It’s Never Too Soon to Marry Mr. Right

“I want to marry you,” John said. Just like that. No bending down on one knee, no prepared speech, not even a tiny velvet box.

We had been dating for just two months. But there we were, sitting in my car at Universal Studios after seeing “Back to the Future Part II.” I thought, geez, what will we talk about after “Back to the Future III”?

I said yes, even though it wasn’t exactly a question.

I’ve got his ring on my finger now, and all of a sudden I’m not just me anymore. I’m a princess, a debutante, the happy ending in fairy tales and women’s magazines.

In other camps, however, I’m well on my way to ruining my life. Everybody wants me to explain why I’m doing this.

Not that I blame them. Despite my lack of experience in this sort of thing, I imagine being engaged is something like being pregnant (don’t even ask, I’m not): A blatant display of one’s private life.

Pregnant women constantly fall prey to strangers offering unsolicited advice.

An engagement ring attracts similar attention--it’s a conspicuous way of announcing, “Hey everybody! I’m madly in love with this guy I’m having dinner with, and--get this--we’ve decided we’re never going to sleep with anybody but each other for the rest of our lives! Are we crazy or what?”

People almost always respond, one way or another. Other engaged women smile at me in moments of secret affinity. Men in bars look and then look away, as if I’m not even there.

Among those who knew me pre-John, I exist in a sort of societal limbo. I’m 24, and suddenly my mostly single friends don’t know what to do with me.

The night I told Michele, my oldest and dearest friend, I struggled with this dilemma: Do I wait until she gets over breaking up with Paul, or do I tell her now, in person, before she hears it through the grapevine?

In the end, I blurted it out while she, John and I were having dinner.

“Oh my god!” she wailed. “I’m going to be an eccentric old maid!” A few seconds later, after regaining her composure, she congratulated us and excused herself to call her mother.

A few days later, a man whom I considered one of my best friends told me he would probably never call me again because, he reasoned, he couldn’t condone my decision.

Two other friends--one of the few married couples I know--sat me down at a Mexican restaurant one night and admitted that they thought this was a colossal mistake. “Why the hurry?” they asked. “Why do you need to get engaged now?”

Part of me suspects that my friends’ shock has more to do with the nature of my engagement than with the actual concept of marriage.

The whole whirlwind-romance thing throws them. Even I think it’s a little strange. Had I written this a month or so ago, it might have been full of terrifying moments--those panicky, awake-in-the-middle-of-the-night doubt attacks where I try to rationalize away the unanswered questions: Who the heck is this guy? What am I doing? Why do we need to get engaged now?

At my worst, I wonder if I’m being seduced by some cultural force beyond my control--the neo-traditional/post-AIDS era push toward monogamy.

I’d hate to have been subtly manipulated into marriage, but I have seen firsthand how wonderful being engaged can be.

You get to be the center of attention for a whole year. When you try on gowns, the salesladies literally put you on a pedestal. You have license to blow thousands of dollars on one party in your honor. And along with everything else, the ring screams, “Look at me! I’m special!”

Once the rice settles, though, I’m going to be somebody’s wife--with a lifetime to ponder whether I married in haste.

Perhaps I really am naive, but I don’t think I’m going to regret my decision. I don’t regret it now, even with friends and acquaintances and strangers still asking, “Why are you rushing into this?”

I honestly don’t know why. I know I love him, but, in the long run, a successful marriage is less about love than it is about coexisting peacefully in the same space.

So I could say I’m marrying John because we never fight about housework or who squeezed the toothpaste in the middle or whether it’s polite to change channels every three seconds, but that’s not it either.

I could say John is the first man I’ve gone out with who reads every story I write--even the ones I think are boring. All these things are true, but they still don’t justify marriage, necessarily.

The trouble with being engaged--defining our relationship for the public--is this sudden pressure to justify my decision. I’ve only recently stopped trying because it’s impossible to impose a logical explanation on something so mysteriously intuitive.

Marriage is a huge step, and not something to be taken lightly. Ultimately, though, the decision is mine and John’s. I can’t explain what makes him “the one.”

These days, when I’m lying awake in the middle of the night worrying, I think of what my mother told me years ago when I asked her why she married my dad. “Because,” she said, “I knew it was right.”

At the time, I didn’t see what a perfect answer that was.