The Wedding
—You suppose that partners marry for love, that marriage should last for life because love is eternal… blah blah blah. These and other similar sayings we hear in many of the soap operas. But reality is different. Better or worse? I don’t know. At the very least it’s more fun.
A female friend, tired of fighting with her family to make them understand and accept her sexual orientation, decided to marry. The chosen groom was my boyfriend. At the time he wasn’t comfortable with his life at home (he hardly had any privacy) and together with my friend started to build a (small) place to become independent from the world. Together they created a space of harmony and friendship.
The family of my friend, unknowing of the deceit, for the first time supported her in everything. “Our baby is getting married” you could hear them say, laughing and full of happiness, “at last her crazy youth has passed.”
We friends, who were accomplices, felt that with this farce we would be able to put an end to the suffering that my friend and my boyfriend had at the parents’ places.
We were hoping for a simple wedding but my friend’s family thought that it should have been the best of everything. When they appeared with a long white dress with a veil, my boyfriend’s legs weakened.
He didn’t know what to say. Of course, everyone thought that he was nervous to see his girlfriend looking so pretty. They didn’t imagine that with this veil they were giving her the opportunity to develop (legally) her addiction.
Our boyfriend had a certain weakness for drinking and we spent months asking him to control it for the wedding.
With the white veil he became conscious of what he was doing, and understood that he did not have the strength to deceive anybody, especially the father of my friend who was hugging him and pampering him like his beloved son-in-law or, better, “another son.”
They had to use their wits to leave as early as possible for their honeymoon, before he confessed to everyone how ashamed he was.
After surviving this stress, we met in Brisas del Mar, to the east of the Capital, in a small house near the beach, with a little fun park in what must have been the garden and a marvelous bathroom, according to what the girlfriend of my friend told me.
We friends (ten people in all) stayed for the entire honeymoon with the just married couple. We saw my boyfriend fall down several times because of alcohol; we saw my friend happy because she could be with her girlfriend in peace, without having to tell stories to anyone or hide as if they were fugitives. And we enjoyed the beach, the park, and the sand. It was freedom.
Some years have passed and today he is no longer my boyfriend but my friend. And the bride is back living with her family because the drink made her reflect on her situation: Would it be worth spending her life fighting with an alcoholic just to not upset her family? Was this what she needed?
Despite everything, the wedding worked because her family left her in peace. “At least she married,” they reason, and look with pride and nostalgia at the wedding photos.
My friend has had other girlfriends, but hasn’t had to answer to anyone because she continues to be “a married woman” and “if her husband permits it”…
They believe this, and don’t know that my friend is as free as a zunzún bird that selects the flower it wants to suck.
This is what comes to my mind whenever I hear talk of a wedding. The day that I marry, if I do, I will not be as happy as I was at that honeymoon with my friends.