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think of a lot better ways to spend a Saturday than fighting with you about the stupid dishwasher
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    Kate would sit between them, her body filling up with concrete, willing her mother to back down. But Mona didn’t know her own strength. She’d usually take the conversation somewhere cutting and out of the blue, saying something like,
Maybe if you were able to take just the tiniest bit of constructive criticism, you might have gotten a promotion sometime in the last decade
. From there, it would start to snowball, and Kate knew that soon enough her father would be locked away in his woodworking shed out back, her mother shrugging her shoulders, asking what his problem was.
    Kate had long feared that she possessed the same ability to harm that her mother did. When Dan came along, she saw him for what he was at once, and vowed not to mess it up. Dan was a straight-up good, midwestern guy, with the right politics and a big heart. The kind of guy who would turn a tails-side-up penny over on the sidewalk for the next person to find.
    Her family grew hopeful when they met him.
    “Do you think you’ll get married?” May asked after they had been dating a few months.
    “I think he’ll be the father of my children,” Kate said. It felt right, and enormous. She expected her sister to hug her.
    But May responded hotly, “If you’re not picturing yourself in a wedding gown, that’s a bad sign.”
    Leaving marriage aside, there was the issue of weddings. These two wildly different concepts were forever entwined in her sister’s brain—if you were in love, May reasoned, you would have thoughts of butter-cream icing and swing bands and bridesmaid dresses skipping through your head at all times, and this was no different than thoughts of spending your entire life with someone. None of it appealed to Kate. She knew that a woman was supposed to want to be married, but everything about weddings made her skin crawl, nothing more so than the brides who wantedto be different somehow—“I’m not like other brides!” all her friends had declared, before promptly acting like every other bride in the history of brides. She had been to the six-figure Hamptons wedding, the Brooklyn food-truck leave it at that.”ki droppedl f wedding, the laid-back Kentucky hoedown wedding, the Irish castle wedding. They were all the same.
    Kate went along to each of them with a smile. She brought a good gift, and danced and toasted the happy couple. She didn’t mean to be a curmudgeon. She wished she could feel more live-and-let-live about it all. But deep down, she hated other people’s wedding photos. She hated the way a bride would raise up her bouquet in victory after saying “I do,” as if she had just accomplished something. She hated that even normal-sized women dieted for their weddings until they looked like bobble-head versions of themselves. She hated all the money thrown into some dark hole, when it could have been put to good use in a million other ways. Every one of her friends got so overwhelmed by the event, as if they were planning the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. Now there were even blogs for the stressed-out bride, the reluctant bride, the indie bride. But no one she knew, other than her, had stepped back and asked themselves,
Why be a bride at all?
    The outside pressure to be married was intense. This had surprised her a decade ago, but now she thought she understood. People wanted you to validate their choices by doing the same thing they had done. She was blessed—or cursed, depending on how you looked at it—to be the kind of person who really didn’t care what other people thought, as long as she believed it was right. She and Dan had never had a single conversation about whether they ought to get married just to please their parents or get everyone off their backs. But even so, Kate sometimes felt frustrated that her relationship wasn’t taken as seriously because it wasn’t a marriage. She had been with Dan longer