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a sense of anxious expectation lurking in the back of my mind, threatening to take over the second I let down my guard. I was pretty sure that Liv could smell it on me—something was off. A few times I caught her looking at me closely in the mirror as she restraightened her hair and I attempted to tame my locks with something that promised “beachy waves,” but delivered something that was more seaweedlike.
    â€œMy hair is out of control. I look like someone’s crazy shut-in aunt.”
    â€œNo, you don’t.” Liv laughed. “It’s sticking up a bit in the back but I can fix that.”
    As she untangled my hair, I could tell Liv wanted to ask me what was going on, her best-friend senses working overtime. I felt the words on the tip of my tongue a couple times, but physically stopped them from rolling out. Besides, what would I say?
I’m scared to marry Sam. What’s up with you?
    To be fair, marriage as a concept itself was a bit lost on me. When I got engaged I felt a bit like I was entering an anthropological study. I felt like saying to my single friends, I know, it seems crazy to me, too, but I’ll infiltrate the natives and report back. It’s not that I thought I was above the institution, or that it was antiquated or too sexist—although my Feminist Legal Theory professor could probably make a proper argument that it was, involving terms like
espousal rights framework
that I pretended to understand all semester. It was more about the fact that I’d never really pictured it happening to me. I couldn’t imagine myself in the cupcake dress, shyly smiling as I walked down the aisle, or, God forbid, throwingthe bouquet, carefully aimed to hit my most pathetic single friend. At my age I’d been that friend more times than I could count, which was only made more tragic by my lack of eye-hand coordination. This inevitably caused me to miss and the crowd to muse:
No wonder she’s not married, she can’t even catch
.
    It took me a while to pick up that I was the odd man out on this. But after seeing enough romcoms featuring girls asking a Ouija board the name of their husband, and attending countless sleepovers planning my girlfriends’ weddings down to the name of the golden retriever who would carry the ring down the aisle—a detail that seemed particularly uncritical at the age of twelve—I figured out I was for the most part alone on this one. It was kind of like when everyone was obsessed with the Backstreet Boys. I thought we were all kidding, a joke that all of America was in on. But when their song came on at the eighth grade dance and everyone screamed bloody murder I realized, alarmingly, that Backstreet was back, all right.
    It wasn’t that I didn’t want to be with Sam, it was more that I was skeptical of the idea of forever. Marriage had always seemed a little like a sham to me, and those who believed in it slightly delusional. Part of me felt like the only reason people were able to get married at all was because the reality of
one person for the rest of your life
is so difficult to picture, they couldn’t grasp how truly ridiculous, and nearly impossible, the concept actually is.
    I even tried to bring it up with my intended once, but it hadn’t gone very well.
    â€œSam,” I asked tentatively one night, while we were eatingstraight from the Whole Foods take-out boxes, him skimming film blogs and me distractedly watching
The Bachelor
, “how do you know I’m the one?”
    â€œIs this a
Bachelor
-related question? ’Cause I don’t really understand anything about that show except they bang in the fantasy suite.”
    â€œNo.” I laughed, encouraged by his banter to go on, although I probably should have shut the hell up. “I mean, aren’t you ever scared? Being with me for the rest of your life? Staying together? Forever?” I looked at him for a response but his face was