The True Story of My Fake Ex-Husband

Happy Wednesday, friend!

You are reading The How to Live Newsletter: Your weekly guide offering insights from psychology to help you navigate life’s challenges, one Wednesday at a time.

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It’s an annual tradition at The How to Live Newsletter to share this story on Valentine’s Day.

❤️ Valentine’s Day can exacerbate loneliness for people who have lost partners, broken up, or are single. For many more, it’s simply an irritant.

So, I thought I’d tell you a story that reflects the paradoxical nature of Valentine’s Day and what it elicits: absence and presence, fact and fiction, and especially love and a marriage that happened once and has withstood the test of time, even if it also never happened at all.

Since I was young, I’ve always known that our society has a lot of things backward, and as I got older, I began to wonder whether we’d also gotten the idea and the timing of marriage all wrong.

After all, it takes a long time to get to know someone, and if you’re a person who wants to get married, sometimes the time it takes is forbidding. When you genuinely know the person who is the subject of the marriage question, realizing who you’re with can be crushing.

Instead of spending a year or more getting to know someone before deciding to spend your life with them, perhaps we should decide right away to spend our life with our new partner and discover, in time, whether we want to continue.

I’ve done many spontaneous and whimsical things in my life.

Some amazing, like running away with the Cirque du Soleil for a year. Some were ill-advised and traumatic, like dating my literary agent.

But one has stood the test of time, not only as a story I’ve told at dinner parties (ah, simpler times) but as an unbroken bond stretching across continents, time, language, and truth.

This is the true story of my fake ex-husband, Pablo.

From the start of college until my mid-to-late 20s, I worked in independent film in NYC. When it became clear that I wouldn’t become a filmmaker (I wrote more films than I made), I left the business to focus on writing a novel.

But then I accidentally fell into comedy when, as a hobby, I started an internet radio show called “Cindy Something” for a popular startup in Soho called Pseudo Online Network. It was 1996 or 1997.

No one remembers.

It didn’t pay much, so I’d occasionally go on auditions to supplement my meager income.

One audition was to host an internet TV show. I showed up at the office, and the casting director sent me out with a camera crew with the instructions:

“Do whatever you want.”

When given such general directions, do you know what comes to mind?

Nothing.

Absolutely nothing.

I figured I’d take the crew to my neighborhood—the East Village—where we were bound to run into people I knew, and we’d see what came of it.

We hopped on the subway, and immediately, I saw the most exquisite-looking 20-something-year-old boy. I sat next to him and introduced myself. His name was Pablo, and he was from Barcelona and spoke Catalan.

He was in the States on a business trip and was returning from a meeting.

Pablo was in NYC for only a few more days; he had no plans, so I asked him if he wanted to accompany us. He realized I was with a camera crew only after he agreed, but he didn’t seem bothered.

We got off the subway and walked. We were smoking and talking when I asked him something very unexpected.

“Should we get married?”

“I don’t see why not,” he said.

We decided to go shopping for our wedding outfits and went to the first thrift store we saw. I remember trying on a cape, which Pablo deemed “Perfecta.” I can’t remember what he chose.

But before we paid, I called my friend Marco, an “unordained” non-minister, who–like me–was game for most anything and (almost) more importantly, lived several blocks away, and asked him if he was free to preside over a wedding between me and a stranger I met on the subway.

“I don’t see why not,” he probably said.

Off to Marco’s, we went.

At around 2:30 in the afternoon, Pablo and I stood in our wedding outfits in Marco’s art studio as he led us through an impromptu ceremony, in which he informed us that our wedding contract was for five years, and at the end of five years, we had to re-evaluate and choose whether or not to renew our vows for another five years.

It seemed like a much more reasonable expectation than the actual obligation of marriage, which is FOR LIFE. Then, we kissed, and we were (fake) married. We had our honeymoon at Café Mogador on St. Mark’s Place and our first kiss somewhere else that night. I remember we went to a bar or two.

And I felt butterflies grow whenever I glanced at him, my brand-new fake husband.

I don’t remember anything we talked about. I don’t remember anything we did beyond that one day and night.

All I know is that I thought he was the most beautiful boy I’d ever met, and I felt convinced that he would be the most beautiful man I’d ever marry (I was right on that front). Pablo returned to Spain, and we kept in touch. At some point, he told me he’d gotten married, which was when I realized I was now fake-divorced.

We’ve gone years without contact, only to be in touch again without awkwardness or apology. And always, since the very beginning, signing our correspondences, “Your ex-husband/wife.”

We have forgotten that we’ve never seen each other in person since that week in our late 20s.

In many ways, sharing something with someone no one has ever shared is a bond found only in marriage.

We all want to have our signature stamped into the world, keeping us special and immortal, and in some ways, that’s what I was doing when I proposed to Pablo.

I was unconsciously creating an experience between us that no one else could share. To never be forgotten or to live without ever experiencing marriage, I did the thing I somehow knew I’d never actually do to have an anchor in this world.

No matter how far away he lives and who he lives with, we are forever bonded by this event for as long as we both remember.

If I didn’t ask Pablo to write up his recollection of the day, this would only be half a story. And, in proper Pablo form, what he wrote instead was a philosophical time capsule recounting not simply the day in question but the very nature of a truth about marriage and love that has evolved from a single act of whimsy and spontaneity.

To flesh out the day, I sent him follow-up questions. You can read those underneath his poetical memory, which does not entirely square with my memory, making this exercise even more interesting.

PABLO’S VERSION

Ode to exilic marriage

What is love? What is marriage? How can humans maintain these two imaginaries alive in this age of decadence? These three big questions can only be understood partially from one’s own parochiality.

Hence, rather than develop theories about love and marriage and about how to animate them, one can study examples and exemplars of the feeling of love and the activity of marriage and can explore ways in which the imaginary of both is prefigured within particular conjunctures.

Hence, this approximation to these questions via this small exploratory sketch of one moment between two people of different genders and different nationalities residing in different continents, and despite not having seen each other in over 20 years maintaining the bond of gift-gratitude-reciprocity which lies at the heart of both love and marriage and animates their spirit as ongoing activities.

Amanda’s audacity is the source of this marriage, which we both agreed to start, end, and continue. Marriage as a conversation is what we have, a dialogue between the two of us that began on a New York subway and has continued as we have moved on. In one day, the day of the train ride, we noticed each other, we began to speak with each other (not monologue over each other), we had our first drink, our first kiss, and got married.

A few weeks later, after having seen very little of each other, we divorced. We never stopped talking; we had our first fight, our first amends, and parted ways. Always with a tacit understanding that what we had begun had no end. Sharing a family resemblance with the exilic thought of Hannah Arendt, in our marriage and love, we acted in concert, and our deed endured through time.

Now, I write from the banks of a river in the mountainous region of Catalonia. New York is far away, and so is Amanda. Yet, her spirit, her smile, and most importantly, her ability as a dialogue partner are ever-present. Hence, the essence of love and marriage that united us and led us to part ways remains unscathed.

My follow-up questions for Pablo: I'm in bold.

Be honest. When I began talking to you on the subway, did you think I was a bit bonkers?

Not bonkers, No. Just incredibly smart, daring, and fun. You surprised me because I was used to playing that role in other people’s lives.

Do you remember how we decided to get married?

I just remember being in a bar and talking without stopping with the outcome of “We are getting married.”

(See above for my very different recollection. Or what I call “the correct version.”)

Do you remember the thrift store we went to and picked out and tried on our wedding outfits or the apartment we went to where my friend Marco married us?

I remember Marco, I remember the apartment, I remember trying on clothes and hats, but I always thought the thrift store was simply Marco’s apartment. For some reason, the two spaces have become one in my memory.

I remember the whole moment being magical, like New York was made just for us, to walk and enjoy each other as our own little world acquired meaning.

Like going down the rabbit hole, I loved it; it is how I try to live my life today. So, in a sense, you inspired a part of the person I am today.

END OF QUESTIONING.

Because I spent my first 25 years hiding what turned out to be a panic disorder, I grew to be quite gifted at pretending not to be the thing I am.

Perhaps that’s why pretending to get married wasn’t outside the realm of my truth. Because I have never been married, I can only believe Pablo when he tells me that what we pretended to have wound up reflecting, in time, the most profound qualities of the true thing itself.

And no, I didn’t get the job I was auditioning for and never got the footage. Instead, I got a fake ex-husband with whom I’m on very good terms.

❤️ Happy Valentine’s Day, Pablo, and to you, dear reader. ❤️

UPDATE: Pablo and I met again for the first time in 22 years. WATCH OUR REUNION HERE.

What's the most spontaneous, whimsical thing you've ever done? Send me an email and tell me!

Let me know in the comments.

Thank you for reading!

Until next week, I will remain...

Amanda