That my husband, Reed, was texting the other woman just three days into our honeymoon wasn’t surprising. He had been falling in love with her for months. What was surprising was that we had gone through with our wedding despite the mounting evidence that our relationship might collapse under the weight of everything we had been piling onto it for the past year.
Now, watching Reed on the patio of our rental apartment in Spain smiling at the thought of a woman who was not me, I wanted to smash his glass of red wine into the ground and hurl his phone into the Mediterranean.
Instead, I headed to the kitchen, slid to the floor and buried my head in my hands.
In the months leading up to the wedding, friends and family had asked, gently, if we still planned to go through with it, “given everything.” Mere weeks before, Reed’s brother had taken him aside and told him to hold off on signing the marriage certificate “just in case.”
The tumult of the last year had dizzied us. Around the time of our engagement, we had opened our relationship. Although we had done our research into ethical nonmonogamy, we had still evaded, sulked and sabotaged. We had been reckless, inconsiderate and withholding.
Watching Reed fall in love with another woman, I leaned into my antidote, which was casual sex with a rotating cast of men and women. Despite our best intentions to build a more flexible, durable relationship, we had strained ours to its breaking point.
Now, days into our honeymoon, I contemplated bringing our love story to its end, which meant I found my thoughts drifting back to its beginning.
Reed and I met in college. He was a green-eyed country boy who played the banjo and ate kelp straight from the sea. He caught my attention with his laugh.
Walking across campus, I would catch myself grinning whenever I thought of Reed, which was constantly. It didn’t take long for me to tell Reed I loved him. After I did, the same words tumbled from his mouth as if he had been holding them in for weeks.
After a year of dating, Reed suggested we write letters to each other, bury them beside a tree on a bluff overlooking a nearby cove, then read them in a year.
The letters were not the reason we stayed together for another year, and another decade after that. They only encouraged us to consider all that had led up to writing them and everything we hoped would follow.
By our honeymoon, I had prepared myself for our relationship’s seemingly inevitable end. Entering nonmonogamy, my biggest fear was that Reed would fall in love with someone else and leave me. Now, that seemed like a real possibility. Slumped on the kitchen floor of our rental, I thought about how, for the past month, our marriage license had sat on our dining room table — white, ghoulish — like something made to haunt.
Before we left for Spain, a friend had asked me if we had signed our marriage license.
“Not yet,” I said.
“Maybe wait until after your honeymoon,” she advised. “It’s a lot easier to send in that paperwork than it is to undo it.”
But as a person who likes to check things off my to-do list, I dropped the signed license into the mailbox the day before we departed.
It was the officialness of marriage that had always chafed against my beliefs about modern partnership. By the time we got engaged, Reed and I had been together more than 11 years. And though we saw ourselves as more of an old married couple than friends who had been married for a fraction of that time, we often fielded questions about our commitment.
People pressured us to make our bond official, as if marriage was the only way to legitimatize our love. Reed and I were skeptical of such a reductive view. We felt chosen by each other rather than bound. We knew our love was real even if it wasn’t legally recognized.
Still, the pressure built. Being the woman, I felt it more acutely. There was something destabilizing about being asked repeatedly whether I thought Reed might propose, as if the question weren’t about whether Reed and I loved each other but whether he loved me enough.
The question scraped against a specific insecurity that can get lodged inside women who are told that our worth is tied to our marriageability. Despite my feminist value system, I even had begun to conflate being married with being lovable. Eventually, I told Reed I thought we should make it official.
We did want to celebrate. We had loved each other for more than a decade, which felt like something to dance about, yet we wondered if there was a way to dodge convention. We considered rebranding the event as a “celebration of love,” which felt truer to our goal, but worried about friends and family not prioritizing such an event if we didn’t call it a wedding.
At the start of our honeymoon, we had playfully referred to the trip as our “luna de miel,” our moon of honey. By the end, we were calling it our “luna de hell.” The first night, gripped by food poisoning, I emptied myself of the six-course meal Reed had cooked. Our next rental apartment stunk of rotting fish. Stormy skies and a roiling sea kept us from lounging on beaches or splashing in the water. We ventured to the hot tub only to find it ice-cold.
These were inconveniences we could appreciate, though. We could raise a glass of wine and applaud the universe’s humor. The part of the honeymoon that was harder to laugh off was the feeling that this might be our last vacation together, the beginning of the end.
I could feel it the day I hiked into the mountains alone, the morning I spent sobbing at the edge of the sea. I could feel it on the plane when we held each other’s hands in silence, our palms slick with sweat.
Our honeymoon was gloomy on the grandest scale. A spectacular failure. And yet, by the time we returned from our luckless, sexless vacation, I felt surer than ever that we had made the right choice by getting married.
When people had asked if we would call off the wedding, I had told them that I still wanted to celebrate. And why not? Reed and I had been together so long, our love for each other so big, that it deserved a grand finale. After all, most rites of passage mark the completion of something: a graduation, retirement, birthday, anniversary. Weddings are an outlier, a celebration of a current love and prospective future. Wasn’t that sort of backward?
We thought: What if we marry to celebrate the successful run of a beautiful relationship? What if we go out with a bang?
We held the ceremony under a giant oak tree in highland prairie. When we kissed, our friends and family cheered, showering us with crimson and peach rose petals. We drank hard cider and ate paella and homemade pies. We danced.
After the music ended, Reed and I lay on our backs in the dewy grass and watched falling stars. I pulled my wool coat over us as coyotes howled in the distance. We stayed awake until dawn.
“I get it now,” Reed said as I lay in his arms. “I get why we needed to have a wedding.”
During the months of planning, I had only pictured the party. I had wanted to dance and to feast. The ceremony itself was a mere formality. Looking back, though, I think first about the ceremony, the two of us standing under that oak tree sharing stories about our 12 years together, our heads thrown back in laughter. It was the ceremony, not the party, that had encouraged us to go back to the beginning and remind ourselves why we were having a party at all.
After our honeymoon, we didn’t divorce. Although the year leading up to our wedding had altered our relationship, fissured it with cracks, the fundamental form remained — lovely in a different way, and more interesting. The four years since we married have been our most committed and joyful.
Why? Like digging up long-buried love letters, the wedding forced us to reflect on how important we were to each other. And once the social pressures released — to marry, to enjoy a picture-perfect honeymoon — we could ease back into doing things our unconventional (and yes, still open) way. Not to mention, the legal hassle of divorce helped to temper any discontent.
Whatever the case, it’s funny to think that wedlock, the “antiquated” rite of passage we were so reluctant to embrace, was key to saving our relationship.