Two days before my wedding, I was standing in the alterations room of a small bridal shop off South William Street, watching a woman pin the hem of my dress, when I realised I could not breathe. Not in a dramatic way. I did not faint or cry or run out into the rain. I just looked at myself in the mirror and saw a stranger in ivory satin, smiling the kind of smile you give when someone says, “Nearly there now.”
The wedding was meant to be in City Hall, with photographs in St Stephen’s Green and dinner for ninety-six people in a hotel near Merrion Square. My mother had spent six months talking about centrepieces as if they were matters of national importance. My father had polished his shoes twice. Friends were flying in. My cousins from Galway were already texting me from the M6. Everything was paid for, printed, steamed, boxed, and waiting.
And I was waiting too, for the feeling everyone told me would arrive. Certainty. Calm. A little nervousness, yes, but underneath it a glowing rightness. Instead I had a stone sitting in my stomach every morning, and I had been calling it stress.
I met Conor when I was twenty-six, in The Long Hall, after work drinks that turned into chips on Dame Street and a walk across the city because neither of us wanted the night to end. He was kind, funny in a quiet way, and he remembered small things. He knew I took milk first in tea. He knew I hated carnations. He would stand on the outside of the footpath without making a speech about it. For a long time, I thought that was love: the small protections.
But in the year before the wedding, we had become very good at being a couple in public and very poor at being honest in private. He wanted a house in Kildare, children soon, Sundays with both families, a safe life with matching lamps. I wanted to stay in Dublin, keep my small flat in Rathmines a little longer, maybe take the job in London I had never told him I was offered. Neither of us was wrong. That was the hardest part. There was no affair, no cruelty, no terrible secret to make the decision easy. Just two decent people slowly walking in different directions while holding hands.
After the fitting, I sat on a bench near Grafton Street with the dress bag across my knees. It was a bright cold afternoon, and a busker was singing “The Auld Triangle” badly enough to make it beautiful. I rang my sister first. She answered, “Are you excited?” and I said, “I don’t think I can do it.”
There was a long silence, then the sound of her stepping out of wherever she was. “Do you mean the wedding or the marriage?” she asked.
That sentence saved me. Because I had been confusing the two. The wedding was flowers, a playlist, dinner choices, aunties asking about hats. The marriage was every ordinary Tuesday after that. The marriage was who I would be allowed to become.
I went home to our apartment in Portobello and waited for Conor. When he came in, he was carrying a suit bag and a packet of chocolate Hobnobs, because he knew I liked them when I was anxious. That nearly undid me. I loved him in that moment, which made what I had to say feel even more brutal.
I told him I was afraid we were getting married because it was in motion. Because deposits had been paid. Because our families loved each other. Because we were thirty-two and it seemed mad to start again. He sat at the kitchen table and listened without interrupting. His face went very still, as if he
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