Being engaged means people expect you to have a wedding

????!!!!!!

Now don’t get me wrong, I want to be married. I want to call Mohato my husband (sometimes I already do but it makes me feel like a kid failing the marshmallow test). I want to swap vows and get the law involved so there’s a gravitas to our friendship on fire. It’s not that I don’t like the idea of a wedding, I do want to say “I do”. But what’s been making me feel nervous is that I don’t feel like I’m the right woman for the job. And I mean that quite literally. I don’t feel like the ‘right woman’. 

A wedding is a testament to love and commitment, of course! However, it also feels like a pageant of sorts, where I’m competing against no one (and everyone) and somehow still expected to perform. Perform in the role of femininity. Perform in the role of being a soon-to-be wife. Perform in the role of daughter. I guess this is true for every milestone we’re lucky enough to reach. We ritualise life’s transitions so that their meaning is celebrated and communicated to our communities and also ourselves. And that’s exactly where the hurt lies. I feel fraudulent in so many of these roles, so what’s been communicated makes me feel like a phony.

One of my overwhelming feelings about life is that I’m waiting for the grownups to come home. I often approach life like this *gestures wildly* is a makeshift arrangement that only needs to hold steady until someone wiser and more capable and critically knows what the hell is going on takes over. 

Having a wedding feels like a major departure from this mindset, which is a good thing. But I don’t feel like I am the person I thought I would be when getting married. The future is now and I thought future me would be different. So, in some sense, planning a wedding feels like a public display of affection and surprisingly self-acceptance. 

Maybe the "grownup" I've waited for is already here. She was beside me all along — in glimpses of wisdom taking form at their own pace. Can traditions act not as measuring sticks of some static ideal, but as celebrations of found wholeness, however gradual? If I approach my wedding as a ceremony of belonging rather than proving, perhaps that lens offers enough.