First Comes Love, Then Comes a Millennial’s Painful Crawl Toward Marriage
This essay is dedicated to my husband, the biggest risk I’ve ever taken.
In my very first memory, I am tucked underneath a pink and white comforter, hot and itching from head to toe because of the low thread count and a new feeling in my stomach. It’s not poo-poo, I don’t know what it is, and I can’t ask Umma for rubs. She’s elsewhere. The comforter has a floral design and small scalloped edges. I am clutching the comforter in this memory.
“Can you tell me what happened, little girl?”
Something I only thought existed in movies and cartoons. A cop.
He is standing above my bed, his belt heavy with the same toys we played with just days before: a walkie-talkie, flashlight, gun. The cop’s, I’m sure, does more than just pew-pew-pew. I make sure not to move fast, scared to find out.
In this memory, my older brother is eight or nine years old.
“No. No. No, we don’t know what happened. Are they in trouble?”
The cop sighs and rolls his eyes at us. I immediately start to cry.
What it was was this: a domestic disturbance in the middle of the night. It happened right outside our little apartment, where the people parked their cars. My brother and I were inside, listening to Mom and Dad shouting in Korean.
Gae-sehki. Son of a bitch.
Sshi-bal. Fucker.
Mi-chin-nom. Crazy bastard.
This went on, and the clock ticked no faster than it ever does, but it seemed that way. Neither of them came back in for what seemed like hours. And then there was the scream. Finally, Mom and Dad came inside, two white officers in tow.
Dad stayed somewhere else that night, and I remember hearing Mom cry on the other side of the wall.
How could this happen? Don’t they love each other? They’re married, I thought to myself. Married people aren’t supposed to hurt each other.
On my side of the wall, I cried myself to sleep, too. I wondered if I was ever going to see my dad again. I thought maybe they took him away to some place forever, and that my mom would never smile again. That was the first time my heart ever broke. The first time I ever realized that marriage didn’t disqualify someone from pain. That marriage can sometimes cause it.
Imagine the confusion in my little brain and my small, pink heart.
“What happened last night? Why were you guys fighting so bad?” I asked Mom in the morning.
Puffy-eyed, she said to me, “I never should’ve married your father.”
I would hear this, or a variation of it, from both of them almost every day from that day forward: I shouldn’t have gotten married. Why did I have to marry that bitch? I can’t believe I married that sad excuse of a man. My life could’ve been so different if I married any other woman in the world. We never should’ve gotten married.We never should’ve gotten married. We never should’ve gotten married. They screamed this loud enough for me to understand that these were not just the gripes of an annoyed husband and wife.
Not much later in life, things got even stranger.
Mom and Dad kept screaming at each other. In fact, it never seemed to stop. They kept screaming even when two planes crashed into the New York skyline, killing and injuring and traumatizing thousands.
I was six, and it happened during the school day. We closed the door to our first-grade classroom and turned all the lights off. I couldn’t see the colorful construction paper anymore, just the blaring lights of the TV and so much chaos coming from it. I thought we were about to be shown a movie. It wasn’t until our teacher, Ms. Silva, started crying that I understood something terrible was happening.
There was so much screaming and commotion on the TV screen. Things falling apart. Shouting. People crying.
For a moment, I felt at home.
The other students and I, our little bodies were crowded around each other, huddled on the bright, polka-dotted carpet. Our faces lit up, and you could see the buildings on fire in our tiny irises.
When Mom picked me up from school that day, she hugged me tight and extra hard. I let her wrap me with relief, and felt so sad that some mommies in New York wouldn’t get to hug their daughters ever again. That some husbands wouldn’t grab the dry-cleaning on their way home. That some brothers wouldn’t be able to protect their little sisters anymore.
My heart broke for the second time ever in my life that day.
Strange, I thought.
How was it possible that a heart could break a second time? That you could feel pain more than a single time in your life was unimaginable. Would this feeling—this sad, terrible feeling—become a regular thing? I wondered this in my mom’s arms and I fell deeper into her embrace, so scared of the possibility.
The next day, I continued reading Corduroy with the image of a man jumping out of a skyscraper where a fuzzy teddy bear’s button was supposed to be. There was that pain and confusion again. When I sensed that these feelings would be a regular thing, I felt betrayed by the world. I felt betrayed by my parents who brought me into it, and by God who writ it so. Would the rest of my life take all softness, take what’s supposed to be a cuddly teddy bear, and replace it with terror? Blood? Pain? Pain so was cruel, and to have no choice but to suffer it (unless I killed myself at 6 years old) sowed little seeds of nihilism into my being before I ever knew my times tables.
A new, strange, sad holiday came to be every year after that day. It was called 9/11, and six 9/11s passed until I got to the seventh grade.
During all six of those 9/11s, my brain became even an even scarier and lonelier place to be. I learned that not only would pain and sorrow be a regular part of life, it apparently already was a quintessential part of Everything, All The Time. It was not just a part of mine or any other millennial’s lifetime. It was part of everyone’s, spanning all times, Before and Even Before That, and would go on forever. Soon, everything came rushing in and with a determination to mold me, harden me.
My mind became polluted and my heart a callused thing once I understood the ubiquitousness of pain.
My body hadn’t even shed blood yet, but I’d seen it sticky and fucking everywhere. It was learning that the Holocaust was a thing; it was learning that humans with the same-colored flesh and the same-colored blood but different-colored skin were hung from trees with rope strong enough for such a heinous thing; it was this sweet girl I knew in elementary school who was kidnapped, raped, and murdered; it was the thought that it could have very easily been me; we played, once, together in the sunlight; it was Mom and Dad fighting all the time, fucking still; it was the never-ending crime (so much crime) everywhere; it was the collective anger of the entire country that never seemed to love each other; it was the violent films I was too young to see but had started to crave. It was the sounds of screams and the litter on the streets that I, all of a sudden, started to notice.
It was all of this, all the time. It was beyond me, and yet it was within me.
My heart and my brain began to morph into these weird, precarious things. Just beating and thinking and thinking and beating and taking a beating, a beating, a beating. I was becoming so angry, already. So razor-sharp and unwilling to soften. I didn’t know how to ask for help. It wasn’t like I could point to the boo-boo on my heart. So I just kept warmth at bay and mocked tenderness as every year passed. I soon didn’t know what it meant to be gentle, not since that hug from Mommy.
I woke up one day and believed that to love and care were the strangest things to do. That they were silly things for foolish people who didn’t know better. That marriage, of all things, was a nonsensical crock and an administrative nightmare (the administration of it all is why my parents, despite how much they hate each other, have not gotten a divorce).
I mean, didn’t these people know that a hijacked plane could eviscerate the love of your life in a split second? That a crazy man in power could decide to gas you and your entire family on any given day? That a mysterious man could just pluck you off the street and fuck you and kill you and bury your prepubescent body? This is the default madness of the world. This is the life force that spins the earth on its sad, tilted, so fucking tilted, axis.
I love you madly?
We only say that to stand a small chance.
Who in their right mind would ever risk any of that just to know love? How could anyone risk the pain, the atrocities, the suffering, just to be held at night? Who the fuck does that? Who is that crazy? The lovers the lovers the lovers, surely? Why would anyone allow this kind of fear into their lives? When there was such a clear way to live free of fear?
Live free of love; that’s all it took. Wasn’t it obvious?
Such was my tenet.
I was calcified with confusion, fear, and dread by the time I had actually reached the seventh grade. I wouldn’t be caught dead, and neither would anybody else, loving.
Instead, I was just this big blister of a young girl—(a) pussy. I was eleven, and I would just exist, persist, without the necessary courage to actually end my life, with the begrudging determination to have as much reckless fun as I could to expedite the end. And I wouldn’t seek or accept love anywhere, and that’d be just fine. When I died, I wouldn’t hurt too many people. I wouldn’t be in love. I wouldn’t be married. A handful of people might be sad for a while. I could live (die) with that.
So, I just let my life come as it did, having as much destructive fun I could until the day the world would decide I’d had enough. I threw caution to the wind, let anyone think what they wanted, and let everyone go as they wished. Come what may, so long as it was not love.
Here came puberty. Here came hormones I couldn’t even pronounce. Here came school dances that were a Petri dish of fast dancing and even faster flings. Here came the boys. And these weren’t boys that I simply had a crush on and chased around the schoolyard. These were boys I wanted to do things with; boys who would oblige behind a dumpster in an alleyway; boys who would deny my existence the day after. Here came being eleven and feeling guilty for not knowing what to do with a dick that was presented to me. Here came the determination to learn what to do the next time that happened. And so here came the boys. Again. For real this time. Here came wanting to sit with the cool kids, and knowing I’d have to be a “bad” girl to do so. And so here came my first sip of alcohol. Then stealing. Then stealing the alcohol. Then backseat fondling with older boys who had cars. Here came so many things specifically not meant for a seventh grader.
But I was convinced they were meant for me. There was not a care in the world. Nothing loved, nothing lost. Nobody cries when a seventh grader steals a Winston from their dad’s shirt pocket. Nobody cries when a seventh grader hops a fence and hides, laughing, from the patrol cars. Nobody falls in love behind a dumpster in an alleyway. Nobody cries. Nobody cares. Nobody gets hurt.
Except that I did.
In a way all too like the universe (God, maybe?) to do, this way of living, this way of securing a pain-free, heartbreak-free life, had ironically started to breed in me a severe hatred for myself. I’d do all the things I’d do, weekend after weekend, then come home and cry to myself about it, lost in a dizzying syrup of shame. I felt so lost and ashamed any time I looked at myself. I should be a child, and the mini-adult looking back at me in the mirror was a heinous, phony thing. I was selfish. I was a thief. A liar. A slut.
I was just so so so confused, all the time. I was afraid, more than anything. I was angry at Mom and Dad for their seismic, terrifying love-hate. I was resentful with my brother who, now at 15, didn’t have the same heart to protect me, but would join the others who were calling me “slut”.
I suppose I was successful in that I didn’t know or care what love really looked like. Not from others. Especially not from myself. In my attempt to resist all external love, I had suddenly learned what it meant to lack self-love.
Two for the price of one. And this is just how I went on until something threatened to ruin my new balancing act.
When this next thing came, I realized that it wasn’t just patrol officers or an act of terrorism or genocide I had to worry about. Because now there was this. And this was way worse.
Now there was social media: one of the most cataclysmic missteps in our civilization and upbringing.
Those days, social media was still nascent and infantile, but it was powerful enough.
I thought dial-up internet was insufferable. The thing that awaited us on the other line? So much fucking worse.
We started sharing little by little. Pictures of us with duck lips and peace signs that we took with an old, fat digital camera and a makeshift tripod. Statuses we thought about the night before. For some reason, we all knew Tila Tequila and Jeffree Star. We started inviting anyone in to make lewd comments, urge you to kill yourself, or—worse—rank you among a list of their top eight friends. All of this happened so quickly, and I think maybe we all found ourselves caught underneath the wave. I knew that I felt wary about the entire thing. It suddenly occurred to me that it didn’t matter if I hated myself, because now other people could, too. And they could post about it.
Shit.
During these early days of social media, everything that used to be weekend gossip and put to bed over a 3-way phone call started to become permanent, tangible sources of ridicule and pain. Soon, everything was connected and public and permanent. There were all of our interactions and feelings, in digital format and covered in shoddy self-made layouts when they used to be fleeting whispers behind school books or sent via text composed with sloooow T9; these trivial and fleeting emotions were no longer forgotten about by Monday, but cemented on the internet. If someone had posted something about you, you were screwed and just had to hope it was a pleasant angle, not too mean, or that they’d take it down upon your pleading.
This is when we began to understand that we would be at each other’s mercies. That we’d be beholden to others forever.
I became very afraid of the entire thing the moment I realized its power. The threat of pain was both in plain sight and disguised so well. It’d be something as subtle and inconsequential as dropping a spot on someone’s Top 8, and I’d just feel my heart tear open and my sense of self diminish. I’d see a friend “Online now!” and wonder why they hadn’t just answered my phone call. I’d see what so-and-so did last weekend, and any time I read comments referring to some inside joke that I wasn’t a part of drove me mad. What the fuck was going on? I hated not getting comments back, or reading some cryptic update that was so obviously a dig at me. I didn’t know what to do if someone unfriended or blocked me. All of these things shook my heart. I’d feel so uncool. So exposed. So unwanted. So disliked. None of this shit happened in real life. Not in a way that you remembered or took personally.
Social media single-handedly took my own hatred away from me and gave that power to others.
Now it’s not just me hating me; it’s possibly everybody hating me.
That fear felt so extreme and hard to bare, I wanted to jump out of a tower.
Soon, my heart ached at the sight of anyone, online and offline. Would they like my status? Would they thumbs-up my post? Did they think I was cool? Was I worthy of their friendship? Did I look fat or chinky or like I was trying too hard in this photo? Did I look fat or chinky or like I was trying too hard in real life? Was my recent post witty enough? Will they accept my friend request when they get online? Would they heart my pic? Would they heart my pic? Would they heart my pic?
Would they heart me?
These were the questions that made up my existence. This was the language I began to speak to myself in. I let this new rhetoric dominate my life so much, I had forgotten how to string together a sentence in Korean, and I barely talked to my parents anymore because of it. I no longer cared to learn how their days went; I was glued to my computer grasping for social adoration, acknowledgment, attention. And then I’d blame my parents for never giving me enough.
Mom. Dad. I’m sorry.
I was the one who didn’t give either of you enough attention.
We were speaking in another language.
I regret this more than anything.
How was your day, anyway?
It was just so much easier to pay attention to the internet. It was growing, titillating, like watching a viscous bacteria morph and split and explode underneath a microscope. It was even faster than I knew how to handle. My attention span would get soaked in acid day in and day out, just obsessed with things happening online. A new update would roll out, and the neurons in my brain would deep-fry, concentrated in the blackest, thickest, darkest grease. A new online trend or “aesthetic” would become popular, and my hands would shake at the desire to replicate or portray it.
This place—this digital hellscape and nightmarish mirror—was the school I learned at. This was the church I went to. This was the hospital I went to for cures, bandaids, attention. I was discharged with blood-soaked gauzes and glazed eyes, uneducated, and so devoid of any righteousness.
And those were just the early days.
When high school rolled around, my parents were deeply ingrained in this perpetual cycle of hating and screaming at each other and the evil that governs our universe had learned how to put the internet at our fingertips. So now I was deeply ingrained in this perpetual cycle of running to my phone to escape the madness at home, only to put it down when the fights got loud enough to rip my attention away. When their fights eventually simmered, I dove right back into digital wars.
She unliked my photo.
“You’re the worst mistake I ever made.”
He left a sarcastic comment on my status.
“I should’ve left you when I had the chance.”
She unfollowed me.
“Our marriage is a joke.”
He blocked me.
“I wish we loved each other. But I fucking despise you.”
I couldn’t turn anywhere. All of this became deeply synonymous with who I thought I was and I had no way of disassociating myself with any of it. At the ripe age of 13, my identity was nothing but my parents’ loathing and DNA, and fearful HTML.
These things ruled my life, and the only way I could regain some semblance of control was to quite literally curate it.
The timing worked out perfectly. I was looking for a way to find this control over my life right when the practice of identity curation became a thing. Now we could all quite literally build who we wanted to be because of how much social media and cellphones were evolving. Smartphones were becoming more and more ubiquitous and allowed us to develop the (false) idea that we had a Self; welcome the Selfie. These smartphones allowed us to snap and upload an immediate picture of ourselves and everything about us—no janky makeshift tripod needed. You could curate as you lived. You could live as curation.
With curation, anything was possible. You could be skinnier than you actually were; you could have darker skin than you actually had; the white teeth you’ve always wished for in a matter of seconds and an app download. Show everyone what you’re up to, and how cool these activities and people made you. Everyone would know about concert-goings, parties, new shoes, new cars. We suddenly had the power to chisel an identity and it all felt so real because, hey, there it was online.
Look at where I am, surely I am interesting. Look at what I’m doing, surely I am someone cool. Look at who I’m with, surely I am someone worthy. Look at Me, surely I am Someone?
How strange it was that social media convinced us we even needed to be Somebody. But not just Anybody, Somebody worthy of attention, love, and approval. That’s what these hearts, shares, and thumbs-up icons all boil down to, isn’t it?
Soon, I was doing this identity and narrative cherry-picking, desperate to earn as many hearts and thumbs-ups as possible. Desperate to Be somewhere besides the painful real world where people died and married couples hated each other. I tried to occupy social media as much as I could. I took all my jagged edges and tried curate an image of someone who knew exactly what to do with those edges. I could snap pictures on the go and comment funny things and say ironic bullshit. I’d appear aloof and poetic. Yes, I’d start writing “deep” and shitty poetry. I’d be filtered. But I’d be cool, finally. (Although, in retrospect, there is nothing more fundamentally uncool than 13-year-old Me, ha.)
From there, from my curated, manicured, filtered profiles, I could become untouchable. I could become my own to hate again. I could reclaim some of the hatred-bullets. Give people less to hate, and more to throw a like at—I had curated that possibility with trends and aesthetics and popularity in hand. My pictures got cooler. My posts became smarter, edgier. My appearance got better.
I learned how to blend in; I learned it was possible to seem as if you didn’t care; I learned it was possible to appear unfazed, just another person on the internet. Just post something that made you look that way!
Because of this curation, this blending in, this evolution, I gained more online friends. People liked my photos, my taste in music, what I had to “say.”
And in that funny way again, the world delivered to me another strange and ironic thing.
It was through social media that I found a group of friends. And these friends had other friends. And those friends had their own friends. And some day, somehow, through a very delicate and funny and random string of events and even longer string of people, we all gathered at a party.
This is how I met my husband, Chad.
When we met, I was not a very good person. I was still roaming around, aimless and lacking the capacity to care and truly love. I was a few months away from turning fifteen.
It’s funny; I knew that not knowing how to love and care much for others didn’t make me any cooler or more special than the next fifteen-year-old going through the woes of adolescence, but I still hung onto it with pride. I hitched my wagon onto that aloofness, and, again, hoped that it’d make me actually seem careless. But truthfully, all it seemed to me was that I did care (a reminder that the universe is just so funny and stupid that way). And this dichotomy confused me thoroughly.
I didn’t care about other people. I only cared about what they thought of Me.
I didn’t love other people. I only loved the love they showed me.
I’d flip my phone over and over in my hand, just contemplating this all the time. The answer would be in my hand, and yet I still always wondered, naively, “How could this be? How could I not care about the people, only for their opinion?”
I didn’t know then that social media had created my ego.
The answer is just so clear to me now.
Love has no room for ego. So I had no room for love.
All I cared about was this ego. This grand idea of Me, Michelle, born from social media. This idea of my own identity. What it looked like. What it seemed to others. What I wanted it to be. How I curated it. I thought about it so much. Me me me me me Michelle Michelle Michelle @michelle @michelle @michelle @michelle @michelle.
This is who Chad met that night. Just a digital and physical and confused and severed version of Me.
“Hi, I’m Michelle. Oh, here. It’s actually @michelle. What’s your’s?”
“It’s Chad.”
“I meant your handle.”
His name? I didn’t give a fuck about his name! I didn’t care to learn his name. His name is what followed the @ symbol, not a handshake. I only cared to learn his Tumblr and Instagram. I only cared to learn if we’d end up following each other later that night. I’d get to know him there, where it mattered. Where we could see each other’s taste in movies, what music we listened to. Our in-person meeting wouldn’t matter or be real otherwise, right?
It had to be right. I could tell you very little about the impression he made on me; that’s how inconsequential it was at the time. Chad’s handshake and face and voice came and went. If it were not for this serendipitous picture, I wouldn’t even have the memory or proof that we had, in fact, met:
Chad (far left), Me (far right). A group of friends brought together via social media. (2011)
Chad and I would not start dating until about three and a half years later.
But I did enough damage in between then. (Or, I suffered enough damage in between then.)
I hurt myself, hurt others. Became more and more confused. More desperate to get away from Mom and Dad and their blackhole of hate. More reckless in response. More careless with people’s feelings. With my own.
All the while, social media got smarter. There were more features and apps coming out that could put a crown of fake butterflies on your head, make your cheeks red, and your voice high-pitched. People started to become convinced that deeply personal and private matters belonged on their feed, and more and more heinous images or meaningless stories became a regular part of our daily scrolling. It was either something so incredibly unimaginable like a mass shooting or someone announcing their baby passed away from SIDS, or something so unimaginably trite like what people ate for lunch or what a celebrity wore to the grocery store.
“Kim Kardashian wore a blazer while running errands.”
This is the hardest thing I’ve ever had to post. My wife passed away over the weekend.
“Oh, so-and-so just had a grapefruit salad with a bagel.”
Fifteen dead in a small town on the coast of Florida. Three under the age of five are among the deceased.
“No way! Jack and Jill just broke up.”
Fatal stabbing over a fucking hamburger.
This chaotic relation between the banal and harrowing truly paralyzed me. It stunted me emotionally, and the ability to have the appropriate emotional response to things waned even more than I really thought possible. At this point, I honestly had no idea how to deal with people. When your attention and emotional compass is so inexplicably lawless, it turns you into an untethered and disoriented person. A person with little delicacy when dealing with other people. I could look at a person, and have no idea what they meant. And I don’t just mean I wouldn’t understand what they said, but I truly could not understand either of our existences and how we fit into this endlessly confusing plane of (dis)connection. I’d get everything wrong and constantly misread basic signals. If a man were to ignore me, I’d try even harder and became more desperate. If a man revealed his feelings for me, I’d grow tired of him and use his closest friend or relative to hurt him.
It’d take someone very special to break this spell—or, fit right into it.
This person eventually did come. This person was my first love. This person was not Chad.
This person—let’s call him Tom—occupied those years in between Chad and mine’s first meeting to when we eventually began to date.
So. I had spent my entire life learning not to love, but to only accept a weird digital version of it. I spent so much of my youth chasing debauchery and meaninglessness. And then Tom happened. He was the first man who had heard all the stories about me, the whispers of who was in my pants in a bathroom at a party, the cautionary tales of how reckless I was, and wanted to love me anyway. And not just my statuses or pictures. Not Me, but me.
At the beginning, I still kept him at arm’s length, and, of course, committed some self- and budding-relationship-destructive acts. Nevertheless, Tom kept at it, and I ultimately allowed myself this pleasure (I should have known the pain to come, but love, as they say, blinds you).
We were on and off for a couple years, and in retrospect, a horrible match. In another way, he was the best match because Tom was the only person who fit right into my discombobulated sense of relation. I’d do something terrible and disrespect him, and he’d forgive me and love me anyway. Another day, he’d say he couldn’t do it anymore, and I’d come groveling, eyeliner-filled tears cascading down my cheeks. We’d hold hands one night, then avoid each other like the plague the next day. Together, we resembled the same seismic stupor I grew up, and so it became a terrible comfort and medicine to me. Without going into too much detail, we loved very dramatically and it all ended with the same dramatic bang.
When it ended, everything I ever believed about love and heartbreak proved themselves to be true. It was fucking unbearable.
This heartache and loss of love nearly claimed my life.
Now, this might sound dramatic (especially knowing that I was only seventeen), but I had really been waiting since the age of six for a good enough reason to end my life, remember? I needed one push, and there it was.
I had loved (stupid! stupid!), and I had lost it. The pain was as insufferable as I thought it’d be.
Every fear I ever had came true.
I was unworthy. I was stupid. I was ugly. I was alone. Mom and Dad were throwing shit across the kitchen. Mom and Dad were screaming until their vocal cords hardened through their necks. Planes were crashing into buildings. People were jumping out of them, on fire and screaming their lovers’ names. Corduroy, he was on fire, too. He was bleeding and alone and so scared. Ms. Silva was crying in the corner by herself, no one picked her up from school that day. She drove herself home, clenching her steering wheel as she drove by the small pot of land where her student’s raped body was found and dug up. People’d find out about me and Tom’s final, for-real-this-time breakup online and then scroll past us and onto the news of an oil spill in the gulf of Mexico. And I’d concern myself with whether or not our breakup announcement got the sympathy, likes, and amount of attention I wanted, then count the number of slick, dead fish bobbing in a black sea. I was heartbroken, and so terribly confused. The world always seemed to be in ruin. The only thing I knew for certain was that all of my worst fears were coming true.
I spent months on end reeling from this pain. I was celibate, in bed, starving, depressed, and drunk. In some of these drunken, hazy late-night/early-morning trances, I dreamt of dying.
I’d imagine drowning myself to death in the tub, but didn’t necessarily enjoy the idea of being found naked. I’d imagine taking a bunch of pills, but there was the chance that they wouldn’t work, and I’d just wake up in a hospital bed, embarrassed as fuck and feeling incompetent. I’d imagine the numerous ways in which to do It, the thing I’ve wondered about since six years old. I spent ten months ruminating on the best way, and never finding it.
What I did find, though, was a reason not to. I didn’t know it then, but now that I look back at what kept me alive, it really boiled down to one of the strangest and most ironic plays Life had to give.
What kept me alive was knowing that, even though my parents might’ve not loved each other, they loved me.
What kept me alive was not wanting to give them pain by taking away love.
Because now, I understood how truly painful that really was.
They loved me, and so I had to stay.
It was love.
This strange and fucked-up and funny and ironic and wonderful thing.
Love. Yes, the answer was Love.
Is it a cliche if it is true?
That’s really what kept me here. Even if it wasn’t mine. Even if I still didn’t understand it. Even if I hated what it did to me. Even I was deathly terrified of the pain it could cause. It was Love that kept me alive.
I’d spend all night crying until the birds sang, so sure that I’d do It soon, then hear Mom come up the stairs with a plate of steaming food for me: you worked so hard today, my daughter. Here, I made your favorite.
I’d imagine my funeral, go as far as to pick out the flowers I’d want, and Dad would come knocking on the door, saying: I took your car for a wash, honey. And I filled it with gas.
They might have spent their whole marriage hating each other, but they loved still. They might have not been right for marriage, but they loved still. In spite of all the screaming, all the trauma, all the hate, they loved still. Today, even though my parents have not spoken to each other in years and have never hated each other more, some part of me believes they love each other still. Because I’m still here. And I am them. And they love me.
Would you say Our view of love was twisted a bit?
So, I held on. Without really meaning to, I kept waking up day after day and just lived this strange life of mine.
Still, I couldn’t sleep many nights. I’d stay awake until seven, eight in the morning, lonely, bored, and so damn sad. Some nights, I’d watch the same depressing movies over and over again. Other nights, I’d write shitty poetry and sneak out for a drive, chain-smoking cigarettes and crying to Death Cab For Cutie.
On another one of these nights, on one random and fateful night, Chad would re-enter my life.
We’d started messaging each other. All because we still followed each other on social media. All because we’d see each other online in the dead of night. He’d come home from a party at two or three in the morning, and find myself amongst all of his other online friends, awake.
This was that message (or, something like it) from a drunken Chad: “damn, ur still awake lol” (sent 3:23am)
And this is how innocent and inconsequential it all really started.
We are married today because of this: we were there for each other.
We started talking every day. I would come to him for advice on how to heal my broken heart, and he’d come to me for a late-night joke and someone to say goodnight to. We became friends. The best of friends. This camaraderie went on for months, and one day, I noticed I wasn’t fantasizing about my death anymore. Everything just felt… fine.
We shared our favorite shows, made each other laugh, and discovered we had almost everything in common. We punctuated each other’s days, and without my normal wits and walls about me (they all came crumbling down during the breakup with Tom), I was vulnerable to It.
This time, this It, was Love. Honest, healthy, and true Love. We both fell into It with each other and have been falling ever since.
Chad is a gentle surgeon. If I were to describe how he made me unfear love, it’d be like that.
In the beginning, it was like I was lying still on a hospital bed, beaten, bruised, nearly dead. There were hundreds of tubes and wires coming out of me, working to keep my heart beating. The inside of me was just another giant convoluted mass of sadness, pain, fear, confusion. Any silly and impatient man would not have known what to do with it. But Chad, with his soft, slow hands, worked his way to nothing but the sound of my heartbeat, the proof that there was something still there.
What he did was simple.
He just got to know me better. He was patient and honest. He made me laugh. He showed me kindness. He never judged. He just listened. He got to know me. He remained (and still is) such a focused man. Such a careful man. Such a kind, healing man. My best friend. I do believe he fixed and cured many terrible things about me. He made my life better and made me so happy. He made the pain feel not as painful. He found Corduroy’s button.
I still just wasn’t sure I’d ever want to get married.
It wasn’t like all of the beliefs and aversion I had toward marriage just evaporated the day Chad said “I love you, too”. Marriage was still a far-off idea that only risky people dared to attempt. People didn’t stop dying even if Chad loved me back. People didn’t stop terrorizing others even if Chad loved me back. The planet didn’t stop decaying even if Chad loved me back. The world still went on, painfully and mercilessly and digitally and perpetually. If I were to marry him, our life would end one way or another. And the one left behind? If it were me? I couldn’t actually bare to think about it. So I just kept on loving him without a plan.
Besides, I had other things in life to plan.
I was working on earning my degree for the next couple years of our relationship. I was 20, 21 years old, and all the years of my life had convinced me that I had to plan on becoming Something, Someone—and now that time was finally near. This pressure has been there my whole life.
In Korean culture, you pick your destiny on your first birthday. You’re placed before several inanimate objects that represent different aptitudes, ambitions, and what you are to eventually become. A pencil to become studious and smart. A hundred-dollar bill to become wealthy and career-driven. A paintbrush to become artistic. A bundle of thread to live a long life.
In millennial culture, this pressure to make something of yourself doesn’t end after your first birthday. It’s been there our whole lives and it grows, as You know. You must do something. Be something. Be nice. Share your crayons. Stand up straight. Be cool. Puff, puff, pass. Study hard. Be chill. Hustle. Do you. Do better. Do me a solid? Do more. This pressure, the ask of life, it is relentless. It is mean, cruel, and debilitating. It doesn’t always look like a row of inanimate objects laid before you, but like choices we have to make every day. They’re what make us “something.” They make us look cool, make us stylish, make us laugh, make us money, make us sad. They’re what make us believe we have to be something at all.
As an adult, all it ever did was make me think until mental oblivion. And when graduation neared, I felt this newer, grown-up anxiety and fear.
What should I do? What do I become? How do I make something of my life? It was serious now. It wasn’t so much about what outfit to post on social media. Not anymore. The pressure had cooked, matured, and actually grew up with me.
The goddamn fucking pressure.
I have to be rich. I have to buy my parents a house. I might have to buy them two, because they hate each other. Should I have gone to med school, like my parents wanted?
The damn fucking pressure.
I have to be a good person. I have to be successful. Is it too late to start over? Did I pick the right major? How do I do any of this?
The fucking pressure.
Does any of this matter? People are still dying. Come on, do better. Be skinnier, too.
The pressure.
What do I do? Who do I vote for? How do I sign up for this thing?
Pressure.
This pressure I had, it always led to pain. No room to breathe. Less time to speak or think or be. The walls closing in. And I’d find myself just so paralyzed and confused again.
“Don’t worry,” Chad would say. He said it so simply, and all of this would go away. “You don’t have to do anything or be anything or become someone. You’re just you. And I love you. And that’s cool with me.”
So much of the pressure would fall off my shoulders every time he’d say something like that to me. He’d hold my hands and remind me that everything would be okay. And he’d still love me if I never became anything, as long as I was just myself.
The stadium was packed to the brim. Ahead of me was a sea of blue caps and golden tassels. The commencement speaker was going on about something. “Today is the first day of your lives. Make good choices. The world is your oyster. Be brave.” All that fuck-all shit about entering the working world and working for your life and contributing to society. I was so nervous and sat by no friends. I remember being afraid of what’d happen once we threw our caps in the air. While the speaker droned on, I only asked myself, “Could I find a 9-5 job after this? Could I make X-amount of dollars a year, plus benefits? Could I pay off my car by this date? Could I pay my own rent? Could I help out my parents financially? Could I afford do that? Could I do that? Could I? Could I? Could I?”
In the bigness of it all, I searched for Chad.
He was just in his seat, smiling and cheering me on. Such a simple gesture and show of his love: his presence and joy for my moment. All the fear subsequently faded away. I didn’t have so many questions drowning me anymore. I thought, “Okay. Maybe this won’t be so bad. How could it be? When I’ve got him?”
Congratulations, Class of 2017!
He clapped and cheered and hoorah-ed.
I started to think of only one question and one future then. I stood up, and turned the tassel.
… Could I ever be a wife?
I told myself I could take some more time to think about it. After all, I had chosen the bundle of thread on my first birthday.
A couple months after graduation, we moved in officially together (we had already basically been living together in my small studio apartment for the two years I was completing my undergrad). This time, both of our names were on the lease on an apartment we had picked together. We packed our boxes together, shared a bathroom, kept the light on for one another. Then the question came again. It was only natural, I suppose. I thought about this question more seriously as the months passed.
Could I be a wife? It gnawed at me like a cracked tooth. Not in a terribly painful way, but it was noticeable, and I’d periodically take my tongue across it, just asking myself.
At this point, we were about three and a half years into our relationship and the question always seemed to be there.
It never did come to me as Could we ever get married? but only as Could I be a wife?
I think this is because a part of me at this point, this deeply in love, already knew that we could definitely sign a piece of paper and marry each other. But I just didn’t know if I could fulfill that role, that identity, of a wife.
Sociological discourse surrounding women, marriage, and feminism had already been ramping up in a way that was unprecedented (again, thanks to social media). Millennials at this time had mastered virtue-signaling, but hadn’t yet mastered or even understood their own fundamental values and beliefs they were trying to signal to. Many millennial feminists, for example, were some of the most vicious women-judging, unforgiving, condemning people out there. (I realize this statement alone could be classified as a judgement from a woman, but hopefully, you’ll believe me when I say that this is more so an observation from a person.)
Nonetheless, this was (and is) the sociological landscape that I endured and participated in. More and more millennial women were vocalizing their discontent for marriage and wifedom. For many millennial women, we/they believed marriage was an inherently unfeminist institution designed to own and subjugate women. That it was an antiquated and destitute practice only naive, aimless, co-dependent, brain-washed females (note: not “Women”) coveted.
Hm.
I won’t lie; there is truth to that, as in, historically, marriage as an institution was all that. But I genuinely think people have become smarter, more compassionate; we have evolved past that. Unfeminist, institutional marriage was a condition of that incipient time. Marriage today, marriage as millennials, really doesn’t have to look like that. Because, despite everything, we are capable of love. Of loving each other. Love today is a level playing ground. Love today is not male or female. Love today is human. Love today is both of ours, equally.
Isn’t that what we’ve been fighting for all this time?
I had worried I’d be a “bad” feminist if I were to become a wife—just another one who’d bite the dust and fold Chad’s laundry. But really, Love is what would define our marriage, not “husband,” and most certainly not “wife”. Those worries and guilts eventually melted away the more I understood the actual pieces on the chess board. As millennials living in this era, we’re lucky that the pawns are just playful first dates instead of arranged marriages. We’re lucky that knights can be either man or woman. We’re lucky that the Queen and King can live happily ever after. (I say this generally; this is not the reality for many millennials, and I’m sorry that even though we’ve come a long way, I still have to speak, well, generally.)
Of course, for some, for half, it might not end that happily.
I know I’ve been preaching about love this and love that, but I’m not ignorant to the fact that about 50% of marriages end in divorce. That’s shitty odds for anybody with skin in the game. Among the laundry list of reasons for this 50/50 rate, one reason always seems to be financial stress on the marriage, stress that likely began with the debt the newlyweds go into to have a wedding to celebrate their marriage to begin with (just another one of life’s ironic jokes, don’t forget about those).
These odds would have had me running for the nearest self-destructive act. But, I don’t know, I just never ran. I stayed, holding Chad on the bed we built together, in the home we made together. And I felt fearless. I felt brave. I wish I knew how to distill the intricacies of how exactly my beliefs had changed so drastically. Why, despite not knowing what love looked like growing up, I had understood it when it happened to me. The truth is, I can’t. You can go as far as to call it random. All it really boils down to is how truthfully and how well Chad cared for me. That’s it.
On a night like any other, I came home from work. Chad talked to me on the phone the whole way home like he always did, greeted me at the door, and had dinner waiting for me. I felt happy. Mouthful of rice, I thought of the 50/50 odds and decided.
I’ll take my chances. It’ll be the best risk I ever take.
Together, we diligently unwound more and more of the hard, fearful wiring in my brain. We navigated this scary, painful world together. We experienced more joy together, understood each other better, talked to each other all the time. And we genuinely enjoyed and cherished all of it. We liked each other, we loved each other, we thought highly of each other. We married each other.
So far, so wonderful.
Sometimes, I think back to how much I truly feared the life I am living today, and I laugh. I could be driving to the gym, brushing my hair, trying a pasta noodle to see if it’s cooked thoroughly, and catch myself living this wonderful life with this wonderful partner. And it never ceases to blow my mind that this is my life.
Still, I was right to be scared growing up. I still am most of the time. I’m not so naive as to clutch onto my marriage and to Love as ways to just ignore the very real atrocities millennials—humanity, really—continue to face on the daily. I still crawl into a ball and cry when it all gets to be too much. When I’m sick of seeing children dying at the hands of hate and prejudice. When I’m tired of bigotry and cruelness winning again. When justice fails for the millionth time. When I can’t decide what to do with my life. When I look at social media and become convinced I’m too fat or too Asian. When I’m afraid to make a single choice.
Since I was a child and young adult, the state of the world and my anxiety has only gotten more intense and more painful. But today, there is someone I can lean on for support. Someone to remind me to breathe.
I’m so grateful that Chad and our marriage are not scary.
You might be wondering, couldn’t we have just continued to love each other without the bells and whistles of a wedding or a marriage license?
Of course.
But here’s one last funny joke life gave me: I wanted nothing more than to stand up in front of all our friends and family and marry him. It is really that simple.
That is, strangely, the way I killed my old self.
I gave that six-year-old version of me what she wanted. It’s how I proved to myself that I had successfully rewired my wiring. Yes, even by doing the very thing that so many young girls are incorrectly wired to want. Societal pressure hadn’t beat me; I beat me. And I had the best day of my life doing so. Does that make sense at all?
Maybe I am rambling now…
I’ll leave you all with this: in all this doom-scrolling, threats of war, pain, and fear, you need something to hold onto. If we don’t have the constitution to kill ourselves (and by God, I am not suggesting that’s what anyone do), then we need that thing. That good and sweet thing. It can look like anyone or anything.
For me, it looks like an early Saturday morning with Chad. Our legs are still intertwined underneath the comforter, we have nothing to do later besides whatever want to do. We might hit the coffee shop, watch a movie, take a walk around the neighborhood, see our friends. Before we even say our first words, we reach for each other, excited for what it is to come.
My husband helped me figure out how to use my heart again in a way that was good. It’s not unfeminist, or naive, or cringe, or foolish. It’s the bravest and truest thing I’ll ever do in this life.
Today, I am loved and love in return. Why should there ever be any shame in that? Why would I deny myself that? Why would I ever be bashful of that? I refuse to let my millennial programming dictate the greatest thing in the world. Millennial ethos will fight tooth and nail to convince us that loving someone and being loved in return is intrinsically silly, unfeminist, co-dependent, or doomed.
I think that’s the scariest way to think and live.
I know that it’s going to end one day. But it’ll be okay. Do I think the risk, and do I think having love, are worth it?
I do.
This essay is dedicated to my husband. I’d do it all over again even if it hurts in the end.
