After he got down on one knee to propose (he was dressed in one- third formalwear: white tuxedo shirt with studs and tie, no jacket, and blue jeans and cowboy boots) with the engagement ring dropped into a flute of very good champagne, we started talking about when we would get married.  Actually, the proposal had been a formality he had wished for as he had already asked me in the car driving home from synagogue a week before , but he likes things romantic and official—hence the marriage in the first place; I would have been fine to live together but he insisted.

The getting married thing became complicated from the start. We were selling a house, buying a smaller one, moving to another town 40 minutes away, enrolling my daughter  in a new school; he was relocating, and we had to renegotiate  custody with my ex.  The window of time was short.  In the car one day I suggested Valentine’s Day, a holiday we both loathed as one of those made-up Hallmark-card-sell-lots-of-shit-to-make-people-feel-inadequate-days.  We  thought:  let’s make it a real holiday and besides, neither of us is likely to ever forget the date.

 Who knew it would fall on a Wednesday during a major ice storm?

But this was a marriage.  Not a wedding.  A wedding is one of those things people go into hock for.  One of those days girls supposedly dream about from birth.  Those days they never look more beautiful.  Those days of The Cake, The Dress, The Bridesmaids in Candy Colored Dresses. The Day of So Much Trauma You Have To Go On Oprah and Cry About it and Ask for a Do-Over. We were definitely not having one of those.

I never ever dreamed of being a bride even when I was one the first time at 29. Although I loved my first husband I think, in retrospect, I married because I really wanted children. I wore a simple white linen dress, the wedding was understated, the venue very pleasant and unfancy and the bill small. There was no  real trauma until the divorce.

Michael and I had about three months to ask my rabbi to perform a mixed marriage and have him get to know my soon- to- be husband, order a ketuba (a Jewish wedding document that I decided I wanted this time), help my teenaged daughter make peace with the whole idea (right!) and find a restaurant that would take a six-top on Valentine’s Day (nearly impossible). That was the easy part.  The hard part was keeping the old house clean, looking at new houses, dealing with the custody and school issues, and all the other stuff of life. All of that time Michael was still commuting to his old place three and a half hours away.

The hardest part was coping with my own growing ambivalence about marrying again, something I said, after the divorce, I would never do.  In fact that was easy compared to actually once again sharing my space with a man after we moved to the new town and new place four months after we married.

I don’t think I realized how much I had enjoyed the more than two years my daughter and I had lived just the two of us alone.

And besides our being the ultimate mixed marriage:  that between a woman and a man, Michael  and I were also forming a  union between a Federalist Republican and a left-wing yellow dog Democrat, an atheist and a God-fearing Jew, and I was to realize, soon, between a romantic, and a pragmatist.  I had thought I was a romantic when I was married to my first husband but that was only in contrast.  Michael, my second, is a true romantic.  I don’t have a romantic bone in my body compared to him. He adores me, gives me silly cards and gifts for no reason, flowers just because, tells me I am beautiful all the time; he is loving and generous and kind and thoughtful and attentive and emotionally supportive and he actually listens most of the time and remembers the important stuff.  All the things you would want in a lover -- and in a husband, if you were inclined to want a husband.

But I continue to remain fairly ambivalent about marriage, mainly because I just don’t think I’m very good at it.    I’m prickly.  I know that.  He knows that.  I’m also fun and interesting and wicked smart and funny and lots of other good things but sometimes my mind just goes off and even I’m not sure where I am. I need too much space, too much time alone.  I need to sleep by myself when I want to,  and I also need to feel, I guess, I have an out if I need it

Maybe being married for 20 years to a man I shouldn’t have been married to did that to me.  Maybe trying so hard to be the right and perfect wife scared me and scarred me for life but I still remain convinced, and I told Michael this before we married many times, and I continue to tell him, that as much as Iove him, I don’t think I do Wife all that well.

Still, on Valentine’s Day, two years ago, in the presence of my two kids and his son, with two friends to witness the signing of the requisite documents, we married in my synagogue, under a chupah, with the blessings of my wonderful rabbi. I walked around Michael seven times, hoping that the tradition might help me make it stick.  We wrote our own simple vows.  He wore one of his gorgeous thousand dollar suits from when he was a big business muckey-muck before the dot com crash took him down with it, and I wore a black skirt and a beautiful rose velvet tunic jacket he surprised me with at Christmas.  On the way to the synagogue from the parking lot, he held  tightly onto my arm as I picked my way over  the thick ice in my high heels because I think it is bad luck to break your neck on your wedding day.  In the pictures  I am smiling and crying.

After the half hour ceremony we ate dinner in an awful Italian restaurant that was half empty because of the ice storm.  I think we probably could have gotten a reservation anywhere at that point. We never have taken a honeymoon, really.

This year my anniversary card, bought at a weird little boutique in Wilmington, NC, says on the first page “I  love you and that bothers me,” and on the inside says: “And it bothers me that that bothers me.”  Michael  will understand.  But I think he will also be happy with the beautiful chrome retractable fountain pen that goes with the card.