Wed Again

Rachel Vorona Cote ended a “brief and sad” marriage to her first husband when she was 25. She reflects on how she got over worrying about a second wedding:

[S]omewhere along the way I learned that relationships don’t gain moral strength simply because they have endured. Relationships are too messy for such clean parallels. So much humiliation and self-loathing comes of treating divorce as the dark underbelly of intimacy. We don’t get one shot at long-term monogamy—if monogamy is even what we want. It occurred to me that, whether or not I wanted to remarry—and in the beginning I was not sure—divorce did not render impossible fifty years of mutual love and couch co-habitation.

By the week of my second wedding, I was stunned by the bigness of love surrounding me.

Part of me had feared that the celebration would feel uncomfortably familiar, but it didn’t and it wasn’t. My family and friends gathered around me, affirming our bond. … And while it is true that I love Paul in a way that I did not love my first husband—and that this affection shaped our wedding day—what is most important here is not comparative. I loved my first husband too, in the best way that I could in that moment, and I loved—still love—so much about our wedding. My wedding to Paul had nothing to do with my first; it was an exquisite day in the life of our own romance. The wedding was ours, and if it is not unconnected to the rest of my life, it still claims singularity—in the little particulars and in its celebration of a romance that can only be lived by Paul and me, together.