Eloping in the Pandemic
In October, I eloped.
E, my Boshemia editor, asked if I wanted to write about my wedding after seeing the pictures and stories of the day all over my social media. I do. All I want to talk about these days, since the day we met, is my spouse, our union, and our love. The desire comes up against another impulse, though, to shield this relationship in ways I never cared to shield others.
E and I became writing acquaintances, and later real friends, because I published a chapbook of queer Appalachian poetry in 2018. Nearly every poem in that chapbook was titled “this is how two women have sex.” Some of them were about as subtle and nuanced as you can expect with that central tenant. I even used people’s real names and real experiences in a barely poeticized version of my first three years out as a queer person. While I was an undergraduate student, I trotted out my crowd pleaser at open mic nights, a nonfiction piece turned burn book I called “27 Love Letters,” in which I roasted every man I had dated, loved, hated, or hurt in the three years prior. It was a hit because it was unkind and painfully honest, laying bare the grievances many of my friends and I had against our ex boyfriends, they guys we saw sometimes, the men who had rejected us. In lieu of therapy or any self-worth in my early twenties, I resorted to the literary equivalent of standing naked in the street, screaming and begging to be seen.
Some of my favorite writers of nonfiction and autofiction write sex and love into their books. I published poetry about my spouse, all written in the first flush of our relationship. But I never wanted to be Joan Didion asking my spouse to proof an article in which I ponder divorce, nor did I want to be Maggie Nelson, turning my spouse’s gender and body over in my hand like a puzzle to solve with the reader. My spouse loves me, but didn’t sign up to have their life, where our lives meet and overlap, put out for the world to consume.
I’ve been thinking about our wedding, and how unconsumable it was. We eloped. The pandemic helped me justify the wedding I wanted – the thought of being the center of attention for a weekend, responsible for fifty or more people having a good time, gave me hives. We had three friends, a photographer, and an officiant at our elopement. And our dog, Henry, for best man and comic relief. After, we got Thai food, had a slice of cake, and were alone in our home before ten p.m. The entire wedding cost less than a thousand dollars, less than the cost of even attending most bachelorette weekends out of town. I don’t regret this little day or that we spent more time writing our vows and spending time with our friends than we did picking tablecloths or stressing about the cost of the venue with the good light.
JL Roberts Photography, Asheville, North Carolina, USA
When I met my spouse, I was just coming off what I’ve started calling a “therapy high.” When you’re very sad and hate yourself very much, loaded with shame and self-loathing so much that you can barely look yourself in the eye, therapists tell you that you are okay until you believe them. They validate your feelings and your responses to triggers. They make you make peace with whatever version of yourself is present at the time in order to keep you alive long enough to actually work on yourself. I had been in that kind of therapy for a couple of years and was extremely at peace (some might say complacent) with the histrionic, petty, broken person I had grown into. I am a moody person who experienced compounding gender and sexual traumas in my teens and early twenties. I learned to make peace with the probably literal brain scarring all that trauma left on me, and on the psychic scarring that shows up in my daily interactions.
I treated my spouse poorly at first. I demanded a lot and didn’t give much. I wanted to date an emotionally perfect person who would accept my on-fire-garbage-can moods without complaint. I refused accountability for my actions, assuming any suggestion that I had hurt someone else was manipulation on their part, having survived multiple abusive relationships in which I was legitimately gaslit and manipulated. How broken I was, to react to hurting someone’s feelings with suspicion and fear of their hurt. My spouse met a deeply wounded and self-assured twenty-six-year-old. How they saw through it all, I’ll never know.
In their vows, my spouse called me “a spitfire.” With a new therapist, I have tried to channel my incandescent rage for good in the world. Or at least, I have release valves. My spouse is the kindest person I have ever met who, loudly and frequently, advocates for change and highlights inequities in their workplace and field. I’ve met my match in righteous indignation. It’s one of the first reasons I loved them, this big-hearted anger, this fighting spirit.
On top of a mountain, wrapped in fog, our first look: I wore a knee-length lace dress with an open back and sleeves, holding a bouquet of very expensive flowers. My spouse had not seen me in my dress. On first look, they beamed, laughed, and cried, a perfect response. In that moment, I felt seen and loved fully just for who I was, standing in front of them. We set our ceremony up assuming they would cry, and I would be too stressed to show emotion. Among the trees, soft autumn light all yellows and oranges, I sobbed while they read their vows. I sobbed during the poem we picked, our shared favorite “Desiderata.” I sobbed as my spouse repeated the ring vow and placed the wedding band I had picked out on my finger. I felt so in love that I wondered if my head would float off my body, if my skin would explode with love. My spouse was so happy they bounced, jittery and excited, from foot to foot. We are so different in how we show our feelings. We both show our feelings so much.
The first time I saw my spouse, on Tinder, I was filled with an inexplicable knowing, my body relaxing into surety and relief. I shared their profile with a friend with the caption, “Look at my wife,” before we matched. I remember knowing we would be married, an incredible knowing because I never wanted to get married.
Once, during a breakup, my best friend (a lesbian), exasperated at having the same conversation four times in a single weekend, demanded, “Can you really see yourself marrying a man?” My pansexuality, now, a footnote because I choose it to be so, monogamously coupled. I fell in love with my spouse, who is not a man, without gender on my mind. But no, I couldn’t see myself marrying a man, so I thought it would never happen. The odds were never in my favor, and all that, a numbers game for someone attracted to so few people.
Once while planning our wedding, we got on the topic of our relationship, and I asked what would have happened if we had met organically, in a group of friends, maybe, or at a conference. “I would have thought you were straight,” my spouse said, confirming what I already knew. I know we’re supposed to live in a post-appearance queer tomorrow, but I do look straight, with my long hair, minimal makeup, and teacher cardigans, no tattoos or piercings, an entirely normie get-up. I am not high femme like Instagram lesbians, not a tomboy with stick straight hair under a beanie, not anywhere close to butch or quirky cottagecore. It’s why I pursued my spouse immediately – I knew they would never make the first move, assuming I was looking for a third or window shopping for compliments on gay Tinder.
Our wedding didn’t mention queerness. It didn’t need to – we were standing right there. All three of our guests were queer Southerners, too, glamorously adorned and showering us with just enough helpful love to make the day feel special. Our relationship isn’t queer except it’s all queer, the air around us is queer, the house is queer, our love is queer, meaning nothing is overwhelmingly, singularly queer about us.
I thought I was broken for a long time. My public roasting of men I interacted with belayed a deep ambivalence toward them; I felt no romantic attraction toward men. When I started dating women, I picked poorly, because I also had no framework for a healthy relationship. And back to men again, with a new “pansexual” label, I had done no work on myself in my queer journey but still wondered why my relationships were bad, why I was still in these relationships where I wasn’t seen or heard and I couldn’t see or hear anyone else, either. To my therapist, once, I admitted that I liked to date disasters – the married woman, the alcoholic in active use who fleeced me for beer money, the thirty-something manchild living in squalor for no reason but his own laziness – to feel more in control. I liked to be better than the people I dated. I liked when they needed me.
My spouse doesn’t need me. They fixed themself before I came along. Maybe that’s part of why I refuse, even here, to use their background as part of my own story – they worked too hard to build themself for me to use those stories on the path to self-reflection. I also feel strongly, very strongly, a duty to protect them and our new family together. Even my byline is now a cloaking; I have a new name, which I won’t use in publishing, to add a layer between the world and me, still sometimes pulled to be seen, after years of feeling invisible, by unfurling my trauma in front of a crowd, even when I know it will not heal me.
Leading up to our elopement, I would, very softly, say every day, “We’re getting married.” The rings bought, the dress fitted, the photographer booked, all these actions brought us closer to the tiny big day. But what my spouse maybe didn’t realize, and what I barely knew myself, was how this mantra was my way to speak the day into existence, because it still felt impossible that they would marry me. That someone loves me as fiercely and fully as my spouse, that someone knows everything about me without flinching, that someone will go willingly together into every unknown season of our lives, still feels like a blessing I did nothing to deserve. I worry sometimes they will change their mind. I am only me, after all.
When I think of my wedding day, I am left most with the overwhelming emotions, wrapped in warmth and love. We went up a mountain and came down as one. I love my spouse more every day, multiplying infinity by itself again and again, embodying impossibility. I have never known what to do with happiness, but I am starting to learn.