Instead of buying a house when I moved here (thereby establishing some equity and discontinuing my practice of, as my friend Terri puts, ‘flushing money down the toilet’), I rented an apartment and bragged, probably too much, about how I didn’t have to do yard work or plumbing. (In fact, as I write this, I’ve my feet propped up on the coffee table while I can hear someone else shoveling the front walk. This makes me happy.)
Instead of keeping a low profile during the probationary years of my tenure bid, I published this column during my first year at UMW, and, seven years later, am still recognized as ‘the girl who wrote that column.’ I could have saved myself several hundred calories in stress-eaten pizzas had I passed on the opportunity to write about my single life in Montana (and avoided, as my provost has put it, ‘earthy language’).
Instead of staying single or getting married at my home church in Virginia with my friends and family watching as I floated down the aisle in white ball gown, I got married in the drive-thru at the Little White Wedding Chapel in Las Vegas.
Here’s the story.
Peter and I decided in January that we wanted to get married. The actual scenario went something like this:
Me: Do you think we should get married?
Him: Okay.
We mulled over our options for a few weeks. We could go to a Justice of the Peace in Dillon, but word was bound to get out, and we didn’t want anyone to know before our parents. We could get married by a JP in my hometown over the summer, but that would leave out his parents. We could get married by a JP in his hometown over the summer, but that would leave out my parents.
In the end, we chose to leave everyone out and elope. We already had a spring break trip planned with our friends who live in Vegas, and really, what city does quickie marriages better?
Once we opted to elope in Las Vegas, we decided to make the ceremony as cheesy as possible. We could get married by Elvis or any number of Star Trek Star Fleet Commanders, but these ceremonies didn’t resonate with our (read: my) impatient personalities. Quick and easy; that was the name of the game.
The Little White Wedding Chapel offered several ceremonies, several of which didn’t required the interested parties to leave their vehicle. This sounded perfect to us, but in reality, the ceremony took a little more work than we thought.
First, we had to pre-apply for our marriage license on-line. Doing so afforded us placement in the “express line” at the Las Vegas county court house where we both had to show up with driver’s licenses and cash to pick up the legal marriage certificate. We also had to book our ceremony well in advance of our March 5 wedding date as well as secure the reservation with a credit card.
I’ve seen dozens of films and TV shows where people get hammered then hitched in Vegas, and now I can say with certainty that I don’t know how they do it. We couldn’t just show up to a wedding chapel and get married. We had to go to the court house (which boasted almost 24 hour a day service) to pick up the license (good for only seven days) and only then we could go to a wedding chapel. You’d have to be a better drunk than I to navigate that kind of system.
With the marriage license applied for and the wedding chapel booked, we turned our thoughts to more serious matters, namely, what we would wear. I’d say we spent a good 15 minutes looking on Amazon before we settled on a tuxedo t-shirt for him and a t-shirt with the words “The Bride” for me. We took another ten minutes to decide we wanted to treat our friends to The Cheesecake Factory after the ceremony, which necessitated another call to The Little White Wedding Chapel to book a limo to pick us up and drop us off at Caesar’s Palace (location of the aforementioned Cheesecake Factory).
And that was it. We didn’t think about the wedding again until we drove down to Vegas at the beginning of March for spring break.
When we arrived in Vegas, we picked up the marriage license and asked our friends to meet us at Caesar’s Palace. We enjoyed a short limo ride to the chapel, signed more paperwork and received a complimentary bouquet and garter. From there, Peter and I popped out of the sunroof of the limo and were married in the drive-thru Tunnel of Love.
My friends took a few photos and we all climbed back into the limo to go to dinner. In all, it took about an hour.
When we got back to Dillon, we didn’t tell anyone but our Human Resources rep at the college (we had to change our tax forms). Afterward, we just went about our business of teaching and research. We told our families during the summer, and when the fall semester started, we told everyone in Dillon.
The question we kept getting was, “How did you manage to keep it a secret for so long?” The first time someone asked me this, I looked blankly and cocked my head to the side, like a dog, thinking. Finally, I said, “It wasn’t a hard secret to keep because nothing changed for us. We lived together and loved each other before we got married. We live together and love each other now. Neither the ceremony nor the license changed us.”
So why get married at all, you may ask. After all, a woman with a penchant for doing things differently shouldn’t be so quick to conform. There were any number of reasons for getting married: (1) Peter needs a green card to stay in the country and our being married helps (though not nearly as much as you would think); (2) We bought property together and being married makes contract language and mortgages much easier to negotiate; (3) As I round the corner of 40, it’s less awkward to introduce Peter as my husband rather than my boyfriend/fella/gentleman caller.
But none of these things came to mind the night we first started talking about marriage. Before I met Peter, I longed for companionship and someone to care for (who wasn’t me). I wanted my partner and me to be each others' priorities, sacrifices, and inconveniences.
Like everyone else, I wanted to be loved unconditionally, inconveniently, sideways, and upside down.
In the end, I finally got married because I am loved.
Oh, and we traded in the MINI for an all-wheel drive Subaru and are now proud owners of property in North Carolina. Married, driving a "sensible car," in debt.....I really am like everyone else.
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