Why get married?

Some easy-to-answer questions less than a week out from my wedding day

Recently, in one of our last sessions before our wedding this coming Friday, our couples therapist asked Ben and me why we’re getting married. A simple question, one that I expected to answer without much thinking. But as I sat there, I realized that beyond “love,” I didn’t have an answer.

It’s interesting — in all of the time I’ve spent writing about love, and sex, and dating, and partnerships, I’ve never really taken time to examine the “why” behind it all. Why I would open my apps with waning optimism after a bad date, or stick in relationships that weren’t serving me, or drop Valentine’s Day cards signed “your secret admirer” on my crush’s desk in fourth grade.

So, after that seemingly-obvious question from a woman I paid to ask me these seemingly-obvious questions, I took some time to consider it.

When I was young, I remember squirreling away in the corner of my library and tearing through books of old fairytales. The drama and the romance of these stories was always magical to me, a girl who wanted a huge, exciting life. I thought love would provide that for me. But looking back, I also can see a girl who just wanted a buddy. My family had moved when I was nine, and I had trouble fitting in to my new school. Love, to me, seemed to be the answer to having someone you could always rely on: a person who you liked being with, and who liked being with you, and who liked all of the same things as you, and wanted to hang out all the time.

And in fact, when I was single, and I would always say that I wasn’t looking for a husband. Instead, I’d say that I was looking for a partner. That distinction has always been incredibly important to me. As I aged out of my starry-eyed youth and entered the dating world, I never saw myself as striving for marriage, but I always felt the tug toward partnership. I once read that the reason why so many humans feel the pull toward partnership is because we feared being forgotten. Having a partner means having someone to bear witness to your life, and having the privilege of bearing witness to theirs. I liked the idea of having someone else in the room whose eyes I could catch, as if to say, “are you seeing this, too?”

In that way, I’d say the impulse toward coupling is similar to the reasons why I write. It’s a flag in the ground. Proof positive that I was here.

So then, why are we getting married? Why not just remain committed partners? The question has bubbled up as we’ve been planning, especially when I’m penning a particularly feminist bit of writing. I’ve consumed so many words from so many different sources who say that marriage is a bad deal for women. That women who are unmarried are happier than women who are married. I’ve spent a good chunk of my time in New York untethered, and I know I could do it happily for the rest of my life. And yet, here I am, absolutely thrilled to be signing up for a life alongside this one man.

Before I met Ben, I reasoned that marriage was an important part of the process because it was binding — it meant that the other person was forced, in a way, to work on something with you. (Anxious attachment, my dear old friend.) This was obviously attractive to me, because I felt like there was no other way to make a person stay. I had to somehow work my magic and trick them into being legally bound to me before they realized the mess of insecurity and questioning that I was. Otherwise, what did I have to offer that would make them want to stick around? “If you’re not married, they can easily leave,” is something that I’ve heard parroted over and over again in my life. And although it was never spoken, I interpreted the last part of that sentence to be “because why else would they stay?”

I feel lucky that so much of my inner searching lead me to the conclusion that the parts of myself I used to feel I had to hide were more valuable to me than a man who made me feel like I needed to shut them away. I eventually chose my whole self alone over parts of myself in a couple, and reasoned that if I never found a partner, at least I had myself to lean on when times were tough.

This is why I will always repeat the lesson that you should refuse to settle for anything less that what makes you feel 100% you. I held out for someone who amplified that feeling of wholeness. Instead of feeling like a trap, marriage now feels like a kind of freedom. I feel more empowered to be myself because someone loves me as that person. You don’t need to love yourself in order to find a parter. Sometimes, we need another person to point out the bits of ourself that we couldn’t see before that make us inherently lovable.

I turned the question on to Ben after our session. It turns out, we’d reached similar conclusions:

“How do you promise something? Whether it’s spiritually or cosmically, the marriage, the ceremony — it just feels more like making a promise to yourself and this other person which deepens the experience. If you commit to something, commit to working on something, the whole thing just feels deeper. There is a benefit to performing the ritual. But I also look at you, and us, and our relationship and I just keep thinking about integrity, as in wholeness. The marriage for our relationship just makes the whole thing feel wider, more enriching, more rewarding. I feel more free to just be me.”

The reason I am going through with this ritual is so that I can stand in front of 170 people who have witnessed Ben and me at various points in our individual lives and declare that we are now, officially, in this together. That public declaration, the ritual involved in it, the gathering of both of our lives — that is important to me. We could have just remained committed partners forever. But he is the first person with whom I feel a sacred connection that is worthy of this kind of pause and reflection. I don’t think everyone needs a ceremony to feel this. But I am a person who wants one.

But also, at the end of the day, I just fucking love love. I love our love. I love being in a partnership. I have loved every twist and turn on our journey, even the tough ones, and I can’t wait to see what comes next. I love that we found each other later on, when we were both independent people, and that we chose to combine our lives in this way. All I have ever wanted was this kind of love, and I held out for it, and I found him, and he’s everything I could have asked for, and he loves me back. I sometimes used to doubt that this would happen for me, and now it has.

There. That’s it! That’s really how I feel, and I’ve been afraid to say it out loud out of fear of jinxing it, or coming off as a loved-up chick going on about her relationship, or cheapening it in some kind of way. But I am in love. I didn’t think I would ever be in love like this — to want to commit to a person in this way and have him want to commit to me.

That has been the thing I’ve written about most, agonized over, questioned for most of my life. And now it’s here. And I am going to celebrate it.

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A little programming update — I will be taking a little time off for the wedding. Next week’s send will be the first in a new interview series I’m starting, called The Dish, and then I will be taking the weekend after off. I will return on July 13 with a little wedding recap, and then it will be back to your regularly scheduled, neurotic content.

But most importantly, thank you all for your love, support, and well wishes. I can’t believe that one little article I wrote eight years ago would be the seed that grew into this gorgeous, vibrant community. I feel so lucky to have such an incredible group of people to commune with. It’s such a blessing, and I am thankful for it every day.