I Would Rather Have Married Young

A loving response to "Would You Rather Have Married Young?" by Lillian Fishman for the Metropolitan Review by a 28 year old "widow".

Jul 15, 2026

“What’s more precious when one is young — that loose sensation of complete possibility, or the soundness of maturing under an affectionate wing?” (Lillian Fishman, “Would You Rather Have Gotten Married Young"?”)

“And [the Trickster] never was in Eden, because Coyotes live in the New World. Driven forth by the angel with the flaming sword, Eve and Adam lifted their sad heads and saw Coyote, grinning.” (Ursula K Le Guin, “A Non-Euclidean View of California as a Cold Place to Be”)

The night Nick and I decided to get married, we were in my East Hollywood apartment trying to get some sleep. It was a warm, springtime night. My standing AC unit was hemorrhaging like an old tractor, punctuated by the barking laughter of teenage boys under my window.

I turned over and glanced at Nick lying beside me, annoyed to see the glow of his iPhone illuminating his face in the not-quite city-dark. I had begged him not to check his hospital portal for the CAT scan results before bed. These days, we knew it could only be bad news. This continuous parade of scan results wearing us down. A lethargic old dog circling its tail, a slow, pathetic tightening spiral.

He told me what I already knew but didn’t want to confront before sleeping – the previous round of chemo had not worked. His cancer had metastasized; the tumors had grown.

I remember this part like a nightmare, which is to say I misremember it. My consciousness split, I observed myself, from somewhere in the top corner of the room, throwing off the covers and pacing the laminate grey floor. I observed myself berate him for checking these results before bed. There she goes, I thought from afar, “she can’t direct fury at mindless, rapidly dividing cells, so the anger is bursting through the cracks of more shoddily built emotional structures.” I nodded knowingly at myself, while I became annoyed at my own condescension. I watched Nick take the fury silently, handing me tissues wordlessly every now and again.

I floated down eventually, recalibrated. I tired myself out, wrung myself dry until my mind became a pleasant grass field. I asked, simply, “what are we going to do?”

“Let’s get married.” He replied, his large brown eyes holding me, looking up at me. The idea entered that pleasant grass field like a sunrise. He was 25, I was 26. He died within the next year.

Recently, I have tried to make sense of this moment. Marriage was never a goal of mine, not something I dreamt of. The weight of trying myself to someone “forever” made me itch. But I dreamt always of a great romance in my life. On every star, every dead dandelion, every birthday candle, I closed my eyes and wished for true love. I was obsessed with Victorian romances where Juliet dies beautifully pale, plucked like a rose at the height of her youth by tuberculosis. True love, to my teenage self, was a haunting. Romantic because it ceased to exist, and therefore evolve, and therefore become messy. A clean, uncomplicated sort of eternal pain. I imagined a dead body picked clean of its sickened and inconvenient flesh, a skeleton white as Greek columns.

I wondered if my fiancé’s cancer diagnosis was my monkey’s paw, the punishment for my desire for true love, the fulfillment of the darkness of this fantasy, of romance as tragedy, as haunting. Was the universe cruel? Had I dreamed too mythic a dream, hadn’t bothered to put in stipulations in the fine print of my teenage longing? Was the universe indifferent? Did it have a warped sense of humor?

I recognized something then. God was a Trickster.

From the time the cancer returned, I understood that I had passed some sort of threshold. I called this new place “the realm of the absurd”. Not quite a new world yet, but a world in flux, being remade, convulsing. I pictured this to look like the surrealist episodes of Looney Tunes, where cartoon logic is suspended and heightened, even, the animators becoming omnipotent entities, erasing Daffy’s body and replacing it with a purple flower and a flag saying “screwball” pictographically. Power was being exerted on me, always dark, sometimes funny.

This realm exists within the old world, but one must be spirited into it by circumstance, by an unwitting tryst with the Trickster god. The train tracks are switched underfoot, and suddenly the old world rules no longer apply. A kind entity may come and explain the new rules to you, but there’s only so much you can glean. Everyone in the new realm moves within the flow of its logic, irritated with you for not yet knowing how to swim.

This realm comes with a new language to learn. CAT scan! Immunotherapy! Metastasize! Synovial! Lymph node! Dramamine! New words give shape to dimensions of your own body you never knew, becoming increasingly aware of how horrifyingly ignorant you are to your own machinery, its intricate Rube Goldberg systems. You must learn the spell-casting of insurance agents, the right words to say in the right order to unlock portals, and the wrong words which will clamp shut the castle doors. You must learn the rules of the hospital; the cheapest areas to park, the schedule of the coffee shops, the nurses which can become allies, the likely wait time at the emergency room.

I recognized the game. I saw the chess pieces being moved. I didn’t think that getting engaged would stop the seismic waves of a new world being formed. But within its logic, I could engage with the absurd. By getting engaged, I could see an imperfect utopia where I stood.

In “A Non-Euclidean View of California as a Cold Place to Be”, Ursula K Le Guin asks if utopia could not be right here, right now. In a Euclidean mind (as in, Dostoevsky: “the rigid, rational, scientific way of thinking that is limited to three-dimensional logic” – one could also argue, the Western mind), utopia is definitionally non-existent. It exists on the horizon, “out-there”, a mirage. If it were to be brought into the present, it would be muddied by inconvenient realities and therefore cease to be “utopia”. What is the promise of marriage, of forever, if not that glittering, impossible utopia, which functionally cannot exist. Which crumbles in the mud of reality.

“[Utopia] is not accessible to Euclidean reason; but on the evidence of all myth and mysticism, and the assurance of every participatory religion, it is, to those with the gift or discipline to perceive it, right here, right now.” (Ursula K Le Guin, “A Non-Euclidean View of California as a Cold Place to Be”)

Essentially, we were bringing the utopian vision of marriage, of everlasting love, of stability, as the guarantee of a future, into the mud, the chemotherapy, the scent of starch on hospital blankets, into right here, right now. Into the reality of biology, of absurdity, of existing as tiny specks on a sleeping god turning over, yawning, and destroying everything in its path. Promising forever really meant our shared ecosystem as long as we could sustain it, our shared star as long as we didn’t run out of nuclear fuel. My self as long as all my cells still constitute my self. Because that’s what it is, isn’t it? As long as. The true, surging, magmatic core of reality – churning, relentless change.

This was heartbreaking. It was inviting pain into my life with almost surgical precision. I was telling the Trickster god to hurt me here, right here, in the ventricles of my heart. I was hanging by a hook, pointing to my stomach, telling the butcher the exact location of my most tender meat. I was trying on wedding dresses and then spending nights in the emergency room as my fiance’s fevers spiked to numbers I didn’t know were possible. But the invitation of that level of pain meant that I didn’t experience the regret of Nick dying without promising him forever, promising him as long as.

On one January night, while the city was evacuating in the inferno of a wintertime wildfire, unbeknownst to me my fiancé was fighting for his life while I watched The Jerk with my mom and sister in my apartment. He died early that morning, passing away before I could see him. The train tracks switched again, I saw the Coyote loping away, and I returned to the realm of the living, unlike I had ever known it before. Born into the new world.

“My friends and I had an ideological devotion to experience and a belief in the nobility of independence. We were entirely convinced by the dichotomy Hannah set up in “One Man’s Trash” — that a girl could either be experienced or happy — and it seemed to be confirmed by our knowledge of feminism and our desire to be modern. To choose experience was to choose to be single when you were young, to be willing to undergo some precarity because you had to look out for yourself, to be curious about the characters you would meet and what effect they’d have on you, and to rely on your friends for solace and support. To choose happiness was to try to make a career, a marriage, and a stable life as efficiently as possible.” (Lillian Fishman, “Would You Rather Have Gotten Married Young?”)

“There were two in paradise, and the choice was offered to them: happiness without freedom, or freedom without happiness. No other choice.” (Yevgeny Zamyatin, “We”)

After Nick died, I entered a phase of somewhat-manic-experience-accumulation. We all know of the seven stages of grief. As of now, mine have looked a little like this-

Crashing parents’ trip to a budget resort in Puerto Vallarta for mother’s 60th birthday and feeling physical pain in my heart so profound I often Google “heart attack symptoms”.
Constant partying, very little sleep, ill-advised flirtationship I convince to go to a furry convention with me
Dislocating knee dancing to Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Talking to Yourself” at my own house party.
Dating an indie musician on and off again for nine months who can’t decide if we are friends are not
Multiple cross country road trips followed by surprise extended period of homelessness
Writing increasingly surrealist essays
Becoming abrasive and purposefully off-putting on dating apps
Profit (?) ((Still waiting on this one!))

I was experiencing complete weightlessness. In the confusion I became an amoeba, moving toward the chemical sensation of warmth and away from the chemical sensation of cold.

On some level, I felt a need to throw myself into the world, violently, to see if it would catch me, or how it would catch me, or where it would place me. I needed to fill my life with after, as quickly as possible. This phase came to a literal, crashing halt when I dislocated my knee. I was now forced to sit still, I cannot stress this enough, literally, and the grief I had been ignoring started seeping into the edges of my consciousness.

I experienced “staying still”, steeped in the emotion, the loneliness, like an itch under my skin, a physiological signal to move. Was this listlessness not really alchemy, I thought? Why not use my sadness and listlessness as propulsion into the netting of the world? Wasn’t that productive? Or … was it escape, running from processing, pure distraction? Is there a difference?

I went to an art exhibit at the MOCA in Los Angeles recently. Two pieces were contrasted next to each other- Jaques Villegle’s “Rue Piruoette” and Betye Saar’a “Gris-Gris Box”. The former collaged ripped posters on a piece of plywood. Layered on top of each other, original meaning was lost, confusion and overwhelm the effect. In the former, objects were neatly arranged, each given their own space and emphasis. Care, arrangement, and distinction gave the otherwise random objects meaning. It was as if the empty space between them was held together by an invisible, ancient energy. A sense of place and memory. A shrine.

I avoided feeling the fullness of grief because I feared the prospect of missing Nick for the rest of my life. It seemed impossible to me that the feeling of missing him would ever lessen. But now, I’m worried about forgetting. Since he died so young, I will likely face more years with him than without him, and I worry that I can’t possibly hold the memory. In the beginning, memories floated to the front of my mind with an accompanying sting, fresh as a new puncture wound no matter how many memories I’d already painfully waded through, an ocean of needles. Now it’s less frequent, and I miss the constant stings, that at least brought him to the front of my mind. But I was on an airplane recently, and for no reason at all I could vividly feel the weight of his head on my neck when we would fly together. Something about the stale air of the airplane cabin held the memory for me, I didn’t have to. Grieving wasn’t my task, it was the entire scaffolding of the new world. The whole world, a kind conspirator in holding the memory.

“The heaviest of burdens crushes us, we sink beneath it, it pins us to the ground. But in love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man’s body. The heaviest of burdens is therefore simultaneously an image of life’s most intense fulfillment. The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become. Conversely, the absolute absence of burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant. What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness?” (Milan Kundera, “The Unbearable Lightness of Being”

When I think about what I want now, in this dizzying freedom, I still want love, and partnership. I want a love that presses me down, forcing me to wrap my fingers into the grass, into the dirt. A weight that intermingles me.

But- there’s something similar that happens when I’m writing, when I face myself and come back to an essay like this again and again. When I think about my thesis as I drift off to sleep, when I retread painful memories, when I send an essay out into the world, which feels very much like “weight”. A weight which makes me feel close to the ground, to the intermingling feeling, to sublimation. Giving “weight” to writing was something that I was afraid of for quite some time. Because that meant risk, failure, just as letting a body press you down means the risk of loss, of being flung into weightlessness again. But when I allowed it, writing with seriousness feels like digging into the earth again.

This is the reality of the new world. If I allow it, grief becomes the scaffolding and writing the weight which ties me to the earth. Is life really so dichotomous - weight and stability through partnership, or freedom and meaninglessness through solitude? I hope not. If you think of yourself as experiencing only one, the other looks like a Euclidean utopia, on the horizon, definitionally impossible. Even worse, to think you should, or even can, crystalize one path when you are young. I would never advise you, reader, on matters of the heart if I couldn’t offer up my own to you. I hope I have in this essay. So let me just say to you what I say to myself: you are not here to crystalize one path in your youth. You cannot even if you wanted to - The Trickster god remakes your world all the time. You are here to alchemize your loneliness into freedom, and to tie yourself to the earth, to do both. To reject dichotomy in favor of duality. Yes, finding where you can let love weigh you down means exposing to the butcher exactly where to cut you. It also means the grief scaffolds the world, which invites the world to be a partner in remembering. Utopia is not on the horizon, it is right here, right now, and always will be, even as you and the world are remade thousands of times. You have all the time in the world and no time at all. You are an organic being living in geological time. Get married, get divorced, love, grieve, fuck it up. I love you!