Binary Star
On wedding anniversaries and being somebody's wife
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BINARY STAR*
“Marriage is awesome. You will love being married.”
I read this in a small Facebook messenger window as I was toggling between the dozens of tabs perpetually open on my computer screen. On the other side of the exchange: someone who had been a good friend early in college, more of an acquittance later, and a welcome colleague-to-bump-into at large conferences in recent years. He had gotten married right after we graduated and waded his way through some of the immigration paperwork I was at the time terrified of. My partner and I had not quite set a date yet but did agree that this was going to be the year when we actually go through with plans we had been talking about from rather early in our relationship, and I was trying to very gingerly and very subtly discern whether we should start saving up for an immigration lawyer. The exchange that ended with this glowing review of the marriage skewed me towards an affirmative answer but did not make me any less anxious about the whole thing. Later, I would be grateful that we did actually splurge on legal help and representation though I continue to be uncomfortable with the monetary value attached to just getting someone to explain what exactly and how exactly to do. It is a huge marker of my privilege that I could call up someone to ask about lawyers and then actually find a way to hire one. But I was ready for legal talk. I was, on the other hand, not necessarily so ready for gleeful endorsements of the married life. I had fully thought, and still do, that having a piece of paper binding us in the eyes of the law wouldn’t really change much about how we are with each other. It never made sense to me why other spoke about it as if it would.
Partly, my past friend’s assertion stuck with me because the quiet transformation of our good friendship into cordial acquaintanceship was to an extent, at least for me, spurred by his at times very rigid requirements for women he wanted to date and later marry. I had less rage but also less shame concerning my political beliefs in college which meant that I was more likely to get into heated discussion of how misogyny and sexism inform someone’s dating preferences. I was also more likely to step over certain boundaries of politeness and critique people’s stories about the women in their lives. I never got into a shouting match with the friend in question, but I was displeased with his values around women and marriage and I think he knew it. Every new story about a woman in his circle, usually one that gave something up to be a wife and a mother or maybe was nudged to get married as a solution for some problem, put a bit more distance between us in my mind. I’m sure he doesn’t remember it that way – I know I am sensitive to the way people speak about women and relationships more than it sometimes serves me – but my memories color the way I took in that comment years later.
At the same time, when we were invited to an engagement party for a family member last Spring, I found myself parroting the same phrase to the happy couple because we were freshly married, half-expected to offer some wisdom, and I had absolutely nothing interesting to say. Marriage, for us, had really not been a life-changing event.
I’m writing this on our first wedding anniversary (September 27th) and older family members keep calling to congratulate us and talk about gifts. My mother-in-law bought us a steel salad spinner. She means the absolute best, but it’s such a cartoonishly appropriate display of domesticity that I couldn’t escape the feeling that we had suddenly been transported to a 90s sitcom when she brough the box out during a very small, pandemic-compliant family barbecue. It feels really odd to be congratulated for making it through a year of marriage. Why congratulate us on something – being together – that we always really wanted to do? During our almost five years of dating long distance no one ever congratulated us despite the fact that was much harder and required a lot more work than most things we’ve done in the past year. Of course, this has been an unprecedented year, studded with so many life events we could not foresee and many of them rather negative ones. Yet, we got to be stuck together, in close physical proximity, offering support to each other in person at an extent we were never able to before. Ironically, at times it has felt like the universe finally cut us some slack.
That same feeling of confusion at all the congratulations had really been with me the whole year, kicking up in my gut whenever anyone asked me what being married was like. Nothing really changed between us when we exchanged rings in city hall, but seemingly much has changed in how people perceive us. By becoming “husband and wife” we neatly fell into a box that is easy to understand, judge and legislate. My friend’s conjecture that I would love being married made me queasy for this reason – when you know how someone thinks of marriage and roles within it you don’t always want them to think that you’d be good at playing them. And it’s been something of a small internal battle with myself, negotiating how much I wanted to embrace “wife”, or how often I’d let “husband” roll over my tongue though it feels heavier and stickier than “partner” which has always been my, albeit at times problematic, default. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with being married or being a wife, it is just that I am terrified of ‘wife’ being such a strong character, such a solid trope, that it could conflate, erase and overwhelm everything else that I am.
The strength of our relationship has always been in not having to justify ourselves to each other, not having to explain to each other what we are about as an act of defense of insurance. This has allowed us to have a lot of space for togetherness and a lot of opportunity to pay attention to each other. A lot of opportunity to fill-in the gaps between our personal experiences with idiosyncrasies and ways of being that are tacitly just ours. Looking back on who I was when we met, I feel like a whole other person and, moreover, a person still looking at herself and for herself quite intently. Every time that I have been given love and have had a capacity to love during this mercurial phase feels like so much more of an accomplishment than deciding to codify our union within an institution with terrible political, economic and social baggage. The history of marriage is history of economic transactions, of power imbalances made law, of exclusion, of capitalism and compliance. Of course, marriage is also what you make of it and does not have to be locked into that history, but it would be beyond naïve to think that there aren’t some out there that still believe in its most traditional iteration, the one I want nothing to do with, but that “wife” inevitably throws me in contact with.
When we got married, I wrote about being queer and letting that lens give me a framework to challenge whatever structure was going to confine our relationship to something I felt was wrong. Today, my octogenarian grandparents wrote me an email wishing us to have “love, respect and tolerance in our marriage forever.” I thought to myself that I was so lucky to have had those things way, way before my mom was trying to zip me into my graduation-turned-wedding dress in the basement of my in-laws’ house that has unexpectedly been home for most of our rookie year as spouses. Maybe that’s why the attention and the congratulations feel so weird today, because they seem to reinforce the idea that marriage is a challenge, that it is a struggle, that it is the kind of work that can break a relationship that was formed through a genuine connection already. Maybe it is a whole other level of privilege that I always knew that that wasn’t going to be us. I guess my friend was, ironically, right and I do love being married, but only because I already loved being with my partner beforehand.
My only regret is that, now that I know kitchenware is fair game, I did not name-drop some very expensive Dutch ovens as our anniversary was sneaking up. We have to pair something with all those salads, you know?
Best,
Karmela
*In astronomy and astrophysics, binary star systems are simply systems that consist of two stars. Often, they appear to be a single star upon initial observation and can only be resolved through more sophisticated and careful analyses.
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ABOUT ME LATELY
WRITING: I wrote about identical quantum particle entanglement for Scientific American here. It was really fun and interesting writing this one since it appealed to me as a theoretical physicist and challenged me as a science writer. It centers two distinctly quantum phenomena: the fact that exactly identical particles do exist in quantum mechanics (as opposed to classical physics) and the fact that they can be entangled. Combining these properties makes for a difficult mathematical problem and the study I wrote about showed that there are physical implications to that math. This is the sort of thing that excites me about physics, and I feel fortunate every time I get to write about it.
LEARNING: I have been teaching in one capacity or another since I was a sophomore in college, and I have been in school of some sort for most of my life. Yet, every single first week of classes always feels like a slap in the face. This past week I kicked off the two classes I will be teaching at my new job, a 9th grade conceptual physics class and a 12th grade college-level Calculus elective, and sunk almost all of my time into either teaching them over Zoom or putting together materials and assignments to go along with these synchronous lectures and problem solving sessions. I learned a lot about Zoom minutiae, about my stamina with screens, about the remarkable difference between students just starting high school and students ready to complete it, about using Google Classroom and about regulating my own emotions in moments when something glitches or someone in the virtual classroom appears terribly bored. It’s been a lot, but not necessarily in a bad way.
Discussing the scientific method and big question concerning how science works and whether we can trust it with students that are just getting their first taste of a field I devoted all my adult life to has been challenging but exciting. Seeing students try hard to wrap their heads around something difficult has been absolutely inspiring. Facing overwhelming uncertainty about resuming in-person instruction next week has, on the other hand, been pretty nerve-wracking. For the time being, however, I am trying to focus on positives and not pass on anymore anxiety than I have to on to my students. I’m learning some classroom confidence, in addition to revisiting all the patience and compassion I learned while teaching college students, and hopefully that will make me more ready for whatever this school year is about to throw into my face next.
LISTENING: I heard about the passing of Power Trip’s Riley Gale on the New York Time Popcast and was surprised that I had never heard the band before. It’s really a shame because they were quite good – just old school thrash and speed metal with no unnecessary bells and whistles and a galloping energy that quickly envelops and carries you forward. Gale also sounds like he was a great person, so this is very much a big loss for contemporary metal music.
READING: This comic newsletter about running by yourself by Edith Zimmerman because it reflected some of my own anxiety.
This letter by Fariha Roisin about loneliness. Her writing, the sheer emotional intensity of it, always blows me away. Addressing this she writes
“We seem to be a culture of liars, exaggerators. I am not exempt from this, as a writer, I have had to become a better fact-checker of my own memories. But memory itself is flawed, and as a society we must become better at archiving correctly.
I’m vulnerable because I have no choice, not because I want to be. In the last few years, I’ve been pursuing truth-telling. Wildly, I’m attracted to partners that keep me in check. Maybe because I want to be challenged, maybe because I want to be better at being honest, knowing that it’s easier to be theatrical & comedic, than it is to tell the dynamic, whole, truth. Vulnerability is an art-form, and it’s a powerful skill. Above everything, it means being judicious. Real vulnerability is holistic.“
And later, on the topic of loneliness itself
“When I started writing this newsletter I wanted to understand why I was lonely. I didn’t yet know. This week should feel momentous. But it doesn’t, and I don’t either. However, after writing this over a day and a half, I think I understand why. I’m bad at validating my own thoughts, my own feelings, discarding everything I assume is messy (which is generally my own emotions). Maybe that’s just what loneliness really is: when you feel displaced in yourself because you refuse to see a clear image of who you are.”
A few measly pages of Gravity’s Rainbow.
WATCHING: Dipping into our weird-and-scary classics list we watched John Carpenter’s The Thing. Though there was more gore and body horror in this film than I expected, I enjoyed it. It is technically really strong, it moves just at the right pace for the viewer to not start thinking of it as corny or boring, and the attention to detail comes through in every shot. The plot does not necessarily always make sense nor is there much character development, but that is clearly not what The Thing is about. What it is about, and what it excels at, is a dark and fearful atmosphere, a sense of claustrophobia and paranoia more and more deeply interwoven into all scenes and dialogue as the movie goes on and an ultimately fairly unhappy ending which may be among the scariest parts of it. Enio Morricone’s soundtrack does a lot of heavy lifting as does the drab frozen landscape. The cast is just detached and blunt enough to drive it home that this is really a heavily nihilistic piece of science fiction, as opposed to more hopeful varieties of the genre. Watching The Thing definitely made me want to spend more time with Carpenter’s work.
We sort of gave up on the second season of the Umbrella Academy and decided to watch two rather different shows with an undercurrent of psychedelia and crime instead. First, HBO’s The Third Day is a six episode miniseries that is currently halfway through its run and doing a great job re-mixing something like The Wickerman and modern day, Brexit-era British politics into a story about a middle-aged Jude Law, mysterious islands, pagan fish-people and dropping acid in the woods with strangers. We inhaled the episodes that are currently available and are fairly excited to see what comes next.
The other is the first season of True Detective, a show that I remember making quite a splash when it was first released in 2014. However, I never felt like I was its intended audience, so I didn’t go out of my way to watch it. Seeing it now, I can to an extent imagine why it was a big deal at the time, but have also been pretty surprised by how bad it is at times. There is a lot soliloquizing, a lot of rather sophomoric half-baked philosophy and way too much gratuitous nudity and objectification of women. The whole thing is really an exercise in toxic masculinity and though it was probably intended to partly offer commentary on that variety of male and police culture, it is at times just too clunky to be taken as anything but self-indulgent and hokey. Of course, I want to know what the crime case at its center is about and I want to know about the Yellow King, but the plotting is unnecessarily complicated by personal details and side-stories of the two investigators. These stories simply fail to make them more real and less cypher-y and only underline the problematic politics of the show instead of giving the whole thing more texture. Shout-out to Matthew McConaughey for the sheer amount of acting he is doing here, but overall I expected something more fresh and intriguing from this series.
EATING: Our Vietnamese neighbor gifted us a giant winter melon (wax gourd) from his garden and I spent a few days trying to find ways to eat it. First, I made a soup heavily spiced with cumin seeds, onions, garlic, ginger, chili peppers, cinnamon, star anise and soy sauce with homemade vegetable stock, plenty of winter melon, curly ramen noodles and smoked tofu. The next day I cooked it in coconut yogurt then tempered with coconut oil, cumin seeds, turmeric and a good pinch of salt (sort of following this recipe). We paired this fairly spicy and creamy curry with a big pot of veggie kitchari from Vegan Richa (I made it on the stovetop), a famed Indian comfort food that I definitely felt comforted by as well. The rest of the winter melon ultimately joined my “trash chowder” soup which I made mostly of leftover broccoli stems, leftover coconut milk (a different dish only called for half a cup), sweet corn and quick corn cob stock, peppers, onions, nutritional yeast, lemon juice and a few good pinches of Vegeta. We topped this with smoky soy curls and fresh cherry tomatoes tossed in lemon juice for extra brightness and it was good enough to forget that I was just trying to use up the scraps and the melon with equal sense of urgency.
Baked sweet potato wedges, homemade guacamole, refried beans following an @vegicano recipes, a big massaged kale salad with red peppers and some cumin toasted pepitas as garnish.
Party-fare for my husband’s birthday party which included exactly two party guests in the spirit of pandemic-era responsibility: peanut marinated tofu, onion and red pepper skewers, veggie skewers with red peppers, zucchini and mushrooms, peanut satay sauce, a big salad consisting of shredded red cabbage, kale, carrots and julienned cucumbers dressed with sesame oil and lime juice, and a layer cake I am unreasonably proud of making. It consisted of yellow cake (roughly based on this recipe) and chai-spiced buttercream (I used Country Crook “plant butter” which worked really well) all topped with a generous amount of shredded coconut. We might have to throw another extremely small party just so I can make another cake like this one. (My husband made some grilled shrimp and micheladas for the non-vegans among us and I’m sure he’d like to repeat that as well – the reviews were glowing.)