The Bennifer wedding & second chances

How we choose to see them reflects our attitudes and our conditioning

I was on the side of a hill Sunday, dancing to some of the world’s best DJs spinning when I casually checked my Instagram. What greeted me was an enthusiastic share of this post in a group chat DM with a bunch of JLo fans. I was the first to break the news to my fellow music lovers on the hill. JLo and former beau Ben Affleck tied the knot—20 years in between their romance timeline.

My dancing hill pals, all cishet females who have carved non-traditional paths for themselves, were primarily pro-Bennifer-nuptials. “I love second chances,” exclaimed one. “Good for her!” said another—because we know how hard it is in these streets! Because even though I’d say the group of us is collectively apprehensive about dating and men, we have all been conditioned in “happily ever after” storylines. We are still hopeful about the kinds of love we were sold. We bought the whole package. And like a Columbia House CD subscription, we’d really like to cancel, but then you get a hint of a new Sade disc and boom, you stay in it.

In this group (though it might be said of a large swath of Gen-X women), most of us come from dads who were less than stellar, some of us barely knowing the dude at all. Some of us who had dads around experienced abuse that makes my childhood abuse look like a trip to Disneyland. Even though many of us didn’t grow up with healthy models of committed relationships, the pull of “happily ever after” is so fucking strong. Women reading, ask yourselves if you kinda wanted a Princess Bride/Wesley “As you wish” moment. We’ve only ever seen it projected to us in fairy tales, romance novels and romcoms. Intellectually we may know it’s bullshit, but fuck if I don’t want to discover it the way a monk secretly wants to see the face of God.

“Do you believe in life after love?”

Cher asks this her famous song (and now it’s your earworm, too). Hells yes, I do! I am strong and have LIVED, and I KNOW I can survive hard things and that striving for big love is worth it. I know I can build a super quick bridge to JOY in my own company if shit goes sideways.

But do you believe in LOVE after love? Yes again. I’ve now been deeply in love twice, and I’m confident I will be again someday. What keeps tripping me up? I choose emotionally unavailable men who need me to hide some part of myself. And if that’s not it, then I just don’t know how to sustain it. People start to show me their shadow selves, and I see hints of old patterns, and I freak the fuck out and run.

And after watching Halftime (the Netflix JLo doc), I’m gonna assume JLo has similar paradigms. She loves Love. She’s willing to take the risk. She wants the pics for the ‘gram! (And yes, I really want pics on the ‘gram, if I’m honest with myself.) But maybe she doesn’t know how to run the marathon—maybe, try as she might, she was built just for the sprint.

I have had a wedding. Just one, because only really rich or really poor people can get away with four weddings. I was 26 and didn’t know shit about shit. I half did what I could afford on the incomes of two recently graduated dum-dums, and the other half was a mix of what my parents wanted for their version of “the ‘gram”: The Toronto Armenian community gossip circles. I bought Martha Stewart Wedding magazines and tried to plan something big and only semi-traditional, a tug of war between my creative, undiagnosed ADHD brain and my mom.

I made my own wedding invites using clip art and bad fonts. I had a “Film” theme, even having the centrepieces made in film cans and naming the tables after movies where I could find the poster art (in those early internet days when photos weren’t ubiquitous). It was messy but also one of the best days of my life… I think. Maybe I’ve bought into the story that I’m supposed to say that. Nah, I do love a good party, and a good party it was.

What we believe about remarriage

Would I get married again? The jury is out. I would probably want to throw another big party again. I would probably not want to share bank accounts ever again. And as I get older, I certainly don’t want to spend the rest of my life with someone who only wants a mom, a therapist or a nurse.

The thing is, women don’t technically don’t NEED marriage anymore. Gen X women who still find themselves single have their own money and probably more than one good sex toy. We have property (or a rental), queen-sized beds we get to spread-eagle in (which is very handy for night sweats!), and truly badass people we love, and maybe children we adore or at least a few good “other people’s children” options. In Canada, we mostly still have human rights, and we are hitting our crone years anyways so we’re about to become invisible. (They’ll probably make us train the birthers. JK JK… I think.) What we DO NOT want is to become bitter because we can’t seem to figure out how to write ourselves back into “happily ever after,” and we aren’t actually sure we want to.

While visiting with an old guy friend recently, I remarked that one day I woke up to the realization that almost everything I’d ever learned about being a woman was imagined, fabricated, projected and produced by men. And that the stories we’ve consumed since childhood have told us that we women are only worthy when men choose us. My mom believes I will only be truly safe when accompanied by a man when the truth is many men have been utterly unsafe to me. (Case in point, after a friendly Instagram chat with a man I didn’t know who slid into my DMs this weekend, the random dude sent me an unrequested video of him jerking off, sooooo...)

Like those arcade toys in Toy Story, waiting for The Claw to select them, society says the only way to be valuable is if some man decides to aim his meat paw at us and plucks us out of the pile. So subconsciously, we wait to be picked, only to realize (often years in) that we are working through abandonment and/or attachment issues created by our fathers. And this is such a cishet view. I can’t imagine how much more agonizing this tension is between our conditioning and our reality for anyone who is Queer!

Hey, look at me showing you my beliefs! Beliefs are stories we’ve repeated so often we’ve built identities around them. And just like you can decide to vote Liberal when your heart is NDP, we can choose to change. More to come on belief work as its central to my book.

So what do you believe about Bennifer’s future? Are you cynical? Are you judging? Are you betting on how long it lasts? Or are you cheering them on, hopeful that this time, older and wiser, they have both done the work to be whole humans willing to keep doing the work it takes to get to the finish line together?

Could you leave me a note? I’m curious to hear where you stand.