I do not have a good conversion story. It happened like death in a Greek drama: offstage. I’d try to go to church and then I’d give up because it conflicted with my Sunday morning workouts, and I would light more candles, and I’d scroll through Twitter and go to more book parties and try to ignore the fact that there was a fissure in the pillars of the world, and that every day, every time I scrolled or swiped, I was taking a pick to it, and then one day I could not ignore that feeling, and then the next time I tried to go to church I kept going, and then there I was.
I would rather, I thought, be a Lady Marchmain—however poisonous—than accept the world as it was.
Around this time I started dating someone new. He was not Christian, but he’d been raised Evangelical—homeschool, no evolution, lots of Kipling—and he told me he was interested in converting back. He’d specified on OKCupid that he wanted a girl who believed in God. He came to church with me. We talked about the sermons. We talked about marriage, and he told me all about how love was an expansion of your sense of self, and about how marriage was joining your single narrative to a shared narrative with another person, and about how people these days were so obsessed with their own individuality and their own narrative and their own strength and their own independence that they couldn’t cope with actually, genuinely, in-the-flesh giving over your life and self to another human and forsaking all others and becoming one flesh—that maybe the most radical thing you could do in this dissipated modern world of ours, where we’re all on Tinder all the time and constantly weighing our options and maximizing our social capital, was just to say fuck it, yes and get engaged to someone you’ve known only a few weeks, and get married in an honest-to-God monogamous, death-do-us-part sacrament. We were going to have two or three children. We were going to be—socially, sacramentally, officially—a family.
If I’d been raised by conservatives, I might have bought a motorcycle instead.
The year that followed was, in retrospect, a farce. We performed, in public, hysterical heterosexual happiness. We posted a lot on Instagram.
We booked a wedding venue, and spoke to our priest, and did not tell him that, an hour before our meeting, we’d been shouting at each other because he did not think that a proper engaged or married woman should ever travel abroad with her female friends, something I often did, and longed to continue to do. A girls’ trip, he thought, would probably result in me cheating on him, that if he worked hard all day to be a provider and I went on vacation and cheated on him that would make him a sucker, and he didn’t want to be one of those.
Perhaps, I thought, he was right.
After all, I thought, in this liberal, modern age of ours, where we’re so obsessed with autonomy and individuality, perhaps there was something to be said for me learning to be less independent, less selfish, less insistent—so often my vice—on having my own story.
I cancelled a trip with my best friend.
I started wearing mostly skirts—it turned out that he liked women to dress classy and feminine and what he lovingly called trad; he did not, he told me, know what to wear himself when I was in one of my more androgynous jumpsuits. Better to complement each other, he said.