You reach an age when calling someone your “boyfriend” begins to feel icky, if not downright obscene. Mark and I got together in our early 20s—a friend introduced us at a pub, in a way that seemed possible then. We moved into a very tiny flat above a chicken shop, then a slightly larger one in the same block. The walls and floors were painted black—we learned quite soon after moving in that the previous tenant had been a Satanist sex worker, award-winning too.
Friends moved into neighboring flats. For a while, it felt like a merry kind of commune—we’d bring drinks down to the shared garden, and dip in and out of each other’s kitchens for eggs. This was the flat where we fought and made up and repainted the walls and, 10 or so years later, had our first child. These were the things that happened, the architecture of a relationship within which our life together expanded. We bought a house and moved closer to our families in time to, at the beginning of lockdown, have a second child. Then, one day in spring, we woke up and realized it was our 20th anniversary. The trick to staying together, it turned out, was 20 years of every morning silently agreeing not to break up.
Films suggest that the real stuff of life happens before a person settles down, all the romance and adventures and growing and failing, leaving little room to imagine what on earth happens next. The doors are closed on the relationship, the focus blurs. The truth is, plenty happens beneath the warm duvet of domesticity. Love letters are hidden in text messages about the heating. Whole crises play out in looks thrown silently across a dinner table. Instead of moonlit conversations in Paris, after 20 years you discover new things about each other while stacking the dishwasher in pajamas. The stakes remain as high as ever, higher if you count the children, but the field has flattened and shortened to the size, perhaps, of a suburban lawn.
The first time we discussed getting married, it didn’t happen because I didn’t want to. Marriage, I patiently explained, sat firmly at the intersection of patriarchy and capitalism. It was a threat to us all, both politically and personally—why institutionalise ourselves for no reason, why willingly buy into a tool of the state? And, as a heterosexual couple, wasn’t living in sin our final, sole, tiny act of rebellion? I didn’t want to be a “wife”: reduced, demoted. “OK!” Mark replied and on we went. Our relationship continued, growing old enough eventually to have left home and had children of its own, and our shared roots burrowed deeper. I started writing a weekly column for The Observer and, as we entered our 40s, every time I described him as my “boyfriend” (babyish) or “partner” (aspirational lesbian), we would each slightly wince. One day I interviewed a queer historian who had written a book about marriage, which taught me how the institution has reshaped itself so much over the years that a wedding often means different things to different people—sometimes even those living in the same house. Halfway through the pandemic, our new baby working as a kind of clock, my thoughts on the thing started to change.
I didn’t realize they were changing until, in 2022, my sister got ill. She and her partner had been idly arranging to get married when a cancer diagnosis violently shattered their plans. On a brief break from hospital, they rushed to the local town hall—I watched their wedding via FaceTime. And what with all the love and pain, something in me softened—or maybe decayed. Twenty years after our first conversation about it, I started discussing marriage with Mark again. This time he was the one who was less keen. It wasn’t so much that I’d been particularly convincing with my original argument, more that he wondered… what was the point now? We had committed to each other 10 times over, did we really need to spend the money formalising it? Probably not, I agreed. But… maybe?
