relationships for more than twelve out of the past thirteen years. But my apathy toward weddings—the apparent culmination of these relationships—is lifelong. Girls are trained in childhood to take an interest in bridal matters, through Barbies (which I didn’t care about) and make-believe (I mostly fantasized through reading) and feature-length Disney musicals, in which a series of beautiful princesses enchant a series of interchangeable men. I loved these movies except for the love interests. I fantasized about being Belle, swinging around ladders in the library; Ariel, swimming around the deep ocean with a fork; Jasmine, alone in the starlight with her phenomenal tiger; Cinderella, getting a makeover from the mice and the birds. Toward the end of these movies, when things got real with the princes, I would get bored and eject my VHS tapes. While I was writing this, I pulled up the weddings from Cinderella and The Little Mermaid on YouTube, and felt like I was watching deleted scenes.

  It’s not that I was averse to the bridal building blocks. I was girly as a kid, and I loved attention. I had pink sheets, pink curtains, pink walls in my room. I pored over descriptions of fancy dresses in books, feeling deeply pained in Gone with the Wind when Scarlett couldn’t wear her favorite one, “the green plaid taffeta, frothing with flounces and each flounce edged in green velvet ribbon,” because, relatably, there was “unmistakably a grease spot on the basque.” Sometimes, at family gatherings, I would demand an audience and sing “Colors of the Wind,” in honor of the Disney princess that I felt most connected to—Pocahontas, with her neon sunrises and raccoon friend and bare feet. I was only four years old when I started writing impassioned notes to my mother to persuade her to take me to Glamour Shots, the iconically tacky mall photo studio where you could take a portrait of yourself in sequins. When she acquiesced, I wrote a thank-you note to God. (“Thank you for the chance to go to Glammer Shots,” I scrawled, “and for making me sneaky.”) For the photo, I proudly wore a white dress with puffy sleeves and flowers in my hair.

  In middle school, I went on my first “date,” dropped off at the mall for a romantic matinee showing of the Adam Sandler vehicle Big Daddy. Around then I started to desperately want guys to like me; at the same time, I was repulsed by the predictability of that desire. In high school, I carried on a series of intense male friendships and odd secretive dalliances, and mostly, within a graduating class of ninety people who had all gone to school together for a decade, I didn’t date. In college, I fell in love very quickly with a guy who all but moved into my apartment in the fall of my second year, when I was seventeen. Around then, I recounted one of our conversations in my LiveJournal:

  He was telling me what scares him—that he’s just fulfilling the part of, you know, like the left-wing existentialist college boyfriend after which I settle down with the Marriage Type….What I told him, and what I really think, is that what are we all ever doing except playing a part that fulfills a role at its appropriate time?

  This is the only time the word “marriage” occurs in the entire archive, which covers my whole adolescence. Watching myself obliviously shift a personal tension into an abstract social inquiry, I can glimpse, for a second, a shadow of all the things I have neglected to admit to myself in the elaborate project of justifying what I want.

  Anyway, I broke up with that boyfriend my fourth year of college, suddenly confused as to why I had ever voluntarily done someone else’s laundry. When I moved home after graduation, I got bored and messaged Andrew, whom I had met the year before at a Halloween party. He’d been dressed as the wrestler Rowdy Roddy Piper. (I was dressed, politically incorrectly, as Pocahontas, and my date was draped in feather boas—the Colors of the Wind.) At the time, he was dating a pint-size brunette in my sorority, who later broke up with him before he moved to Houston for grad school.

  Andrew was new to Texas, and I thought I was leaving for Peace Corps any minute. Freed by the mutual acknowledgment that this would be temporary, we glued ourselves to each other, and then six months passed in this way. One morning we woke up on a deflated air mattress in my friend Walt’s apartment, hungover, with light filtering through the dust like magic, and when I looked at him I felt that if I couldn’t do this forever I would die. A few days later, we went to DC for, of all things, a black-tie fraternity reunion. I got wasted and went outside to savor the taste of several delicious menthols, and then came back inside reeking of smoke, which Andrew hated. “I’d quit for you,” I told him, “but…” My departure for Central Asia was, by then, just two weeks away. Andrew, who is a sweet boy, started crying. We went back to our hotel room and admitted that we loved each other. I woke up surrounded by cans of Budweiser, which I had drunkenly used as cold compresses for my tear-swollen face.

  We decided to try to stay together, even though I was leaving. I boarded a plane to Kyrgyzstan, where, several months into my volunteer service, I reached my single peak of wedding ideation to date. My friend Elizabeth had sent me a care package full of wonderful, frivolous things—an issue of Martha Stewart Weddings among them. Everything in the magazine was pristine, useless, beautiful, predictable. I loved it, and I reread it all the time. One night, after climbing halfway up a mountain to try to get cell service on my tiny Nokia, after failing to reach Andrew and sinking into a wormhole of dread that I was ruining something irreplaceable, I fell asleep reading my wedding magazine and got married to him in a dream. It was an intense, vivid, realistic vision, soundtracked by 2011. There was a vast, open green plain, with flowers drifting in the air, the guitar loop from José González’s cover of “Heartbeats” playing, a sense of shattering freedom and security, like an ascension, or possibly like a death; then, a dark room that glittered like a disco, and Robyn’s “Hang with Me” thudding through the air. I woke up shocked, and then curled into a ball, my eyes smarting. For weeks afterward I nursed that fantasy, even though I was never able to imagine anything but light and music and weather. I could never see myself, could never imagine bridesmaids, a dress, a cake.

  I left Peace Corps early. On the plane back from Kyrgyzstan, I was a raw nerve, fragile in a way that I had never been before—flattened out by the awful juxtaposition between my obscene power as an American and my obscene powerlessness as a woman, and by an undiagnosed case of tuberculosis, and by my own humiliating inability to live comfortably in a situation where I couldn’t achieve or explain my way out of every bind. I went straight from the airport to Andrew’s apartment in Houston and never left. He was, at the time, oppressively busy, coming home from his grad school studio to catch five hours of sleep a night. I occupied myself with my two Peace Corps hobbies: doing yoga and cooking elaborate meals. Alone in the kitchen, rolling out pastry crusts and checking vinyasa schedules, I started to feel uncomfortable flashbacks to college, as if I had once again, at a freakishly young age, found myself playing the role of wife.

  At the time, I didn’t technically need a job right away. Andrew had gotten a full scholarship to Rice, and so his parents paid his—now our—$500 rent, giving him the money they had saved to subsidize grad school tuition. This year of free rent was transformative, as free rent tends to be. But I was terrified of what it meant to depend on someone else’s money. I was afraid of making myself useful through sex and dinner. I spent hours every day on Craigslist looking for work and, in the process, discovered lifestyle blogs, wedding blogs—websites that overwhelmed me with despair. I stopped cobbling together grant-writing gigs and started “helping” rich kids with their college application essays, which effectively meant writing them. Propping up the class system paid terrifically, and with this ill-gotten cash, I bought myself a sense of permission. I wrote some short stories and got into Michigan’s MFA program. In 2012, we moved to Ann Arbor. We were invited to eighteen weddings over the course of the next year.
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  By that point Andrew and I were a team, fully. We had a dog, we split the housework and our credit card statement, and we had never spent a holiday apart. When I curled up to him in the mornings I felt like a baby sea lion climbing on a sunlit rock. One weekend in 2013 we flew back to Texas for a wedding in Marfa, where the whole thing was a vision of heaven: a mournful Led Zeppelin riff thrumming through a church, the heat of the desert, the supernatural happiness of the young couple, the sunset gradient fading away as they danced. That night I sat under the stars in a black dress, drinking tequila, wondering if my heart was as incorrect as it seemed to me in that moment—thudding with the certainty that I didn’t want any of this at all.

  The pressure of this thought intensified until my ears seemed to be ringing. I told Andrew what I was thinking, and his face crumpled. He had been thinking the exact opposite, he told me. This was the first wedding where he’d really understood what all of this was for.

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  Half a decade has gone by since then. Andrew has long ago forgiven me for making him cry in Marfa; he has also, possibly due to a lack of desirable alternatives, lost interest in making anything official. Our lives are full of pleasure but almost completely stripped of mass ritual: we don’t do anything for Valentine’s Day, or celebrate an “anniversary,” or give each other Christmas presents, or put up a tree. For my part, I have stopped feeling guilty about not wanting to marry such a marriageable person. I now understand that it is an extremely ordinary and unremarkable thing to feel overwhelmed by weddings, or even averse to them. As a society we do not lack for evidence that weddings are often superficial, performative, excessive, and annoying. There is a strong strain of wedding hatred in our culture underneath all the fanaticism. The hatred and fanaticism are, of course, intertwined.

  This tension crops up in many wedding movies, which tend to depict weddings as a site of simultaneous love and resentment. (Or, in the case of the soothing and relatable Melancholia, a site of impending comet apocalypse.) Often, in wedding movies, it is the romantic partner who is loved and the family who generates the resentment, as in Father of the Bride or My Big Fat Greek Wedding. But more recently, these movies have been about how women love and resent the wedding itself. The 2011 Paul Feig blockbuster Bridesmaids played this tension for slapstick comedy and sweetness. The 2012 Leslye Headland movie Bachelorette did it again, on a dark, acidic palette.

  Before that, there was 27 Dresses, released in 2008, starring Katherine Heigl, and 2009’s Bride Wars, starring Kate Hudson and Anne Hathaway. These deeply upsetting rom-coms were supposed to be about women who love weddings and for women who love weddings. But both movies seemed to really hate weddings, and to hate those women, too. 27 Dresses was about Jane, an uptight, sentimental, perpetually exhausted bridesmaid-handmaiden who became obsessed with weddings after she fixed a rip in a bride’s dress when she was a kid. “I knew I had helped someone on the most important day of her life,” Jane says breathily, in the opening sequence, “and I just couldn’t wait for my special day.” Throughout the movie, she compulsively denies herself self-worth and happiness, hoarding both things for her imaginary future wedding, planning other people’s rehearsal dinners and accruing huge piles of resentment in her soul.

  Bride Wars is worse. Hathaway’s Emma and Hudson’s Liv are best friends who have also been obsessed with weddings since childhood. They get engaged simultaneously and accidentally plan their weddings at the Plaza for the same day. An all-out battle erupts as a result of this preposterously fixable situation. Emma, a public-school teacher who pays the $25,000 venue fee from the wedding nest egg that she’s been building since she was a teenager, sends Liv chocolates every day so that she’ll get fat. Liv, a lawyer with a treadmill in her office, sneaks into a spray-tan salon to turn Emma bright orange. Both women are essentially friendless, and they treat their husbands-to-be like crash-test dummies. Just before she walks down the aisle, Emma snaps at the coworker whom she’s forced to be maid of honor:

  Deb, I’ve been dealing with versions of you my whole life, and I’m gonna tell you something that I should’ve told myself a long time ago. Sometimes it’s about me, okay? Not all the time, but every once in a while it’s my time. Like today. If you’re not okay with that, feel free to go. But if you stay, you have to do your job, and that means smiling and talking about my bridal beauty, and most importantly, not making it about you…Okay? Can you do that?

  Like Jane, Emma has been broken by the cultural psychosis that tells women to cram a lifetime’s supply of open self-interest into a single, incredibly expensive day.

  In 2018, Michelle Markowitz and Caroline Moss published the humor book Hey Ladies!, a series of hellish fictional emails sent among a group of female friends in New York City who are constantly sentencing one another to elaborate social obligations—a problem that worsens once members of the group start getting engaged. A sample email, from when the bride-to-be’s mother chimes in on the bridal shower:

  Since we all know Jen has always loved flowers, I’m thinking we do a garden luncheon bridal shower at our country club in Virginia at the turn of the season. I know Virginia is a trek from New York City and Brooklyn, but I already checked Amtrak train tickets for the last weekend in April, and it looks like it will only be ~$450 per person round trip (a deal!).

  Ali, since you’re the Maid of Honor I’ll let you handle dress code, but please, ladies, be prepared to wear a pastel or muted shade that goes well with your skin tone. If you’re not sure, google! Or go to a high-end luxury clothing store and make a consultation appointment with a stylist. As for shoes, just because this will be outside doesn’t mean you should sacrifice looking good for being comfortable. I am going to have a photographer on site, so keep that in mind! As for hair and makeup, please call Meegan at Hair Today in VA for consecutive day-of appointments so we can have consistency in looks.

  It’s satire, of course, and perfectly exaggerated. But real emails like this frequently go viral on Twitter. And, although until 2014 I never made more than $35,000 annually, I have spent, at a bare minimum, at least $35,000 on weddings to date.

  So: the expense, the trouble, the intensity. And then there are the predictable feminist things, too. Historically, marriage has mostly been bad for women and fantastic for men. Confucius defined a wife as “someone who submits to another.” Assyrian law declared, “A man may flog his wife, pluck her hair, strike her and mutilate her ears. There is no guilt.” In early modern Europe, writes Stephanie Coontz, in Marriage, a History, a husband “could force sex upon [his wife], beat her, and imprison her in the family home, while it was she who endowed him with all her worldly goods. The minute he placed that ring upon her finger he controlled any land she brought to the marriage and he owned outright all her movable property as well as any income she later earned.” The legal doctrine of coverture, which held that, as Sir William Blackstone put it in 1753, “the very being, or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage or at least is incorporated or consolidated into that of her husband,” was implemented in the Middle Ages and was not fully dismantled in America until the late twentieth century. Until 1974, women were frequently required to bring their husbands with them while applying for a credit card. Until the eighties, legal codes in many states specified that husbands could not be held responsible for raping their wives.

  Part of my aversion to getting married is my sense of incompatibility with the word “wife,” which—outside the Borat context, which is perfect, and will be perfect forever—feels inseparable from this dismal history to me. At the same time, I understand that people have been objecting to inequality in marriage for centuries, from both the inside and the outside of the institution, and that, in recent years, what it means to be a wife, a married partner, has changed. In the summer of 2015, in Obergefell v. Hodges, the Supreme Court guaranteed same-sex couples the right to marry each other—a decision that validated
the relatively recent conception of marriage as a mutual affirmation of love and commitment, and also reconfigured it as an institution that could be entered into on gender-equal terms. “No union is more profound than marriage, for it embodies the highest ideals of love, fidelity, devotion, sacrifice, and family,” reads the final paragraph of the decision. “In forming a marital union, two people become something greater than once they were….It would misunderstand these men and women to say they disrespect the idea of marriage. Their plea is that they do respect it, respect it so deeply that they seek to find its fulfillment for themselves. Their hope is not to be condemned to live in loneliness, excluded from one of civilization’s oldest institutions. They ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law.” On the Friday that the decision was handed down, I’d planned on staying in, but then the news electrified me with such happiness that I went out, and ended up at the club on mushrooms. I remember standing still, people dancing all around me, my heart like Funfetti cake, reading the decision’s final paragraph on my phone screen over and over as I cried.