Lawfully Wedded Husband by Joel Derfner

Author:Joel Derfner [Joel Derfner]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press

Well, that was a nice try, that oh-it’s-not-in-front-of-witnessesso-it’s-not-a-real-wedding thing. It was working pretty well, too, in fact, until my father called and asked whether he could attend the Iowa proceedings. After which my brother called and asked whether he could attend the Iowa proceedings. I could hardly say, “No, you can’t come to my wedding or reasonable facsimile thereof,” so now we’d have witnesses.

And Mike was furious.

“You promised me from the beginning that this whole thing would be low-key,” Mike said to me. “But if your father and brother are coming, then my mother will feel like she has to come, and this is turning into a big deal. You promised me you’d protect me, and you’re breaking your promise.”

Mike was over the reality show. He has some control issues (by “some” I mean “a lot of ”), and he felt incredibly uncomfortable with the idea that images of him were going to be circulated over which he had no power. I wasn’t thrilled with the idea as far as images of myself were concerned, but I guess the Girls Who Like Boys Who Like Boys people had persuaded me that it wasn’t their plan to mock us like the brides on the first season of Bridezillas, who were told only that they were going to be on a series about brides, and if something like that happened then I guessed I’d ruined both our lives, so I was just keeping my fingers really tightly crossed.

(It was perhaps not my wisest move to apprise Mike of my family’s plan to attend immediately after we had spent three hours on camera, with Sarah in tow, getting our marriage license application notarized. The notary was a friend of Mike’s sister, and once we had filmed her notarizing the application three times [“Are you married, Sarah?” she asked during the third take, after the assistant director had come over and whispered in her ear; Sarah rolled her eyes and said, “Jesus Christ”] and gone in and out of the building and the office eight hundred times, Mike was clearly relieved to be done with this, until the director was like, okay, let’s film the three of you having lunch afterward, which took another two hours.)

“You know I hate this,” Mike continued, “and yet you have no problem volunteering my time and my energy and my image to be filmed doing whatever they want for however long they want it.”

“If you knew how many times they’d asked for you,” I said coldly, “and I told them you weren’t available, you wouldn’t have said that.”

“Well, it doesn’t feel like that to me. To me it feels like you lied and manipulated me into doing what you wanted me to do and then abandoned me as soon as you could—oh, wait, that’s because you did.”

“Do you think this is easy for me? As of now we’re getting married in two weeks, unless we’re not, because I don’t know if Iowa is a real wedding or not,

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