Desire
Where Sex Meets Addiction
the bride, the groom, and the dog
Standing under a black walnut tree in front of my parents' eighteenth-century house on a spring afternoon, I prepared to get married for the third time in a broad-brimmed white straw hat and a gauzy blue and white dress. One hand held the crumpled, preprinted wedding vows; with the other I tried to comfort my sobbing six-year-old daughter, dressed for the occasion in a beloved pink jumper. My heels sank into the green lawn near a shaft of June sunlight.
Weddings make the heart soar. If second marriages are the triumph of hope over experience, as Samuel Johnson famously wrote, third marriages may be the triumph of imagination over experience. They are even more improbable and require something closer to delusion than simple hope. There is something delicious and heartening about a wedding; a wedding is a chance to let our dreams seem real, a frothy ceremony that is both a great party and a powerful symbol, and this is even truer when the bride and groom are experienced and knowing.
My mother had spent months planning the afternoon of the wedding, and in ... read full excerpt from Desire: Where Sex Meets Addiction ebook
