Offbeat Bride

1. THE PRESSURE AND THE PROPOSAL

Knowing when (& whether) to say “I do”

ANDREAS AND I HAD BEEN TOGETHER FOR LESS THAN A YEAR WHEN THE questions started. I spent the afternoon of Christmas 1998 with my mother, two of my aunties, one auntie’s lesbian partner, and Andreas’s mother, Nancy. (Andreas was with his father for the holidays.) Auntie Cherie, perhaps wishing to make me squirm in front of the mother of my boyfriend, asked me whether Andreas and I planned to get married.

I stuttered through my evasive answer. “Well, we’re really committed to each other and we might have a ceremony someday to acknowledge that, but I’m not sure if we need or want the legal institution of marriage to make it official.”

There. Whew. I was committed, but we were nonconformists.

The end.

No, not the end. The three lesbians in the room all commented on the irony that Andreas and I—a straight couple who could get married—would choose not to enjoy the legal rights for which so many committed gay and lesbian couples fight. At that point, Nancy and her partner, Susan, had been together for fifteen years, and Auntie Andrea had been with her partner for seven—and yet they couldn’t enjoy spousal rights. The irony stung a little. But the idea stuck: a commitment ceremony might be okay, but marriage seemed weird to us, with our gay families and both of our sets of parents divorced.

By the time our third anniversary rolled around, my thoughts on getting married had shifted. We were basically already functioning as a married couple, so why not? I made a half-hearted attempt at a proposal. Andreas’s response felt like both an acceptance and a rejection. “Oh, of course we’ll get married,” he said. Acceptance! “I thought we decided that a long time ago.” Oh, I thought. So I didn’t need to propose at all. We’re already getting married!

Andreas wasn’t done yet, though. “But we’re not, like, getting married anytime soon, right?”

Oh. Ouch. So that was the snub: no duh we’re getting married, but what’s the hurry? It was delayed gratification with no timeline for a payoff, but I saw his point and agreed with the concept. Okay, so we’ll do it someday, but what’s the hurry? Why the rush?

Three years after that, however, it appeared that the pressure had grown to be too much. Our finances were screwed from filing taxes separately but functioning jointly. As terminal freelancers, it seemed like we never both had health insurance. And our friends and family, despite their nontraditional values, were itching for a party.

The M word and the C word—no, not that one

It all started one night at a steak house. Jerry and Sallie—Andreas’s father and stepmother—had taken us out for dinner with their friends Alan and Char. (Please disregard the irony of us, a vegetarian and a vegan, being invited to a steak house for dinner. Sometimes these little issues must be overlooked in the interest of familial relations.)

Soon, we were also trying to overlook the attentions of Char, who asked us what we thought about “the M word.” We glanced at each other with a little confusion at first. The M word? What M word? Char clucked at us. “Marriage, you guys! When are you getting married? Sallie and I are just itching to plan a wedding!”

We hemmed and hawed and tried to change the subject, reverting to our old commitment-ceremony lines and aware of the difference between the kind of wedding we would plan and the kind of wedding someone else would envision for us. I foresaw gold monogrammed napkins and a princess dress and knew it just wasn’t in the cards. We would not be cornered into a steak house shotgun wedding.

The conversation got increasingly surreal from there, with Char going on to ask us whether we’d put any consideration into “the C word.” This code-speak confounded me—the only C word I know is the one that ends with “-unt.” I have put a lot of consideration into that particular C word, but of course that wasn’t the one to which Char was referring. She meant children.

It wasn’t just Andreas’s side that started to apply the pressure. My mother had also reached a state of terminal frustration. She called me up one day to crow, “I don’t care if you two never sign any papers—it’s all bullshit anyway. I just want you to throw a party so we can give you presents and sing about how much we love you!”

Well, presents. Presents are hard to argue with, aren’t they?

Party planning to avoid party receiving

Our friends gave us very little grief, because, in keeping with typical overeducated urban coastal types, few of them were married either. Of my most immediate circle, only two close childhood friends got married when I was in my twenties, and only one of Andreas’s childhood friends had tied the knot. Among our circle of aging ravers, intellectuals, music festival freaks, hippies, and geeks, we were one of the longer-standing relationships by years—our friends sure as hell weren’t going to pressure us to get married when they were all busy dealing with their internet-dating snafus, hidden porn-collection crises, and catastrophic, caterwauling breakups.

But the pressure kept mounting. The most bothersome thing to me was that almost no one ever gave Andreas any shit about our unmarried state. It seemed that, as the owner of the ovaries, I was also the de facto prewedding planner. Because I didn’t have facial hair, I was obviously the one who was picking out crystal for the registry and poring over bridal magazines, trying to decide which tiara I would wear once we were finally engaged and he gave me that big ol’ rock. People sometimes harassed the both of us, but very rarely did someone corner Andreas to ask whether we were getting married.

The whole thing gave me the grits. Sure, I might be the girl, but that didn’t mean I was the one who was dreaming of the ribbon-tied rose topiary that would be at the center of the white-cloth buffet tables.

Then again, maybe I was. I really wanted to get married, but not because I’m the one with the boobs—because I’m the one who thinks about health insurance. In our relationship, we had very well-defined roles: I was the vice president of logistics; he was the CEO of emotional support. He inherited a little bit of the absent-minded-professor syndrome, while my brain loves keeping track of the little details. I, meanwhile, can be moody and foul-tempered at times, while Andreas remains compassionate, supportive, and reassuring even in the worst of emotional storms. We balanced out well.

As vice president of logistics, it then fell under my jurisdiction to realize that we were both getting older and that having no health insurance was starting to be a bigger risk—a risk that separately we couldn’t afford to surmount. If we were married, only one of us would have to have a real job at any given point, and we’d both have health care. Alternately, if we were paying for our own insurance, it would be cheaper as a married couple. These pragmatic, nonromantic reasons were what pushed our gushy sentimental affections over the edge to legal union.

That and my mother. Ever persistent with her “party and presents,” she had called me in January 2004 suggesting that, because we seemed to be lagging in getting married, she wanted to throw us her own party. “In honor of your relationship,” she explained.

“Sort of like an engagement party?” I asked her. “You know, we are getting married someday, so we’re technically sort of, like, semi-engaged.” My mother was satisfied with the semi-engagement-party concept, and so she asked me to talk to Andreas about it and see what he thought.

The CEO of emotional support wasn’t sold on the idea. “I don’t want to go to a party about us that’s all planned by your mom,” Andreas explained. “If there’s going to be a party about us, I want that to be our party.”

Andreas had thrown a party or two in his raver heyday—one called “Teddy Bears Always Say I Love You” and its sequel, “No Shoes & You Have to Smoke in the Kitchen.” He knew a bit about the importance of theme and setting in the throwing of a good party. I was the consummate hostess myself—after all, had we not met at a party, one of my drunken tumblings around my apartment?

It should be known that my mother has thrown a lot of parties in her time, but her parties are called “rituals” or “gatherings,” and they usually involve a sweat lodge, a campfire, and hand percussive instruments. They’re great, profoundly touching events that have resulted in the formation of a cohesive community over the years.

But let’s be clear: these are not our like-minded folk. Not all of them, anyway. Certainly there’d be some crossover between the people my mother would invite and the people we would invite. But if there was going to be a party, it was going to be our party, damnit. Not a steak-house wedding! And not one of my mom’s “gatherings”!

So Andreas rejected his future mother-in-law’s idea for a party. But don’t feel sorry for her. I’m positive it was exactly what she wanted us to do. By pushing our rebellious, sassy asses, she totally forced our hand.

We would do it! We would throw our own party—so there!