(I wrote this about a month ago, shelved it for edits and promptly forgot about it until E mentioned Walking and Talking in an email this weekend. So! Here is a thing for Monday, and the last thing about marriage for a good long while. Promise.)
I read Seventeen until I was fifteen, at which point I moved on to Cosmo; I spent middle school watching television shows about high school and high school watching movies about what was going to happen in college. Once there I was introduced to both Kicking and Screaming and Reality Bites, the twin masterworks of post-collegiate ennui and drift, and spent a couple of years fixated on my future, imagining low-wage misery punctuated by the arrival of heartlessly attractive men, scruffy and scrappy, totally unlike my preppy peers, whose piercing gaze would transform me from a thick-thigh half-Jew to a mysterious, radiant waif. Then I actually graduated and they never materialized; now that I have a job and health insurance and an apartment I am, so far, capable of keeping and keeping clean, I watch movies about women who aren’t getting married and wonder: oh fuck, is that going to be me?
Bridesmaids planted the seed, of course; I saw it alone on a rainy Saturday and immediately afterward texted my (currently single!) best friend to say that I’d “spent the whole thing fearing the day when I am the Annie to your Lil.” Her response? “Haven’t seen it, so I do NOT understand that anology.” As in, calm down, girl.
And you know, she’s right: it isn’t that I want to get married right now, or in the foreseeable future (which, at twenty four, has a visibility hovering around twelve to eighteen months). It’s that it is, apparently, what happens next, the big tectonic shift around which the rest of my life will have to settle.
And so I keep watching. Last week it was Walking and Talking, Nicole Holofcener’s 1996 feature film debut, a proto-mumblecore meditation on precisely these issues featuring sneakily stunning Catherine Keener and pre-Ellen, pre-everything Anne Heche. Its one-line summary is almost identical to Bridesmaids’: single Amelia deals with her best friend’s engagement and the strain it puts on their friendship. In a funny echo, both begin with their lady heroines meeting for a quick morning coffee, dropping into one another’s lives with the practiced ease of old friends.
The two movies are otherwise almost entirely unlike: Bridesmaids’ focus on flashy set piece humor and adherence to an ultimately conventional plot, in which every woman finally lands her man, looks a little cheap next to Walking and Talking, which is just as quietly meandering as the title would suggest. Amelia goes on some dates with a man she calls The Ugly Guy and keeps lending money to her emotionally stunted, unemployed ex; Laura and her fiancée argue about sex and skincare and end up, briefly, separated.
Walking and Talking is also unavoidably older, marked by now-obsolete totems, video rental stores and answering machines and grown women in what can only be described as jorts; it is decidedly clunky, especially against modern romcom slickness. Plus for which, those pieces of dead technology actually move the plot: they aren’t background noise or 90’s color but the things that structure life on the screen, determining it the same way laptops and smartphones determine us. They’re probably the best testament to the movie’s intelligence, really, the way those pieces hold up: I don’t meet men in video stores but in bookshops or coffee shops, anywhere I frequent, and an overheard voicemail could just as easily be a email left open during a post-coital shower. I was struck watching by those voicemails, the way they anticipate the texts I send my friends every day, reaching out from our atomized adult lives to say: my sponge smells funny, I’m lonely, here is what I was thinking about just now while I washed my hair. This is what the movie captures most beautifully: the way in which we lace our friends across our lives, and expect them not to always be available in the moment but to find the time eventually to listen, and respond.
And this is probably why I keep watching: not because I’m really so anxious about my own romantic future but because I worry about losing friends to theirs, and I want to see my own insecurities and fuckups mirrored by women slightly older, much more beautiful, made glamorous by the screen between us. Set against the big pressure of impending marriage, the patterns of female friendship show up in quiet relief, fading in, and I think: oh there we are. There’s a reason those friendships are threatened by marriage, and it isn’t because women are petty and jealous but because those are what we have before marriage, before someone agrees to hang around forever, listening to us say the things we might otherwise be calling or texting or emailing about, picking up the fragments for us. Which isn’t to say that this is a condition exclusive to marriage—it happens when you live with someone, of course—but that marriage formalizes it, and asks a woman to stand up and choose one, just one, for always. Not just this is the one I love but this is my emergency contact.
Because marriage divides us on a practical level: taxes, titles, visiting rights. The registry and the home they’ll make from it. You check a different box on the forms, going from “single” to “married,” and then holding out against “divorced.” We marched through school together, advancing from one grade to the next; maybe someone took a year off in college, but if you just keep at it they hand you a diploma: you’re old enough now to have this. Whether you’ll ever be old enough to get married remains an open question.
