L.A. Affairs: I grew up on Disney princesses and fairy tales. Was I ready for my own happily ever after?

Los Angeles Times

6 days ago

Marriage has been ingrained in me since I could form memories. That my purpose in life is to get married and have babies. I know this sounds old-fashioned and maybe that has something to do with the fact that I was born a girl in the Soviet Union to a Jewish family, but I've spent my life toggling between the tradition of marriage and the liberal Los Angeles ideologies I internalized. I've often found myself wondering if it is even possible to be a good writer, an artist and be married.
At 11 years old, I was a flower girl at my cousin's wedding in Calabasas. I remember walking down the aisle with a tiny basket of rose petals, a pair of adult-sized breasts and a petrified look on my face, unable to smile even though I was a generally happy kid. The horse and carriage, the vintage bridal kimono, the perky orchids, the flash, flash, flash of cameras, the expectations on everyone's faces, the stressful night's sleep no amount of Valerian root could remedy — I wasn't sure if all this was for me.
But I loved love. I had grown up on an unhealthy dose of Disney princesses and fairy tales and the idea that one day my prince will come. I memorized the entirety of the film 'The Notebook.' I would often fantasize about lying on my deathbed with the love of my life, hand in hand, like Noah and Allie.
In my teens, I flirted for hours with strangers on AIM. I hooked up with boys in the landscaping at the Century City mall after sharing a bowl of orange chicken at Panda Express. I had boyfriends and friends with benefits and cutouts of my idols: Victoria's Secret models like Adriana Lima taped to the walls of my childhood bedroom. I was fully liberated by the over-sexualized, MTV-obsessed early aughts.
Then I lost my virginity to my high school sweetheart who soon became my boyfriend of seven long years.
In a conversation I don't remember having, my cousin asks me when I think I will be married. I reply matter-of-factly: 'By 25.' She then scoffs and laughs in my face. 'Yeah, right.'
By the time I reached my mid-20s, I had broken up with my high school sweetheart whom I had little in common with other than the fact that we were supposed to get married. I was living alone in a studio apartment in Palms, sleeping in the same room as my refrigerator. I had stacks of books near my bed, a county government temp job in a downtown L.A. skyscraper and a stream of notifications from a dating app lighting up my apartment at odd hours of the night.
Marriage was beginning to seem impractical, uncool. I was living a life my immigrant parents deemed 'acceptable,' but what I really wanted was to be a writer, although I was too scared to even utter the fact that I was an artist back then. I honed my craft and spent my nights in adult-education writing classes.
Meanwhile, I dated plenty. A musician. A botanist. An artist. An art writer. I fawned over a co-worker, a photographer a decade older than me. Eventually I met someone my own age: a graphic designer from work who I ended up dating for 4 ½ years.
A year into my relationship with the graphic designer, marriage began to follow us around like a hungry dog. I was a bridesmaid in two different weddings, one week apart. I wore a grass-green, floor-length dress. I wore a lace, Champagne-colored floor-length dress. I got my face airbrushed. My lips lined. My eyes powdered. My cheeks contoured. My hair sprayed. I looked like a Russian mail-order bride. I was a reverse mail-order bride, born in Belarus, now an American. Actually, no one had ordered me. I had never been so unlike myself. My graphic designer boyfriend noticed. His knees buckled as he watched me dance the hora and attempt to catch the bouquet again and again.
What's funny is that my own parents didn't get married until their mid-30s. My dad was divorced, and my mom was an old maid by Belarusian standards. But I was raised on their love story: the couple of life-altering years in which they got married after three months of dating, had me and moved to the U.S.
The graphic designer and I broke up in 2020. I was a mess, but it was clearer than ever what I needed to do: stop trying to control everything and just let life happen. A few months later, a kind, gentle, handsome, funny, optimistic, wildly creative man replied to one of my prompts on Hinge, agreeing that mayonnaise was indeed disgusting.
Tyler and I fell in love and dated for four years. Together we lived through family tragedies, the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic, my grad school, his grad school, supporting each other's creative practices, quitting jobs, finding jobs, moving in together, adopting our sweet mutt Agnes. In the summer of 2024, he proposed at Crater Lake, surrounded by a swarm of dragonflies.
At first, I felt weird talking to people about the engagement. Some of our friends were newly married, some were single by choice (or not), but most were in long-term monogamous relationships with no plans for marriage. I had never been happier, but I still housed the fear that getting married was too status quo, out of fashion, an uncool thing to do. My favorite writers certainly thought so with the most popular books that year being about divorce and self-actualization: 'All Fours' by Miranda July, 'Splinters' by Leslie Jamison and 'Liars' by Sarah Manguso.
The Paris Review once asked writer Helen Garner whether being a writer and marriage are generally compatible. She replied: 'They probably are, but it probably takes a lot of generosity and flexibility. If you're burdened by a classic idea of the artist as a figure to whom everything is owed and whose prerogatives are enormous and can never be challenged, forget it.'
In one of her more judgmental essays titled 'Marrying Absurd,' Joan Didion chastises those who choose to get married in Las Vegas. She insists that they are doing it not out of convenience, but because of the fact that they don't know 'how to make the arrangements, how to do it 'right.''
How do you do it right, Joan?
Tyler and I got married in January (nine years after the age I insisted to my cousin I would get married) in Las Vegas, by an Elvis impersonator singing 'Can't Help Falling in Love' at the famous Little White Chapel with three dozen of our closest friends and relatives in attendance, two weeks after L.A.'s devastating wildfires, and the week of Trump's inauguration.
While I had my hair and makeup done in front of the hotel window overlooking the faux Eiffel Tower, with the Bellagio fountain going off every 30 minutes, I was weepy. But not because of the usual suspects: cold feet or the last-minute cancellations or the eczema reappearing after years of dormancy on my arms or the lack of sleep, although I did forget to pack some Valerian root.
At some point, I had convinced myself that getting married was uncool, not what an artist does, but here I was doing it. In fact, I was marrying the man who supported my creative pursuits the most. I had changed my mind about marriage yet again. It's a symbol of hope in a hopeless world, a sacred pact between two people, and it can be whatever the hell you want it to be.
And yes, it might not work out, but also, it might.
Maybe the question isn't: Does marriage make you less of an artist? Maybe the question is: Who gets to be an artist anyway?
The author is a freelance writer from Los Angeles. She's on Instagram: @druzova_.
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