Getting married was the second last thing I thought I would ever do in life.

It was never even on my list of things to accomplish. My list included college, graduate school, a nice home, lots of pets, a career I loved, and writing.

No wedding dress. No fancy reception. No marriage.

To this day, it is weird and foreign to me that some women have been dreaming of their wedding day since they were little. I never did. I didn’t play dress-up bride—in fact, I don’t remember playing dress-up at all. I played school. I played board games. I played with my brother’s GI Joes, He-Man toys, and Matchbox cars. I made my My Little Ponies act as battle horses with my She-Ra figurines.

I owned Barbie dolls and Cabbage Patch Kids; I even owned a Jem doll. I probably role-played motherhood with them at some point.

But I have no recollection of ever playing bride.

As I got older, I knew marriage was not in my wheelhouse. Sharing my life with a partner sounded great, but I couldn’t wrap my head around marrying someone. Why was it necessary?

When I was 13, I made two decisions—I wanted nothing to do with organized religion, and I wanted nothing to do with having children. If I had no religious need for marriage, and I had no need for a husband to be father to my children, what purpose would marriage serve me? At that point, wouldn’t a marriage just be a legal sanctification of my chosen partner? Like the government telling me it approves of and recognizes my relationship choice?

Fuck that noise—I didn’t need no government approval.

Besides, I had always prided myself on my ability to choose for myself. I had never felt like I needed anyone’s approval, and I considered myself lucky to have avoided being indoctrinated into thinking that I had to be a mother, that I had to have a religion, that I had to have a husband. So many of my female friends thought those things were their duties, and some of those friends did those things begrudgingly, because they thought they “should.”

I never wanted to do things simply because I thought I “should.” What I did needed to be my choice, or I wouldn’t do it at all.

So when I started dating David in 2001, I knew what I wanted—and didn’t want—from our relationship. And I didn’t want “shoulds.”

I wanted a partner. I wanted financial independence. I wanted a home, but I wanted separate bank accounts, and I wanted to keep everything split evenly down the middle. For years, we tallied up all of our bills, figured out each person’s share, figured out how much each of us spent toward that share, and then reimbursed one another for the difference, just as I had always done with all of my roommates in the past.

Only David was never my “roommate.” I always referred to him as my “boyfriend,” but sometime in my mid-30s, that terminology felt weird.

“Boyfriend” is not a 35-year-old successful librarian with whom you own a house. “Boyfriend” is a 17-year-old who takes you to the prom, buys you a wilting corsage, and then sticks you in the boob with the pin when he tries to put it on your dress.

I tried calling David my “partner”—because that’s what I always thought of him as—but if I didn’t specify his gender when I did so, people thought I was gay.

I eventually settled on “my partner, David,” or I said “boyfriend” and cringed, hoping the person I was talking to wouldn’t think I sounded like an infatuated school girl.

We went along like this, as “partners,” until February 2018, when getting married was suddenly a good idea. Changes to David’s job situation put us in a position where, for the first time, we needed to be on a family health insurance plan. We decided over texts that getting married was the way to go.

Twelve days later, we had a wedding, at my gym, in front of the squat racks.

My mother joked that this was almost a shotgun wedding, only it wasn’t my parents holding the gun. It was the insurance company.

A week after the wedding, I found myself calling David my “boyfriend” again—it took me a good while to adjust to saying “husband.” Coworkers and friends often corrected me mid-sentence until I got the hang of it.

Once I started using the word, however, it kept popping out of my mouth.

When my juniors were reading In Country, about a teenage girl whose father was killed in Vietnam and who suspects her uncle was exposed to Agent Orange while serving, I told many of them about my husband’s father, who was exposed to Agent Orange and who now suffers from advanced Parkinson’s as a result.

When one of my juniors wrote her final personal essay on becoming vegan, I told her about my husband, who has never eaten meat or seafood in his life, and about my mother-in-law, who is still vegetarian at age 75.

When one of my seniors talked about how she wanted to live in the city rather than the suburbs, I told her that I felt the same, and that, had my husband not insisted on living in the burbs, I would live in a city neighborhood instead.

I found myself saying “husband” so often while teaching that I wondered why I hadn’t talked to my students about David that much before. It felt wonderful and freeing to acknowledge, as a teacher, that I had a life outside the walls of my classroom. It felt good to talk about day to day life with kids, to acknowledge our common humanity, to tell them stories, and to discuss topics that maybe our literature studies had never breached.

But then I remembered the awkwardness of having no words for our relationship before—and I realized that it had been easier to just not talk about David than to explain to students what our relationship was. What would I have said to them, that we were living together? Would I have said “living in sin”? Would I have said “boyfriend” and cringed? Would I have said “partner” and let them wonder about his gender?

Instead, I just didn’t talk about David. I talked about my pets—all of my cats, and these last few years, my dogs—more often than anything else about my home life. My students knew my dog’s name before I ever uttered the word “husband” in class.

There were no words that were both acceptable in a teacher-student relationship and adequate to best represent my adult relationship. So I didn’t say them.

And my silence showed me just how indoctrinated I was after all.

I may have avoided the “shoulds” that some of my female peers did not when I chose against marriage and motherhood twenty years ago, but I was still limiting my language based on what I thought I “should” or “should not” say. I may not have felt like I had to get married, and I may have stared down the motherhood pressure and won, but I felt pressured to separate my adult relationship from my teaching. And I caved to that pressure.

Even more ironic, though, is how free I felt when I finally started saying “husband” in the classroom. I bought that freedom, that ability to allow myself to be more human with my students, by getting married.

That freedom was purchased with my conformity.

That I conformed and got married doesn’t bother me, however, as I am far more saddened by the 14 years of time I had with students in which I didn’t feel at ease discussing my home life.

My home life hasn’t changed one bit since our wedding. But getting married has changed how I see the pressures our culture places upon us to become certain things, the “shoulds” it conspires to force upon us.

And it has shown me that I, too, am still capable of succumbing to those “shoulds.”