Get divorced!
You're only young once
There has been a splashy celebrity separation, which I think is off limits for me. I sense a darkness which I don’t intend to ridicule. I’ll say this: Jack Antonoff and Margaret Qualley are both very talented and attractive (money; face). I wish them both peace and happiness.
Not many seem to share in my allergy to this tragedy. Tweets everywhere revel in the shame of a sub-5-year-long, high profile marriage and what it means for all involved. I’ve seen more than 5 posts which say something to the effect of, “I would be embarrassed if I had a big wedding and then separated two years later.” You and everyone in the world. I think, however, that you shouldn’t be. If you ever feel the need, please get divorced. And if you’re a 30-year-old divorcee, you should feel pride. There is not much glamour left in our world, not many spectacles of passion and grandeur. You’re only young once—you might as well get divorced.
Last week, my post about being a Swiftie invited a mass emergence of cretinous comment dwellers intent to tell me I was a moron with small boobs.1 So here’s another morsel for them to drive engagement: I like that Taylor Swift publicly parades around short-lived boyfriends with reckless abandon. Friends and sexual partners are meant to enter and exit your life with the ebbs and flows2 of emotional development and circumstantial determinism. Your parents, for example, are a part of your life. If a romantic interest is also a part of your life, why shouldn’t they intersect? So what if the partner leaves and the parents stay: the opposite could very well happen, too. If you are very in love, why not have a huge party about it? So what if you become less in love very shortly thereafter. There will be other parties and yours will soon fade from its guests’ memories, and from yours, too.
To quote myself:
The way young people talk about taking relationships “slow,” mimicking Mom Talk in warning their friends not to fuck each other, to “be careful” with each others’ feelings, always reminds me of my policy about following animals on social media. Since I can remember, I have refused to follow viral pets, or even engage with more than one of their videos, out of fear that they will die.
If you fall in love, you might fall out of love. You might move in and have to move out, or you might learn something about that person you might have otherwise never learned if you hadn’t gotten so close. You might make a mistake, and grow to love someone who hates you. It might be sad or annoying for a while. But what’s the alternative? Never saying “I love you”? Never having a built-in best friend? Never following this badger named Mr. Lumpy?
Here are some things that might make me cringe on a friend’s behalf: having an ugly wedding, smelling bad (at the wedding or otherwise), self-publishing a girl slop novel on Amazon,3 not letting a child watch Spongebob. Getting married young—or, at all—isn’t on the list, and neither is getting divorced. If my friend got divorced, I would say, “Congratulations!” and I would be so excited for us both. I would be entertained by conjuring disdain for our new shared enemy, their ex. I would get to figure out what went wrong. And my friend would get to restart their life anew, to re-experience some months or years or decades of their youth. To become something they always wanted to be or something they haven’t even discovered yet. To learn they were never running out of time, and that they would be shocked by how much it never happened.
All relationships are temporary. Hormones evolve, flesh grows and shrinks, and everything we take in, ingest, and see reorients our brain a tiny bit. What you want today won’t be what you want in ten years.
Occasionally, I still see good-intentioned posters make overwrought justifications for abortion: “what if,” “but,” “compared to.” Each time, it shocks me that people are still living in a time that is not now. To so many people, abortion makes sense in some way. But its social taboos still necessitate robust narrativization and discursive gymnastics. We should have—and in many communities and for maybe an entire, new generation, we have—evolved beyond this. Abortion is a simple, no-biggie necessity because women are people and clumps of cells are not. Yet, first-wave feminist apologia persists.
This is what I am reminded of when people talk about weddings as if they are important. When someone is ashamed that they or someone else had to archive Instagram photos of an ex. Marriages are meaningful, beautiful, embarrassing, and exciting. Weddings are vaguely symbolic parties, whose significance will be interpreted differently by everyone involved. Unions and their celebrations are not beginnings or ends.
In our world, a wedding is too big of a big deal; it is an immovable historical event that defines someone’s self-identification and public persona forever. I understand that it is a reclaimed relic of misogynistic societies, which has been run through capitalism for many decades, as well. But speaking more normally—in terms of love and the relationships themselves—having a party or joining bank accounts with someone are choices. You can make other choices later, if you want.
In the picture these people are referring to, I was 15.
Taylor reportedly introduced Calvin Harris, Tom Hiddleston, and Matty Healy to her father.
I might have to think about this harder. Maybe it wouldn’t be embarrassing. It depends.
I got my heart brutally broken recently and this made me cry (in a good way). But what a gift it was to know him at all! So what that it didn’t work out? At least I tried.
Been waiting on this one, and it delivered.