Two of Hollywood’s most sought-after actors star as bride and groom; unspecified “drama” ensues. The premise wasn’t convincing enough for my current partner, so I had to go to the movie theater with a friend.

Two years earlier, that same friend had witnessed me and my ex keeping up appearances in the months and weeks before our own long-planned wedding, only to see our relationship implode. It turns out that getting married is a pretty efficient stress test for a couple. When my then-fiancé and I finally called it off, almost all of our guests had already made arrangements to come to our grand celebration in the Swedish countryside. Some deemed it necessary to share their nonrefundable travel expenses with me—not that friend, though.

So here we were: four years after our first kiss and four weeks before our long-planned party, my fiancé and I agreed to pull the plug. Another friend told me that, in the not-so-scientifically substantiated discipline of numerology, sequences of fours are master numbers: signs from the universe that everything will be alright if you open up, let go, grow. To me, it seemed more like a bad joke from the universe. Calling off a wedding feels a bit like trumpeting that you’ve won the jackpot, only to sheepishly admit you got the wrong ticket. You were flying too close to the sun, and now you’re getting scorched.

A Struggle for Imaginative Dominance

In Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages, a recently reissued cult classic from 1983, the American critic Phyllis Rose explores the brutal work of building a unified narrative out of two subjectivities. She examines the marriages of five well-known nineteenth-century couples, including the troubled matrimony of Charles Dickens and Catherine Hogarth, and the legally unrecognized yet very happy relationship between George Eliot and George Henry Lewes. “In unhappy marriages,” Rose writes, “I see two versions of reality rather than two people at conflict. I see a struggle for imaginative dominance going on. Happy marriages seem to me those in which the two partners agree on the scenario they are enacting.”

When you think about it, white is not really a color. White is light, white is achromatic absence, presence, white is whatever you want it to be, and marriage is a fabrication of your partner. As Rose puts it: “We all make up the people we love.”