In a hotel bed in the south of France, the warm sun showing off behind the not-so-blackout curtains, I lost myself in Pamela Des Barres’s lesser-known second book, the one about marriage. I longed for the passion and excitement she wrote about and then the eventual divorce. My husband and I were on a trip he hadn’t wanted to take. He packed heavy wool clothes for July and “forgot” his bathing suit.
When I suggested we have sex on Coco Beach at night, behind life-sized rocks, he accused me of being an exhibitionist. No. I was a planner. I knew we’d have to cut it short because of whatever crusty wildlife might be clinging to the rocks, a sudden cold breeze, or the suspicion that someone was approaching. It was the opposite of wanting to be seen. I wanted a built-in excuse to stop. A way to hide from the fact that I didn’t want sex anyway. I was always so busy blaming myself for never wanting it that I didn’t realize until after our divorce that he didn’t want it either.
Outside, on the Promenade des Anglais and all over Nice, people were living their best lives. Local women hung laundry to dry, bright fabrics fluttering in the breeze, so perfect and so cliché it felt like any minute someone would yell, “Cut! Reset!” while the props department removed the clothespins for another take. The wealthy set sailed to Monaco on yachts, and American tourists strolled the streets, carefree and in love.
I didn’t like being married. It felt wrong. I was married to the wrong person, for sure, but I also was not in love with the institution itself, and there was no person so right for me who would have changed that. Staying married felt like boiling water over a candle when there was a microwave two feet away. Why was I living like a pioneer woman? It was like using a typewriter and insisting it still made sense. “They’re not obsolete just because computers exist!” I refused to make my life easier, struggling with typos and White-Out, my fingers jamming between the keys, insisting the effort meant something because without it I wouldn’t be a whole person.
I wasn’t conscious of it then, but it’s clear to me now: marriage gave me cover. My status — MARRIED — entered every room with me, announcing me as lovable, even if no one could quite see why. The MARRIED STATUS moved from person to person, calming everyone down: “She won’t rock the boat while she’s here. She’s normal. Someone can live with her. Someone loves her enough to sleep next to her. See? She can’t be crazy or unlovable or weird.”
You might still second-guess your opinion of me: “But she is married, so maybe I’m wrong?”
MARRIED worked on my reputation on the way out of the room, too, gaslighting everyone in its wake. Even if you felt uneasy about my weird, undiagnosed AuDHD traits or pathological emotional immaturity, you’d still believe I was stable because I was in the club.