Marriage has been rooted in me since I could form memories. That my purpose in life is to marry and have babies. I know that this sounds outdated and perhaps that has something to do with the fact that I was born a girl in the Soviet Union of a Jewish family, but I have spent my life alternating between the tradition of marriage and the liberal ideologies of Los Angeles that I internalized. I have often wondered if it is possible to be a good writer, an artist and be married.
At 11, she was a girl of the flowers at my cousin's wedding in Calabasas. I remember having walked down the hall with a small basket of pink petals, a couple of breasts in the size of an adult and a petrified look on my face, unable to smile even though he was a generally happy child. The horse and the car, the Kimono Bridal Vintage, the cheerful orchids, the flash, the flash of the cameras, the expectations in everyone's faces, the stressful night of sleep that no amount of Valerian root could remedy, I was not sure if all this was for me.
But loved love. He had grown up in an unhealthy dose of Disney princesses and fairy tales and the idea that One day my prince will come. I memorized the entire movie “The Notebook”. I often fantasized about going to bed in my death bed with the love of my life, hand in hand, like Noah and Allie.
In my adolescence, I flirted for hours with strangers in AIM. I connected with children in landscaping at the Century City shopping center after sharing an orange chicken bowl in Panda Express. I had boyfriends and friends with benefits and cuts from my idols: Victoria's Secret models such as Adriana Lima attached to the walls of my childhood room. I was fully released by the first Auges, overexualized and obsessed with MTV.
Then I lost my virginity to my high school girlfriend who soon became my seven -year -old boyfriend.
In a conversation that I don't remember having, my cousin asks me when I think I will marry. I respond naturally: “for 25”. Then he mocks and laughs on my face. “Yes of course”.
When I arrived at my 20 years, I had broken with my high school girlfriend with whom I had little in common, apart from the fact that we were supposed to marry. I lived alone in a study in Las Palmas, sleeping in the same room as my refrigerator. I had lots of books near my bed, a temperature work of the county government in a skyscraper in the center of Los Angeles and a current of notifications of an appointment application that illuminates my apartment at the strange hours of the night.
The marriage began to seem little practical, little cool. I was living a life that my immigrant parents considered “acceptable”, but what I really wanted was to be a writer, although I was too scared to even pronounce the fact that I was an artist at that time. I did my trade and spent my nights in adult education writing classes.
Meanwhile, I left a lot. A musician. A botanist An artist. An art writer. A co -worker enters, a photographer a decade older than me. Finally I met someone of my own age: a graphic designer of the work that I ended up for 4 and a half years.
A year in my relationship with the graphic designer, marriage began to follow us as a hungry dog. It was a lady of honor in two different weddings, with a week apart. He wore a green dress to the ground. He wore a lace dress and champagne color to the floor. I put my face with the airbrush. My lips aligned. My eyes powdered. My contoured cheeks. My hair sprinkles. It looked like a Russian girlfriend by mail. She was an inverse girlfriend by mail, born in Belarus, now American. Actually, nobody had ordered me. I had never been so different from me. My graphic designer boyfriend realized. His knees folded as he saw me dance the time and try to catch the bouquet again and again.
The funny thing is that my own parents did not marry until the mid -30s. My dad was divorced and my mother was an old maid for the berous standards. But they raised me in their love story: the couple of years that alter the life in which they married after three months of appointments, they made me and they moved to the United States.
The graphic designer and I broke in 2020. It was a disaster, but it was clearer than ever what he had to do: stop trying to control everything and let life happen. A few months later, a kind, gentle, handsome, funny, optimistic and wild creative man responded to one of my indications about hinge, agreeing that the mayonnaise was really unpleasant.
Tyler and I fell in love and left for four years. Together we live in family tragedies, the worst of the Covid-19 Pandemia, my postgraduate school, its postgraduate school, supporting the creative practices of others, leaving jobs, finding jobs, moving together, adopting our sweet Mutt Agnes. In the summer of 2024, he proposed in Crater Lake, surrounded by a swarm of dragonflies.
At first, I felt weird talking to people about commitment. Some of our friends were freshly married, some were single by choice (or not), but most were in long -term monogamous relationships without marriage plans. He had never been happier, but he still housed the fear that marrying was too much status quo, out of fashion, something little cool. My favorite writers certainly thought that the most popular books that year are about divorce and self -realization: “All Fours” by Miranda July, “Splinters” by Leslie Jamison and “Liars” by Sarah Manguso.
Paris's review once asked the writer Helen Garner if being a writer and marriage are generally compatible. She replied: “They are probably, but it probably requires a lot of generosity and flexibility. If you charge you a classical idea of the artist as a figure to which everything is due and whose prerogatives are huge and can never be challenged, forget it.”
In one of his most critical essays entitled “Marrying absurd” Joan Didion punishes those who choose to marry Las Vegas. She insists that they are not doing it for convenience, but for the fact that they do not know “how to make arrangements, how to do it” well. “
How do you do it well, Joan?
Tyler and I got married in January (nine years after age, I insisted on my cousin that would marry me) in Las Vegas, for an imitator of Elvis who will sing “I cannot help falling in love” in the famous White Chapel with three dozens of our closest friends and family, two weeks after the devastating wild fires and the week of inexhaustion of Trump.
While I did my hair and makeup in front of the hotel window overlooking the false Eiffel Tower, with the Bellagio fountain that went out every 30 minutes, I was crying. But not because of the usual suspects: cold feet or the last minute cancellations or the eczema that reappears after years of latency in my arms or lack of sleep, although I forgot to pack a root of courage.
At some point, I had convinced me that marrying was unpleasant, not what an artist does, but here he was doing it. In fact, I married the man who supported my creative activities. He had changed his mind about marriage once again. It is a symbol of hope in a desperate world, a sacred pact between two people, and it may be whatever you want it to be.
And yes, it may not work, but it could also.
Maybe the question is not: does marriage make you less artist? Maybe the question is: Who becomes an artist anyway?
The author is an independent writer of Los Angeles. She is on Instagram: @druzova_.
Los Angeles Affairs Chronices The search for romantic love in all its glorious expressions in the Los Angeles area, and we want to listen to their real history. We pay $ 400 for a published essay. Email [email protected]. You can find presentation guidelines here. You can find past columns here.
