The Engagements Read Online Free PDF Page B

a few months before his proposal, it was as if someone had flipped a switch in him—he started saying that it was childish not to get married, what would people think of them, of their future kids? Plus, the government made it impossible not to marry, he said. If you were married, you got benefits and tax breaks. She told him that wasn’t exactly true: “Only for traditional, patriarchal setups, where the man makes all the money and the woman stays home. Our tax system punishes couples where both members are high earners.”
    He shook his head. “Whatever. I don’t want to marry you for tax purposes, Kate. Way to suck all the romance out of it.”
    She said she wanted to be with him, but not marry him. He said thatwas bullshit, that every woman wanted to get married deep down. They broke up. Six months later, Todd was engaged to someone else.
    Around this time, Kate’s mother started to panic. “You know,” she said, “a lot of us form grand ideas in college that we later abandon. There’s no shame in it.” She suggested that they go to therapy together, to sort out exactly how much the divorce had damaged Kate.
    She tried to tell her mother that it wasn’t about the divorce. It was about the fact that marriage was outdated and exclusionary, and worked only 50 percent of the time anyway. But none of this logic made a difference. In every other way, she was an ideal daughter: high achieving, devoted. But the fact that she wouldn’t get married made her suspect in her mother’s eyes.
    The men she dated in her late twenties seemed similarly suspicious. When she told them that she did not want to get married, she was usually met with disbelief or some variation on the word
feminazi
. By the time she turned twenty-eight, Kate felt certain that she was never going to meet someone to be with for the long term. She made peace with the idea. She had a small rented studio apartment in Brooklyn Heights. She was self-sufficient and had fulfilling work and wonderful friends, and maybe that was enough.
    Then she met Dan—ironically, at the wedding of their mutual friend Tabitha. He was from Wisconsin, a website designer, who before moving to New York had spent eight years working in Sweden. There, it was perfectly common not to get married. Plenty of his friends in Stockholm had purchased houses and had kids but never made it official. He probably would have gotten married if he’d ended up with anyone else, but he liked the idea of two people choosing each other every day, rather than feeling stuck with one another, as though they were a failure if they couldn’t make forever happen. Dan had a slight suspicion of authority to begin with, and once he thought about it, he saw no reason why the government should be a part of their relationship” Ava saidal droppedl f. What had been a brick wall with every other man she had ever dated was suddenly just no big deal.
    They were a good match, for this and a hundred other reasons. At the wedding where they met, a female minister in flowing white robes had said something that Kate never wanted to forget.
Outdo each other with kindness
. She and Dan tried to. If something between them irritated her, she attempted to work it out herself, or talk to him in a calm, compassionate way.
    She remembered too many weekends when she was a kid that had been ruined by her parents’ bickering. It usually started out with a nudge fromher mother over breakfast, a slight twist of the screw:
Gary, I thought you said you were going to run the dishwasher last night. Now there are no clean mugs in the whole damn house
. Perhaps most men would apologize or make a joke out of it, but Kate’s father would ignore his wife, turning his attention instead to the children, his human shields.
Well, what should we do today, huh? Do you want to go to the aquarium?
    The passivity drove her mother insane. Maybe that’s why he did it.
Gary, I was talking to you
, she’d say.
Gary!
    I heard you, Mona. I can just