Plus-one
A small story:
“How long have you two been married?” another person asks. This baffles me. Is that interesting to most people? I find it fairly dull but I have been told my lead-off question: Do you have pets? Tell me every single thing about them, is…”odd and off-putting.”
I answer the question, because I am polite.
“We’ve been together over two decades.”
More people than you might think see the linguistic shading.
“Oh, you two aren’t - I mean, it’s fine, you’re just as married as any other cou– I mean, you aren’t AND THAT IS FINE...my sister’s gay.”
I have no idea why our not having played “Mother, May I?” with church and state makes people start to babble. Maybe they think I’m judging theirs. In fact, I love weddings. I’ll discuss “Radicchio: played-out as an appetizer ingredient or retro fun?” for hours with a friend.
Maybe it’s that they have an idea of what someone who lives in sin looks like, and she’s not a small unremarkable person whose most noticeable personality traits are punctuality and a creepy enthusiasm for deviled eggs.
Maybe this was supposed to be small talk while the cater-waiter refilled the deviled eggs.
Consort and I are not married. This is all on me. Consort would be perfectly fine with being married because he is not the weird one. I am the one who knew from an early age that a) I wanted a kid, b) ideally, I wanted a partner, c) marriage made my hyperventilate.
I would imagine walking down the aisle towards my beloved and looking into eyes of some guest’s plus-one and thinking, “Damn it, it was him, this plus-one, and not that poor sap smiling at me. Perhaps I can just slide out the side d-oh, we’re married.”
I also look terrible in white.
I sensed I could be very happy and stay unfailingly by the side of the right person but feared the anarchist who resides in the garage apartment in my soul would, upon being told to behave itself, revolt.
I like an orderly life. I like not hurting a wonderful man who loves me dearly. I stay monogamous and allow the inner anarchist to periodically decree I’m having a pint of ice-cream for breakfast.
For years, Consort would say we wouldn’t get married until marriage equality was the law of the land. After a while, I gently asked him to stop, as I both dearly wanted friends to have that right to marry and dearly didn’t want to have to do it should the legal winds shift over time, as they did. Mixed emotions aggravate my TMJ.
Two decades is long time. We’ve seen each other through grad school, start-ups, birth of a child, death of parents. Two days ago, he fixed the oven door on a 1948 stove which weighs more than the earth. Neither of us should have been moving it, and yet we did.
We then argued for ten minutes about whether the cooked pork in the fridge was still good. He ate it. I briefly wished he’d get a little sick that night. Nothing terrible, just enough so I could mutely bask in my rightness.
(He suffered no ill effects)
I watched him eat his ancient-pork taco and noted, as I periodically do, “You know, technically there’s nothing stopping us from dating others.”
Consort chewed, swallowed and said, “Legally, sure. But I don’t have as much fun with anyone else.”
I sighed and said, “Me, neither.”
We smiled at each other, then turned in sync as we heard a noise from the other room.
The cat was up the Christmas tree again, and removing her is a two-person job.
