The Marriage Effect: What My Wedding Taught Me
philosophical gush from a happy marriage ☼ the phenomenal feelings of a newlywed ☼ pulling off a wedding in one month
Last week, I married the man I love. In a flurried month of planning, we managed to pull off three events: a ceremony in my favorite park in the world, a brunch in a Chilaquiles restaurant and a party on the rooftop of my first apartment in Mexico City (now inhabited by friends!). I have procrastinated writing about said wedding for two reasons: One, I have found myself in a period of wanting to do nothing, a seasonal hibernation, which—as I’ve grown older—I have learned to respect and settle into, as opposed to ignore in an attempt to reach arbitrary deadlines before the new year. Two, I was not sure how to approach writing about the wedding (Stream of blissful consciousness? Analyze the wedding as an institution?), or exactly where I wanted the writing to take me.
At first, I thought that I could list out all of the things that happened, as if to immortalize them across the public threads of the internet. I could tell the story from my experience, how it felt to stand up in front of the people I love and share how much Mijael means to me, but I think most of us already understand what a wedding is, the purpose of one and how it plays out.
Besides, I already jotted down manic notes the week after it happened in an attempt to combat the natural decomposition of memory.
What I want these words to piece together is the part of it all that I did not expect: the feeling. Perhaps not of getting married itself, but of witnessing how much we matter to each other. We often think about a wedding as a marriage of two people. White dress and black suit. Open bar and overpriced food. But what I felt, that Friday and Saturday, is that a wedding is a reaffirmation of multiple families, chosen and kin.
Seeing my closest friends from California and Mexico show up for me on a month’s notice, spending time with my family and Mijael’s family under one roof, and witnessing people from all stages of life (high school, college, adulthood—Sacramento, San Francisco, New York, Mexico City) dance, sing and laugh together meant more to me than I could have imagined. Without being too trite, everything felt perfect. Everything felt easy. Everything felt right.
The day of the ceremony, a clarity embellished my consciousness that resembled, oddly, a feeling I dawned upon during the passing of my grandmother. Pure love, but instead of being lined with grief, it was lined with hope—or belief. As I screamed with my best friends in our little apartment in Cuauhtémoc and watched the smiles of my parents glow brighter and longer than I’d ever seen before, all I could think was: Oh, this is it. This is everything. This is everything I have ever wanted and everything I will ever need.
If you think about it, a wedding is the true mirror of a funeral. All of the people we care about are in one place, except the difference is that we are still living to witness the coming together: of friends, of family, of the stories we share and the cross-cut paths of the communities we belong to. Instead of revisiting memories of our loved ones, we create them in the present day. If a funeral is a celebration of a life that ended, a wedding is a celebration of life itself—together—as we are still living.
We titled our wedding la boda chiquita under the impression that the wedding would be a small event, fifteen or so people gathering at a bar after a marriage at the civil registry. Considering the short timeline, we limited the invites to our friends living in Mexico and our closest people from home, a sure fire way to keep it chiquita. However, anyone who knows me knows that my chiquita is relative. The Aquarius nature is to make a big deal out of everything. Hence, la boda chiquita evolving into a three part experience with multiple cakes, meals and close to ninety guests in total.
As we approached the date, many of our friends joked about the name. On one hand, it was nowhere near as small as we originally intended. On the other hand, it was intimate, considering we did not have the time to invite many people outside of Mexico, nor our extended family. Though I am a firm believer of the more, the merrier and there are many people I want to share everything with, the intimacy of the wedding and the irony of the name la boda chiquita felt emblematic of a larger philosophy that I have started to step into as an adult: small moments are what constitute the big joy of life. Or: nothing about life is “small.”
The morning of the wedding, a wide smile remained laminated across my lips. I allowed myself to taste the coffee in my cup and see the joy on our family’s faces when we mouthed each other good morning. I allowed myself to melt into the music singing from my earphones as I biked to our apartment. I allowed myself to smile and scream and laugh as I breathed in the bright of the thought: I AM GETTING MARRIED!
I realize now, some days after the wedding, that I can continue to allow myself bliss. Any day of the year, I can choose to look in the mirror and smile, thinking: I AM ALIVE! I AM MARRIED TO A KIND KING! I HAVE A ROOF OVER MY HEAD! I GET TO SHARE LIFE WITH PEOPLE I LOVE! I GET TO EAT DESSERT FOR BREAKFAST! CARROT CAKE AND CONCHAS AND RED VELVET COOKIES! I GET TO FEEL THE ADOLESCENT FRUSTRATION OF LEARNING A NEW LANGUAGE. I GET TO FEEL HUNGRY AND THEN FULL AND BUZZED AND THEN LUCID. I GET TO HOLD HANDS WITH A BOY THAT I ADORE AND WALK WITH MY FRIENDS AROUND THE CITY.
It’s like: Joy is a current that we always have the option to swim in. Dive in!
A wedding is a celebration of life on a grand scale, yet we have so many opportunities to celebrate life with a grandiose glint every day of the year. Whenever we meet up with a friend or text a loved one or go out for drinks on a Friday night, we have the opportunity to celebrate each other. Whenever we wake up and stare at the ceiling, we have the opportunity to celebrate ourselves: We made it to another day!
I used to think that the best years of our lives were reserved for when our dreams crossed over to reality, for when we became the people we compared ourselves to or achieved the things we sought after with wanting hearts. Standing in the love of my family and friends reminded me that we often mistake our dreams for things when they are, in fact, people. It is a dream come true that we get to spend time with the people we love. It is a dream come true that we get to know anyone over the course of ten years, twenty years, three years or a month. It is a dream come true that we get to be ourselves.
Life is not about attaining what we want, but wanting what we have. If there is anything we should attempt to master, it is paying attention to the things we have before we reach the point where all we can do is want them again: this moment, that moment, a day with ourselves at this age, an hour picking out groceries from the supermarket with our father, our mother, our friend.
At twenty nine years old, all I really want to do is show up for the people in my life. If there is anything that my friends and family have taught me, it is how to do just that. The wedding itself was only possible because of them: the mastermind behind my outfit (Lalito), the artists who performed and DJed (Sameya, Juni, Allan, Damian, Liah, Naia), the coordination of the soundsystem (Juni), the absence of archival anxiety afforded by my dear friends who played the photographer (Lu) and videographer (Purnima), the party prep work (Antonio), the flowers and leis (our mothers), the anything-that-helps (our families) and every single one of my friends who offered to carry something somewhere or ask the bartender for more drinks or take care of something we could not take care of ourselves. My favorite part about the wedding was that it felt like an experience we stitched into life together. Having several people come up to me and say “so and so is awesome!” made me feel like we were all the bride and groom. It was a marriage for everyone.
In anticipation of the big day, I expected to be happy, to have fun and to create some core memories. I did not expect to be reinvigorated with an inspiration to live. Mijael and I engraved the words aqui and koko along the insides of our rings, meaning here in Spanish and Japanese. While there have been many moments in my life where I have wanted to escape the here, or where the now did not seem all that magnificent, I know that I will always have a reason to be here—and to want to be here—because of the people in my life. Because of Mijael, because of my parents, because of my friends, because of us all.
As I stepped into my wedding outfit, Lu’s camera surrounding me in a shower of clicks, I thought about the photographs of my parents getting married themselves, about the ethereal space between them today and the versions of them in their thirties. It struck me how quickly the seasons repeat themselves, turning frames into pastimes. Us now into us then. When the now becomes then, the only thing we will care about—all of us—is that we looked upon each other with awe. That we taught each other what it means to love. That we knew, to our cores, that the biggest and brightest parts of life were born from the smallest decisions, decisions we had at our neural tips every single day: to look life in the eyes and embrace it for all its colors. Green, blue, yellow, pink, purple, black, white.
Now back to our regularly scheduled programming! I decided to skip one edition of this newsletter due to personal events, AKA getting engaged and married in one month. With that brief hiatus, Sleepover has returned (every other Thursday). ☷
With love,
Your favorite capybara ~ AKA Travis Zane
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