(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.

Some Final Thoughts on All That:

1. It was the most fun I have had in like, years.

2. I was the first person to cry, because I am an unstoppable sap. I was also the first to lose part II of our drinking game, so that right there is my second Manhattan of the evening.

3. In fact, there are precious few photographs of me without a drink in hand.

4. Which is probably because the guys had, at that point, decided I was an easy mark and taken it upon themselves to keep me knee-deep in whiskey for the evening. If you are going to get married, find some fun Ecuadorian groomsmen, won’t you? Ones who like drinking and dancing and who will encourage everyone’s terrible drunk Spanish? Guests will have a lot more fun if you do.

5. Oh also: bouquets! So heavy! My wrists are still sore. As are my feet. And my voice.

6. Dressing up like a Real Girl requires a crazy amount of stuff. You start with shoes and a dress and the proper underthings but then there is all of the makeup and the makeup’s fussy brushes and hair needs styling accessories and appliances and products. Maybe some perfume? Certainly a tiny purse and tiny versions of the makeup for touch ups. Double-stick tape for propriety’s sake. The good goddamn sense not to wear serious heels for an hour-long ceremony might be nice, too, but I was not born that way, it seems.

7. Even still, though, lacquered and shellacked and taped into the dress, looking like a bridesmaid, feeling like a fool: it really was the most fun.

I took an ill-advised nap yesterday afternoon and woke up when I was supposed to be leaving for the rehearsal, sprawled out on my little twin bed in cutoffs and a tee shirt, raw and confused and still helplessly sleepy as I put on a dress and some earrings and tumbled out the door. I drove the freeway I took to high school and listened to loud hip hop to keep from crying— about what I’m not sure I could tell you. Some particular protective layer had come off while I slept and suddenly it seemed overwhelming: my neatly done hair and nice dress, my mother’s big expensive car with its growling motor, the Los Angeles sun full and desert-warm through the windshield, every familiar inch of the 101 rolling by. The fact that I felt like I was going to a Sweet Sixteen and I was on my way to a country club to rehearse for a friend’s wedding; the fact that, even sleepy and confused, I knew perfectly well how to do this.

The Sweet Sixteens I did go to were generally lavish affairs, brunch for fifteen at a nice hotel restaurant with a video of the lucky girl receiving her bow-topped BMW, and favors for everyone who came; I would shyly valet my birdshit-spotted Honda and try to sweep inside knowingly, wearing oversize sunglasses and both of my pieces of Tiffany’s jewelery and looking at the other girls, smooth and lovely and sophisticated, put together, feeling intensely delighted when I felt I fit in. I knew it was a costume, and I loved that I knew how to put it on. It was important that sometimes I could look like a rich girl, too. I didn’t want to be one; prep school was an easy education in how little money could really get you, past a certain point. But I wanted to know I had the key to their world, and that I could pass an afternoon among them unnoticed.

This did not feel like that, exactly; I was among my closest friends, girls I’ve known since preschool, and there was no pretense or costume about it. I just liked the dress I was wearing and the way it looked on me; I had gotten a haircut, which meant neat trimmed bangs and the whole thing straight and shiny, for once. (It is deeply dismaying to me how instantly prettier I feel, still, with straight hair, more acceptable-looking, almost.) I liked looking down to the 405 pouring over the hill into the valley and talking about transit with other natives, high up above our city. It was scary because it wasn’t an afternoon in someone else’s world: I couldn’t pretend that it was just my stupid friends getting older and behaving, oddly, like grown ups.

The hour between the rehearsal and the rehearsal dinner coincided with happy hour, so we took the Ecuadorian groomsmen to a fancy bar in Westwood with pink drinks on special: padrinos, cranberry mojitos, pomegranate margaritas. At dinner we played a drinking game with the wine the waiters kept pouring; J worked out a signal with one of them, palm raised and fingers extended: keep ‘em coming, sir, in five minute intervals.

Late, drunk, he leaned across the table to me. “Ignacio is getting married tomorrow,” he said. “Do you know what that means? Do you really know what that means?”

“It means that Allison is getting married tomorrow,” I said, meaning the same thing. Neither of us is remotely ready for this, but faced with our friends we had to acknowledge: they are. They were calm at the center of it, greeting everyone, making rounds, passing through the rituals of the grown up world. Many people have expressed surprise at how traditional young couples’ weddings are; “I thought our generation would do this differently,” A observed to me the other night. But it made sense, then, among all those relatives: it isn’t how I’d do it myself, but it serves as a kind of proving ground. When we were sixteen it was enough to put on the right clothes, show up on time and pick up the right fork. Now you throw the party yourself, inviting the right relatives, putting together a reasonable registry and a playlist that won’t offend. Weddings are fucking arcane; you participate in the full cultural rite as if to say, I know what these rules are and I can follow them just as well as you can.

As far as I can tell, the difference between behaving like an adult and actually being one is that you stop seeing it as performance— there is no secret thrill to picking up toilet paper and remembering to do all of the dishes before you go away for the weekend. It used to seem like a game; some days, recently, I realize it’s become habit. But I’m young enough to be scared of it all, still, and a little scared of myself. I’m going to be a bridesmaid today; no one who looks at me will think this is a joke or a ruse or a little girl playing dress up. I might not be fooling anyone, actually, particularly myself. I might just have to be there. I’ll let you know how it goes.

(It is also true that, at least for this first one, I will have almost the exact same cast of characters on hand. This is me & K, seventeen or eighteen, after I drank prodigious amounts of wine in the bathroom of a friend’s younger sister’s Bat Mitzvah party. Actually, come to think of it, we were hiding out in the sideroom next door, a tiny salon known as The Bridal Room. This is pretty much precisely how we will spend our first weddings, I imagine, except this time, being legal, we will drink in the open, and leave the bride to ready herself in peace.)

Allison came over on my 24th birthday, in early January of this year, to say hi and celebrate and ask me to be a bridesmaid in her wedding. We sat in my childhood bedroom, where we’d played thousands of games of Pippi and Batman and Princesses and Sisters on the Run from Evil, and I told her about the new guy I’d just kissed, and how my plan for 2011 was to kiss like, way more dudes than I had in 2010, and she asked me to walk with her down the aisle while she married one dude, forever.

So this summer I’m to be a bridesmaid. A bridesmaid who adores the bride and approves of the groom and likes her dress and is, in every way, living the quietest possible version of what is usually cast as a single woman’s nightmare.

To be honest, I’m actually totally looking forward to it.

Allison was my first best friend; she is seventeen days older than I am and you can see her front porch from mine. We grew up together, and though we had plenty of other close girlfriends (many of whom we’re still close with), from 0-12 we were definitely official Best Friends, girls who always partnered up and shared our snacks and had the most playdates. Having an elementary school Best Friend is in some ways like having a rest of your life boyfriend: it means always having someone to accompany you places, and it means that someone has chosen you. Someone loves you best of all.

We went to different middle schools and drifted apart a little bit; my middle school Best Friend was named Sam, and if I thought I was the one true Angela Chase then, it was only because I had such a dead-on Rayanne by my side. Sam was beautiful and wild and usually unsupervised; when we went to concerts that ended after 10pm, her parents would send a driver to pick us up. Sam and I drifted apart when she started dating a friend’s older brother, a boy so bad that at 17 he was out in the Berkshires, finishing up some kind of punishing reform school.

But that isn’t really the story, because she’d had boyfriends before; she, in fact, always had boyfriends. It’s just that at the same time as the boyfriend happened, I started hanging out with some new girls, and she started hanging out with different ones— her friends from swim team, the boy’s younger sister and her crew. We didn’t just stop being Best Friends; we stopped being friends, period. I mourned the loss like a breakup. I missed her for years.

Because this is one thing that Bridesmaids gets right: female friendships are deep and complicated and essential and actually really fragile because they are so unofficial. When you pick a boyfriend or a husband, you give him a title and agree to a set of rules: you, and no one else. And when it isn’t you, I’ll tell you. But friendships don’t work that way: you can slide in someone’s estimation, or drift apart, whether you mean to or not. And it shouldn’t matter not to be best friends when you still are friends, but it cuts deep to know: I used to be your favorite, and I’m not anymore. Our relationship is still its lovely, cozy self but it isn’t your first choice, these days. And it’s worse when it’s another woman, another friend, because with men I understand it: I can’t be your boyfriend. But I’ve been the best friend, and the best friend shunned, and god, does it ever suck.

Everything else I have to say about the movie has been said elsewhere; I think it’s basically very funny and strangely moving and kind of offensive. It fleshes out a scenario we’ve been witnessing for years, which is great, but it would be better if someone could imagine a new one— a movie in which any sympathetic female character ends up single, for instance. Anyway, it made me think about how seriously I take my female friendships, and how infrequently I express that, because again, that’s not in the terms of the contract. When do you tell your friends you love them for the first time? And then how often, after that?