Popping The Big Question

I’ve officially entered that rumored part of adulthood where everyone you know seems to be getting engaged. 

I remember being told this would happen: that there would be the era of constant weddings and then the era of constant baby showers. But it seemed like a far off reality, more fiction than fact. Something to look forward to in the next decade rather than next June.

These announcements come frequently and mostly through Instagram. These days, it feels as though every time I open the app, someone I know well (or don’t know at all) has dropped the infamous proposal post: the sparkling ring, the down-on-one-knee pose, the happily-surprised expression. Scroll down and you will see the abundance of congratulations or white-heart emojis in the comments. 

I always make sure to be a part of said abundance; I wish congrats to the happy couple. Because I mean it. And because I want them to know, even if it is on the parasocial/digital level, that someone out there is rooting for them. 

It’s a huge thing, promising someone your heart. It feels only necessary to make a big deal out of it. We should eat giant slices of cake and dance wildly and take hundreds of photos. We should choose a lavish font for the wedding invitations and consider how the flowers will be arranged in the bouquet.

We should take note of the couple, whose love softens everything. We should take note of love. All that it promises and all it mends. 

But as much as I love weddings and romance – and despite being happily married myself – I can’t help but feel as though I am watching a great party from the balcony. I’m handsomely alone, puffing on a cigarette or swirling around dark whiskey in a clear, blunt glass. I’m attempting to process something, some feeling. I just don’t quite know what it is.

I was on the phone with my friend last week; his brother was just married. We talked at length about the groomsmen, the venue, and his best man speech. This naturally segued into us discussing how a classmate of ours recently announced his engagement. And how strange it is that John is getting married; how we remember reading Shakespeare with him for an eighth grade project. How he used to take all the toppings off his pizza and only eat the saucy dough. How we all wore royal blue caps and gowns for middle school graduation, how all of it seemed so silly then and so far away now. Because now we’re all here, attending each other’s weddings. 

“It’s so weird to be old enough for this to be happening,” he said to me over the phone. “I’m not ready to feel this old.”

“We’re not that old. We’re twenty-five,” I reminded him. (Although there is likely little comfort in this; we’ve know each other since we were twelve.)

“Well, we’re getting old, then,” he replied. There was a pause before he then asked, “do you feel weird that everyone has finally caught up to you? On the whole marriage thing?”

The whooooole marriage thing.

“A little,” I laughed back, because the real answer required an amount of energy I didn’t know how to summon at that moment over the phone. It stirred up that same unspecific feeling from the party metaphor — when I’m alone on the balcony swirling my whiskey, brooding over a heavy question.

Did I feel weird? Define weird. Because it was all weird, the “whole marriage thing”: falling in love with someone from another country, getting engaged at twenty-one, committing to years of long distance. It was everything neither of us could have anticipated. It was entirely inconvenient and totally frustrating. Our feelings for each other complicated what we thought we knew for our future. Our love was in the way of everything.  

Then again, maybe love should be in the way of everything.

I don’t wish for things to happen differently. I’m glad we’re married and living in NYC. I’m glad we chose to get a king size bed and that our dining room is painted Saybrook Sage. I wouldn’t change arguing over where we left off in the Sopranos or our long, evening walks for ice cream. Marriage suits us.

I wish, however, that our engagement had been a happier experience. It was unfortunately the opposite. Our news opened up a door of backhanded comments and violating questions: was it because I was pregnant, was it because of religion, was it so he could get papers for the U.S.? Why were we even engaged, why now, what was the rush? 

Believe it or not, most people don’t seem to buy the “we love each other” thing. More humiliating was our attempt to defend that stance to people who didn’t believe in the concept of marriage in the first place.

Maybe had we been engaged now, at this more “acceptable” time of our twenties, maybe it would have been different. Maybe we could have saved ourselves some of the heartache and interrogation.

Yet another blow to our reality was when the pandemic hit a few weeks after our engagement. The borders closed. We were physically separated for a year without any answer of when we may see each other again. If you can remember those early months of the pandemic — March, April, May, June — it was filled with absolute uncertainty. All of us wondered if life would ever return to the way it was. A part of me deeply feared that maybe travel wouldn’t recover — maybe I wouldn’t ever see him again. That the whole thing had been a fucked-up dream.

It was difficult enough with us being a long distance couple. The added stress of feeling trapped, unable to close the distance we so desperately wanted to close, was the worst emotional pain imaginable. What should have been an exciting era of doting on each other as fiancés was eclipsed by circumstances we could not control. We could not move through the world together. We could not tour venues or mail our invitations. We, like much of the world, were frozen.

So we moved through our engagement with the ocean between us, keeping up with Facetime calls and text messages. Waiting, which is a kind of suffering, for the borders to open again. It was the loneliest, strangest time of my life. And it was my “engagement era.” I would not wish that misery on others.

Perhaps what I feel is envy for these new, happy couples. I don’t know their stories, and I know it’s naive of me to assume they’re not dealing with problems of their own. But for obvious reasons, I imagine their engagements being much less complicated than mine. I imagine them at vineyards or at the beach, feeling that fiancé energy buzz between their locked hands. (The fact that they can even touch each other’s hands.)

I imagine their families excitedly chatting over brunch. Everyone seems ecstatic. I imagine no one asking them if they’ve fallen pregnant or if they think they-re being scammed for a green card. No questions asked. Just happy, blind acceptance.

Maybe it’s not jealousy. Maybe what I feel is sadness. My therapist always tells me I need to make peace with the past. That I need to forgive people. That I need to work on healing my pain. 

I’m not good at these things. I admit it. I can pinpoint the exact moments of my childhood where things went wrong. They became the touchstone for how I understood reality. They became my universal truths. I let them guide me here, foolishly telling myself that maybe the trauma was good for me; it motivated me to take direction in my life. 

It’s painful, difficult, to admit that the trauma was just trauma. Because I don’t know what to do with just trauma. What was the point of any of it … if it didn’t have some kind of meaning, if it didn’t actually enrich my life or give me character or something? How are we supposed to accept that bad things happen and that’s it?

That’s the real big question. Maybe it’s why we also can’t just accept good things. Like a happy engagement — there’s gotta be a catch.

I think when we’re young, we carry our pain like a secret badge of honor. We believe we understand something about this world in light of it. We think it saves us, or we think it makes us deeper and more real. That it connects us to something larger than us and our hometowns and these people we’ve known since we were kids.

Well, at twenty-five years old, I can say I feel less real than ever. I feel like a moon jellyfish: weightless, transparent, floating. Trying to make sense of something with no brain, only nerve endings. Feeling my way through the dark. 

With the excitement of wedding bells and cake tastings behind us, my husband and I now have our lives to figure out. Quite scary. Exciting, too. So much goes into a healthy marriage. (Almost as much work as learning to speak Serbian fluently.)

We have to work to understand each other when our native languages fail us. We have to be more than language. I have to not want to kill him when he uses that terrible menthol shampoo in the shower. He has to be patient with me leaving glasses of water all over the house. 

I don’t mean to joke. But there’s no accurate way of describing it. Marriage is work. Good more often than bad.

So when asked if I feel weird now that everyone has “caught up” to me, the literal answer is no. Getting engaged shouldn’t be a competition. Although I suppose some are counting, anyway, or making snide comments about who is and who isn’t engaged. (In which case, maybe I am rolling my eyes at you and saying getting engaged is soooooo four years ago.)

But being “caught up” in an emotional sense is something else. I feel genuine happiness for others entering this special time of their life. I feel some sadness for my situation. I also feel very grateful – not to have another traumatic experience under my belt – but that people lifted me up during that period. Girls I never spoke to in high school messaged me. The family members I did not expect to reach out to me, did. My in-laws opened their arms and their homes to show their acceptance. Strangers emailed me. Wholesome Youtube comments found me. This blog grounded me.

I learned how to move through it. I learned what it meant to find a support system. 

At my old age, I want to take this energy and support the current women in my life who are preparing to walk down the aisle. I want them to feel pure joy, I want them to get what they want for their big day.

I want them to put love in the way of everything.

Your American Girl,

Kasey