2025 Week 6: Will You Unmarry Me?

2 weeks to the wedding:

On Saturday night we had dinner with Jon's family. He went over to their house while I walked home with my throat burning. A couple of hours later he came home and found me weeping into my laptop. He asked me what was wrong and I said "I don't want to be a married person. I can't accept it."

Then we had (yet another?) 3-hour talk about disentangling. 

It's not the usual stuff like "I don't feel the same" or "you've changed". The problem is that although we supposedly went to ROM as a joke, we have allowed the legacy of marriage to corrupt the relationship dynamic. It's like finding yourself on an escalator you didn't consciously get on, and because the escalator is so long, you missed all the floors you wanted to visit. I just want to get off the escalator.

In the Before Times, I cheerfully thought of marriage as merely a regulatory bit o' nothing, just a formality to get out of the way so that we could buy a home and install pets, books, and jute rugs. 

But after we moved in, people started giving us all sorts of Meaningful Looks. Everyone knows that only married couples can co-own an HDB flat; ergo, we must be married. Then came the nauseating comments: "when's the wedding?" and "do you need a plus one for your husband?". I have the impulse to scream FUCK OFF to everyone, but it's not exactly right. Some of these people are my best friends, my kin, and they mean well.

When I picture our marriage I see it as 2 free individuals dying and getting reborn as a single socioeconomic unit. Subsumed by the monolithic power of the Married Couple. 

A lot of the things we talked about and meant to explore were ignored. The open relationship, the sketches for our separate rooms, things like that. We collectively suppressed impulses that could disrupt the arrangement. And we mind-melded into a single unit. It feels like we became each other's appendages. Maybe it's codependency? 

I guess things have been changing more recently because of HRT and me wanting to see someone else. At first I felt guilty for being disloyal, but after processing that, I realised there are layers and layers of buried emotion. Feelings of anger and resentment, feeling cheated of years of self-development, romance, adventure, growth, all because I conformed to these unspoken rules about what a Married Woman can and cannot do. 

I thought it was just me, but then Jon said that he, too, suppressed some of the things he wanted to do because he thought he "should" focus on us. I found that incredibly sad. I didn't think we would be the couple who pretended with each other. What happened there!??

I'm tired of acting like a cishet married couple, "husband and wife" (gag). I just played along because it's easier not to fight it. Plus the status confers so much privilege. In work and day-to-day settings, just telling people you have a "spouse" makes you instantly respectable and trustworthy. Is that what they call passing privilege? It can make you forget who you are.

I don't remember the last time I was ever this honest with myself and with someone else. (We even worked out the protocol for bringing boys home? Ha.) 

And it was funny how we both had the same idea about the wedding: it would be our last hurrah, the last time we put on a show as "husband and wife". After that we formally release each other from all prior obligations and expectations. So. An unwedding?


After coming back from Baguio I had a fever, so after I wrote the blog post I just slept. Spent a couple of days entertaining Patrick, our housesitter, before he left. I spent some time sorting out the employment related stuff; starting next Monday so that's another thing to process. Went bra-shopping, did a whole bunch of sewing, hung out with parents. 

Emotionally, I've been a hot mess too. My crush has developed into full-fledged limerence. I made one attempt to subdue it with sheer willpower, but completely failed there. In fact it backfired pretty badly and I ended up on Instagram again after 6 years away. Have deleted the evil app now, but I probably should have spent that time reading Capital or Life of Johnson. 

Although the crush led to much-needed relationship maintenance (see above), it still has not gone away even after. It's really bothersome. At best, it inspires me to write Industrial Revolution erotica; at worst, I use it to torment myself. I find a little solace reading bits of Kafka, since he, too, was a nutter:

“I read the letter once, put it aside, and read it again; I pick up a file but am really only reading your letter; I am with the typist, to whom I am supposed to dictate, and again your letter slowly slides through my fingers and I have begun to draw it out of my pocket when people ask me something and I know perfectly well I should not be thinking of your letter now, yet that thought is all that occurs to me—but after all that I am as hungry as before, as restless as before, and once again the door starts swinging merrily, as though the man with the letter were about to appear again. That is what you call the "little pleasure" your letters give me.” (Letters to Felice)


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