my sister’s wedding nearly turned me into the worst version of myself

or: wedding registry discourse hates to see me coming

The night of my youngest sister’s surprise engagement party, I contemplated throwing myself into the heavy traffic that seems to always choke Penn Station no matter the hour. For once, I promise you, I am not being the slightest bit hyperbolic. Some context: It was midnight—my train back from Philadelphia had been delayed by more than two hours—and I was bone tired and ravenously hungry. I was furious that the late hour would make it impossible to anchor my week as per usual with my regular bootcamp class the next morning, not because I couldn’t wake up and be there at 9 a.m.—I had done so on less sleep and after far more indulgent evenings before—but that dragging ass meant I wouldn’t perform the best, and I’d be too humiliated to take my spot in the front row. (To say I had begun treating my athletic performance in a New York Sports Club group fitness class with outsized seriousness is a gross understatement.) Just a few weeks before, I learned that my job was in danger of falling victim to corporate restructuring, which kicked off a fresh OCD episode in which I had convinced myself, as I am prone to do when my anxiety skyrockets, that I must have bed bugs despite no tangible evidence to support the fear and multiple (very expensive) professional reassurances that I was fine, if not a little crazy. And worst of all, at least, in this very moment: I was single—hopelessly, frustratingly, infuriatingly single. So you can sort of understand why, though maybe a little dramatic, getting hit by a car (in a non-serious way) would have seemed like a tempting solution to my problems.

It’s not that I wasn’t happy for my sister and her partner, and it’s not like I was surprised or shocked. They had been together nearly four years; I accidentally ended up in the room when he asked my parents for permission to propose. (“Actually, you should be including me in this! I raised her!” I said as soon as I got done roasting him for his antiquated act.) Hacky tropes about enviously watching your younger sibling accomplish milestones before you weren’t in my brain at all. It’s just that I was suddenly aware of how much harder my life was due to the simple fact that I didn’t have a romantic partner in it.

If I were a character in a romantic comedy, I’d be portrayed as some sort of humorless shrew, the bitchy black cat to my sister’s bubbly golden retriever. I would have some sort of arc that involved resentment over the fact that I am nearing my mid-30s and unattached, or a fear that I was destined to always be the bridesmaid and never the bride. And sure, maybe that would make a good, albeit rather unoriginal, story, but in real life, none of that was true. (Well, maybe the black cat to her golden retriever part.)

For years, relationships were the furthest thing from my mind. I have always been good, perhaps too good, on my hyper-independent own: I was the girl who regarded dating as a distraction from my professional pursuits; the girl who would plainly tell men on first dates that writing a book required my full attention, and I was not in the headspace for anything serious; the one who, until this year, would take cabs home at any hour of the night to sleep in my own bed rather than lie awake in agony next to a stranger who snored. Most of the time, I feel like that viral video of the single grandma: Anyone can go out and get a boyfriend. But looking around at the crop of available men, the choice, to me, is pretty obvious: I don’t have one because I don’t want one.

On my sister’s bachelorette trip, I listened in horror as her friends—girls much younger than me who were, if not already married, engaged to be—shared their plans to quit working in a few years once their spouses could fully support them. “But,” I sputtered, “you need to have financial autonomy!” Marriage is a business arrangement, I am quick to cynically say. It’s not that I don’t believe in love, or that I do not have a bit of hopeless romantic—a consequence of years spent swallowing the myth-making of the movies—within me. It’s just that I was never sold on the concept of a binding financial and legal contract as being definitive proof of that love.

When I think about my fantasies of girlhood, they all revolve around some variation on a single theme: my own success as a single career girl. In my dreams, I was Mary Richards or Murphy Brown; I was Jane Craig or Tess McGill—a character where romance was always the B-plot line, never the main concern. I could not tell you of any dream wedding dress or preference for the big day I’ve been set on for decades; in the heyday of Pinterest, I was perhaps the only girl without a wedding vision board. I keep trying to prove myself wrong with this one, keep combing over my memories and grasping for delusions I’m convinced I must have had, keep wondering and worrying that something was wrong with me for not possessing them. But perhaps I should have known the moment when, a few years ago, I choked back an anxiety attack while helping my best friend shop for her own gown that I would never be wedding material. In a showroom surrounded by voluminous, gleaming white garments, trying my best to focus on the immense joy and love I felt for my friend, I was unexpectedly struck with a feeling of fear and dread that made me sweat out of every pore in my body, a voice in my head telling me, with absolute certainty: You cannot ever do this. You do not want this at all.

In recent years, I’ve taken to conceding that I will never say never. I allow that, should I ever get married, I would just want a simple and efficient visit to the courthouse, followed, perhaps, by a private movie theater rental where everyone has to be in formalwear—not out of reverence for the event, but because I just like an excuse to get dressed up. I realize every time I say this that what I am really desiring is not a wedding or even a reception, but a film premiere.

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A very, very small sample of items purchased from the registry of my sister and brother-in-law, two members of a DINK household who have lived together for nearly four years with very nice things, a very nice income, very nice vacations, and a very nice dog who wants for nothing:

• An espresso machine ($550)

• A new 10-piece knife set ($206)

• A Jolie showerhead ($165)

• A Shark dupe of the Dyson hair dryer ($160)

• A Yeti “beverage bucket” ($150)

• A Ninja Creami ($200) and a Ninja Slushi ($349) — because apparently you need two separate devices to do what one blender could ostensibly take care of

• A KitchenAid stand mixer that will likely only be used three a year ($350) and a KitchenAid hand mixer that will likely be used four times a year ($90)

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You know the episode of Sex and the City I am inevitably referencing here. You would not be the first to make the connection when I bring up this particular gripe of mine, cringe as it may be to compare real life to the plot of a scripted half hour comedy. But the older I get, the more I hear Miss Bradshaw’s voiceover in the back of my head: The fact is, sometimes it’s hard to walk in a single girl’s shoes.

Sometimes it’s hard to remember every day of your life is essentially working a clopening shift in your own home, and nobody’s taking care of dinner for you when you’ve had a busy or hard day. Every cent of every bill comes from your bank account, with no 50/50 split. When you’re sick, you are both patient and nurse—and, should you need something and live in a walkable city with no car, at the mercy of either a hell of a DoorDash bill or the overwhelming thought of walking several blocks to the nearest CVS. If you don’t vacuum or do the dishes or clean the bathroom, no one else will. You don’t have someone to travel with, dividing the costs and holding your anxiously sweaty hand on the plane. You don’t even have a plus-one to events.

These are all a small toll to pay for the choice I have made to live alone, a choice that I do, I promise, like about 85 percent of the time. And yet: Single people do not get congratulations for their resilience. They certainly don’t get to create gift registries for items they actually need to set up their homes, let alone expensive toys they will use twice before they collect dust in the corner. I suppose the argument against either is: That’s their choice. Why should they? But couldn’t I say the same about receiving gifts for getting married?

If I’m being completely honest, if I wanted to throw myself in traffic the night of their engagement, yes, it was partly that I was envious that my sister had a partner to make many parts of life easier, even though a half decent roommate would be a sufficient solution. But really, it was that I was uncontrollably and uncomfortably envious of all the material gifts she was about to receive that she did not need. Which is why I am here today to bravely say: it’s time we put an end to wedding registries.

I’m sure that registries were a practical idea several decades ago when the average age of first marriage hovered just above 20 years old and couples truly were starting their adult lives together. But now that the median has grown to 30, and most couples cohabitate for years before finally tying the knot, I ask you: Why does it make any sense at all to ask people to pay to upgrade your lives for you, to buy you nicer versions of things you already own, because you made a decision to get a higher deduction by filing your taxes together? If it is appropriate to ask guests for a gift that appropriately subsidizes your choice to have an expensive wedding (please, enough with the pay for your plate rule), why is it frowned upon to ask others to contribute a gift to support a single person’s household?

This is not an indictment of someone’s choice to have a wedding, or even an indictment of gift giving. If someone I love is getting married, I want to celebrate them, and I want part of that celebration to include a gift as a sign of my love. This is, however, an indictment of the double standard at work. The world has already created an uneven playing field for single people; asking them to grin and bear it and dole out purchase after purchase for those whose status places them at an advantage while knowing they will receive nothing in return is simply too much.

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“Those were gifts. If you got married or had a child, she would spend the same on you,” Charlotte reminds Carrie after she gripes about the amount of money she has spent over the years on her friend’s engagement, wedding, and multiple children. “And if I don’t ever get married or have a baby, what? I get bupkis?” Carrie replies. “Think about it: If you are single, after graduation, there isn’t one occasion where people celebrate you.”

I have accepted that I will likely never get married, or, at least not any time before I crack 40, and by then I would never expect anyone to buy me household gifts that either myself or my spouse should own as two grown ass adults. But there have been other moments in my life when I wished someone would celebrate me, times when I got a promotion or broke up with someone who was a lunatic or ended a toxic friendship and moved out to live alone (with very little that I actually owned) and couldn’t even get so much as a drink. It would have been nice to get gifts when I wrote and published my first book, but I never expected anyone to come to the party—one that I planned and paid for myself, much like a wedding reception I suppose, right down to a cake moment—with an object in their hands. The fact that people I loved wanted to spend the evening with me was enough.

Still, sitting at my sister’s wedding, the last single girl in my family, I realized that to so many people there, nothing I accomplished in my life would ever be celebrated with as much enthusiasm and pride and sheer volume of stuff as a wedding. And stuff, no matter how loudly I’ve opposed overconsumption or how much stuff I have already, with no true need for more, was all I wanted in that moment. I wanted someone to buy me furniture, and put money in an account for a vacation or a future downpayment on a home. I wanted someone else to gift me jewelry and tech, shoes and bags and books, rare vintage clothes to collect rather than wear and niche movie memorabilia to display on my walls. It didn’t matter how many TikToks I saw with others validating my feelings—“For some people, the most interesting thing they can do in their life is have a wedding; it’s like the adult equivalent of peaking in high school,” one girl wisely surmised—or that the things I’d done were much harder and required far more work than signing a piece of paper.

Any idiot can get married—and plenty do every single day. But to so many in that venue, I realized, there will be no value to my life, no need to shower me with any sort of gift, until I become one of those idiots. I’d forever be answering questions from people about when I was going to find someone, about when I was going to move to the suburbs, and about when my life was going to start, as if it hadn’t already.

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obviously if u are one of my married/partnered friends i love u so much and i love getting u gifts so much plz do not take any of this dribble personally i love uuuuuu!!!

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