The Tamesis
When you get to an age, calling someone your “boyfriend” starts to feel disgusting, even downright obscene. Mark and I met in our early 20s – a friend introduced us in a bar, and it seemed like it would work. We moved into a very small apartment above a chicken shop, and then into a slightly larger apartment on the same block. The walls and floors were painted black – we learned shortly after moving in that the previous tenant was a Satanic sex worker and had won an award.
Friends moved into neighboring apartments. For a while it felt like a happy commune – we took drinks to the shared garden and wandered in and out of each other’s kitchens in search of eggs. This was the apartment where we fought, renovated, repainted the walls, and about ten years later had our first child. These are what happens, the architecture of relationships in which our lives expand together. We bought a house and moved closer to family in order to have our second child when lockdown started. Then, one spring day, we woke up and discovered it was our 20th wedding anniversary. It turns out the secret to staying together was silently agreeing every morning for twenty years not to break up.
The movie shows that the real stuff of life happens before one settles down, with all the romance, adventure, growth and failure, leaving little room to imagine what happens next. Relationship doors close and focus blurs. The truth is, beneath the warmth of family life, a lot happens. Text messages about heating contained love letters. The whole crisis unfolds in the silent glances cast across the dinner table. 20 years later, you are no longer talking under the moonlight in Paris, but you are discovering new things about each other while washing dishes in your pajamas. The stakes are still as high as ever, even higher if you count the kids, but the field has flattened, shrinking to the size of a suburban lawn.
The first time we discussed getting married it didn’t happen because I didn’t want to. I patiently explained that marriage lies firmly at the intersection of patriarchy and capitalism. This is a threat to us all, politically and personally – why institutionalize ourselves for no reason, why willingly buy into the tools of the state? And, as a heterosexual couple, isn’t living in sin our last, only, tiny act of rebellion? I don’t want to be a “wife”: be put down. “Okay!” Mark replied, and off we went. Our relationship continued, and as we grew older, we eventually left home and had children of our own, our shared roots grew deeper. I started writing a weekly column for observer As we entered our 40s, we both frowned slightly every time I described him as my “boyfriend” (childish) or “partner” (aspiring lesbian). The other day I was interviewing a queer historian who had written a book about marriage, and the book told me how the institution had reinvented itself over the years, so that weddings often meant different things to different people—sometimes even to people who lived in the same house. During the pandemic, with our new baby working like clockwork, my thoughts on the matter started to change.
It wasn’t until 2022, when my sister got sick, that I realized they were changing. She and her partner were leisurely making arrangements to get married, but a cancer diagnosis violently disrupted their plans. After a short break from hospital, they rushed to the local town hall – I watched their wedding via FaceTime. With all the love and pain, something inside me softened—or maybe rotted. Twenty years after we first talked about it, I started discussing marriage with Mark again. This time, he was a less enthusiastic one. Rather than my initial argument being particularly convincing, he wanted to know…what’s the point now? We’ve promised each other a dozen times, do we really need to spend money to make it official? Probably not, I agree. But…maybe?
