More Perfect Union How I Survived the Happiest Day of My Life

1 Welcome to Wedding Land Marry your son when you will and your daughter when you can.-- French proverb Here is the difference between a twenty-eight-year-old man telling his parents he has just become engaged and a thirty-year-old woman doing the same: When Steven called his parents, they said something along the lines of "Really? Well, okay. Whatever makes you happy." When I called my father, he said, "Well what do you know. It's about fucking time." "Yes, thank God I'm off your hands," I said. Daughter successfully married off. Check. He then told me that I sounded like one of those girls I'd been making fun of for the past few months, giddy and excited that someone would actually want to marry her. "I do not," I insisted. "It's just cool that I'm, like, getting married and stuff. It's weird." "You do," he said. "Maybe you don't want to admit it, but you do." From my mother, a woman whose general level of seriousness would make a two-year-old depressed, I got squeals of delight. So I did the only thing that seemed reasonable. I squealed back. I'd never really pictured myself married. My childhood fantasies had always involved either sharing a funky SoHo loft with my fabulous (undiscovered) artist boyfriend, or heroically struggling to raise my kids on my own while pursuing a high-powered career that required owning lots of designer suits. Wearing a big white dress and twirling across the floor to "A Groovy Kind of Love" had never entered into my imagination. So it had been a long and involved process to get to this point, to go from being someone who wore two worthless rings on her right hand (one bought at a flea market to commemorate a long-overdue breakup with an ex-boyfriend, the other purchased on a business trip in a moment of boredom) to one of those women I always saw on the subway lugging around glaciers on their fingers. There had been two years of friendship, two years of dating, and one year of living together before either Steven or I even uttered the word "marriage." But once spoken aloud, it was soon followed by other related words like "engagement ring," "proposal," and finally, "wedding." And then before I knew it, I was flashing my own little chunk of ice at my friends. With the ring on, my hand no longer looked like mine. It looked like it belonged to someone older, someone who lived in a sprawling Upper East Side apartment, someone who referred to herself as Mrs. So-and-so and had a nanny and a closet full of Manolo Blahniks organized by color. I found that I couldn't stop staring at this foreign entity that had taken up residence on my hand. I snuck peeks at it as I walked down the street, watching it flash in the sun, wondering how it looked in the rain, when it was overcast, when there was wind. My friends seemed a little obsessed too. "How do you feel?" asked my friend Jami, the resident rocker chick in my life, over sushi in the East Village a few days after I had officially become engaged. "Ridiculous," I told her. She grabbed my ring finger and pulled it towards her. "Let me see it one more time. I may never get this close to one of these things again." I stared at her. Jami is a woman who maintains a website detailing her sexual exploits. We used to stay out at clubs till all hours, spend Sundays lazing around Tompkins Square Park, eating bagels and peanut butter frozen yogurt, and complaining about work and men. My understanding had been that we didn't care about getting married or owning diamond engagement rings. When people we knew got married, we rolled our eyes. "You'll find the right guy," I said, suddenly the authority on how to properly trap a man into marriage. She picked up a spicy tuna roll with her chopsticks and inspected it. "You know, when I turned thirty it was fine. TSchank, Hana is the author of 'More Perfect Union How I Survived the Happiest Day of My Life' with ISBN 9780743277365 and ISBN 0743277368.