The Words We Say
When you get married after seven years and two cats, will anything change?
After a lot of jawing, hemming-and-hawing, and back-and-forth, we finally settled it in November: in a private dinner with just my parents and sister on January first, 2014, we would sign the paperwork that made us husband and wife.
It took a while to get here. I impressed my now-husband over a pool table in a Santa Barbara dive bar back in 2006 — I played the best game of my life, never to be repeated — and we have been together ever since. We even signed up for domestic partnership a while back — paid a notary, sent in the paperwork, even toasted each other with cheap sparkling wine, only to discover a couple of months later when my supposed-partner went to sign me up for his health insurance that, in fact, all our officialdom was not so official after all. Straights are either married or unmarried in California — no in-between (caveat: unless one of you is over 65, which we still aren’t). But we’ve already had the fights about dishes, made up again very affectionately, hashed out our stances on work-life-balance, and decided that we will be trying for extremely adorable café au lait babies before too long. The signing (again) of (actually) legal paperwork, and making promises to family and each other was a continuation of what we’d already put into practice. We have kittens, and a very nice coffee table. We’re baffled about the need for a registry since we already have a kitchen full of copper pots and slow cookers. What, if anything, did our decision to marry signify?
A clear November night meant I was shivering in Napa, where we’d headed after a lovely day of cruising through vineyards in Sonoma. My then-fiancé and I walked along the river while we talked through, again, what this marriage would mean. Is it a cementing of a love already in place? Is it a promise for the future? Is it the moment of subsuming personal needs into the collective? Did it mean we’d finally combine our bookshelves?
We have the extra complication of straddling cultures and nations — his immediate family lives on three continents; mine’s mostly within an hour drive of San Francisco. In order to satisfy ourselves and our families, we had agreed right after we got engaged in April of last year that we would have a traditional Hindu ceremony in India, following thousands of years of tradition, watched by thousands of guests, in early 2014. A couple months later, we would host a delightfully ragged party here, with dear friends and family hanging out on hay bales, huddled around firepits, having your typical fog-bound coastal California soiree. But neither of those wonderful, communal events holds any legal standing, and neither of us hew to any religion. So as our engagement counted down, I was struggling with needing a sense of transformation, of renewal, of change that several events spread over months just did not offer. I felt that we needed a deciding moment to mark our re-naming — from self-declared partners to husband and wife.
I finished a dissertation on Irish poetry early last year, and I think my own love of symbolism and belief in the power of language demand that meaning be attached to what would otherwise be an arbitrary action or sound. J. L. Austin said that not only does language have the power to represent the world, but performative language in fact alters our world; there are words that not only describe, but actually affect us, moving us into a new world that only exists after the right words have been said. The power of pronouncing a couple married is such that according to the law in California, the officiant must say aloud that by the power vested in them by the state, they declare the couple husband and wife. If they skip over that final declaration, the marriage ceremony is invalid.
So we decided (meaning my fiancé threw up his practical, scientist hands and said, “I don’t care. You pick. It doesn’t matter.” And I said “Of course it matters! Everything matters!”) that in order to satisfy the state — and my — need for definition, we would hold each other’s hand as my internet-ordained father pronounced the words California says count, and we’d sign the paper as the sun set on January 1, 2014. We chose the first because it marks the whole year as our year of marriage, neatly wrapping up the problem of multiple events. We also chose it to simplify the multiple anniversary dates I was already panicking about trying to remember.
It all sounded grand — a nice clean start. But in early December, I came to a final, very difficult decision to leave my job at a small publishing company. Two weeks later, I was gone. I loved the work and the people I worked with, but the support needed to make this young company a success had not been forthcoming from the real folks in charge. I had started working as an editor while I was still finishing my Ph.D., so the shock of “what next?” that usually should follow someone handing you a diploma was softened. Now, all of a sudden, I found myself in the position of newly unemployed new wife, starting 2014 from scratch. And I am still so, so afraid of this yawning, open space that could be endless possibility or perpetual disappointment. I have never been unemployed before. I have never not known where I was going. Until April of last year, I had never not been in school. I was always planning a particular future, full of books and intellectual discussion, and I have had that, partly. But my new husband and I had long talks during our engagement about what we can do, financially and otherwise, to contribute to our marriage and our future, and me working part-time, on a contingent basis as I have been, is not the way. So he is supporting me, and I am trying not to resent that, as we begin our first year of marriage. And I am trying to figure out how to be a writer and book-lover who makes money.
I am reinventing myself as wife, and as worker. I’m unbound by the plans I thought I had in place, yet bound to work alongside a partner to the benefit of our emerging family. These first months have seen me stewing in my own head, assessing who I am now that all the signifiers of my identity have been shed. Somehow, I must show my husband that he can depend on me, even as I am more dependent on him than I have ever been.
As 2014 began, I had all the significance I could possibly want. The first of the year marked a reinvention like none I’ve ever undergone. But one thing I promised as my family witnessed our words is to always recognize that we are heading into the unknown together. We’ll both carry the weight of making decisions that change both our lives. We’ll be carrying each other.
