The Dress
On getting married late in life
I’m looking for a wedding dress. I’m sixty-two years old and shopping with my adult daughter. As I come out of the dressing room wearing a loose, ankle length number she raises her eyebrow.
“Mom, it looks like a hospital gown,” she says. She’s an RN. I look at my reflection in the mirror. She is not wrong.
My search for a wedding dress seems emblematic of the cultural peculiarity of being a woman marrying late in life, as if I am searching through a sales rack of tropes and cliches, sexy bride, mature bride, ball and chain, lottery winner.
We’re having a small wedding, mostly our children and grandchildren, so I need no train, ruffles or tiny buttons. Two of our grandchildren are five, one is two. I am expecting sticky kids’ hands and leaning over to pick up toys or toddlers, so freedom of movement is key.
Traditional wedding dresses are white, expensive and lack critical coverage over shoulder, cleavage and back. The assumption seems to be that if you are a bride you are young and have been assiduously dieting and want to show as much skin as possible.
When I search for dresses more appropriate for older women I find fabric columns encrusted with sequins. Apparently if you are older you are drawn to heavy reflective fabric that will blur whatever parts of you the shapewear can’t corral.
The first time I got married I hadn’t graduated from college yet. It, too, was a small wedding, because my father had died two years earlier and it seemed too sad to do the traditional wedding things without him. My dress was knee-length, a summery linen. My grandfather, who grew up in Italy, wept throughout the service, no doubt missing my father as much as I was, only he was able to show it. There’s a saying that a bride should wear something old, something new, something borrowed and something blue, and I think of the grief as the blue, that wedding shot through with it, indigo.
In 1984, in my Catholic world, you married to have children and build a family. Getting married was stepping into a prefabricated identity, off the rack, and I wanted that then. We had two kids and when my daughter was eighteen months old my husband left us. I didn’t appreciate being assigned the label “single mother” in my twenties, but I added “working” to it and built my own identity, career and smaller family. I am no longer looking for a new name or a new identity. The ones I have are good.
When you marry in your sixties it’s not about having children, it’s about walking each other home. “Until death do us part” is less abstract, more likely. At twenty-one, death seems far away. At sixty-two, it’s not. At this age, we’ve all lost loved ones. My oldest son died when he was a teenager. My partner has lost three siblings since we met. Grief is woven in.
Everyone is surprised when I say I’m getting married, from the woman selling me waterproof mascara to the one bringing me dresses to try on. People have thoughts.
I’ve had women my age question why I would want to marry again. They were once married and swore off, some of them caregivers of spouses incapacitated by illness or addiction. To them, marriage is a ball and chain. They relish lives unencumbered by matrimony, the freedom of making their own decisions and managing their own time and money and physical space.
Others long for a relationship and want to know how we did it, as if I have access to a magic spell they might learn. Friends ask how I was able to grab that relationship brass ring out of a dating app universe that seems like a sewer. Luck? Lots of therapy?
I balk at the narrative that I’ve won some kind of late life lottery where I don’t have to face retirement alone, financially or relationally, that I’ve found someone to pick me up if I fall in the shower in which I still have not installed grab bars. I reject the scarcity narrative that since women over fifty have ceased entirely to be sexual beings we should be surprised and eternally grateful and that a man chose us rather than a version a generation or two younger.
On the dating app where we met, my partner had a picture of himself with his newborn grandson. I had a picture of myself with my infant granddaughter. Both babies were tiny, born a few months apart. They are now in kindergarten, and I have a two-year-old grandson. I raised two children by myself, and being a grandparent with another person is especially joyful. My granddaughter loves to cook with my him. My grandson is in a phase where he’s all about my partner, and I see the two of them in the garden, the little boy holding the older man’s hand, as they make the intensely interesting trip to put something in the garbage can. He swings both kids in the air the way I remember my father swinging me, airplane style, and then they all lie down on the grass together, dizzy and laughing.
That’s the prize. The unexpected generosity of a universe that brings us together, late in life, to make our own family. Love is always a risk, we know that from experience. But the gifts are great and sweeter now because unexpected.
I found a dress in a consignment store. It was taupe, flowy and comfortable. I bought it, uncertain, and took it over to my daughter’s house. She gave me that same critical eye.
“I love it,” she said, and began to pull out scarves and jewelry to accessorize the blank canvas of the plain fabric. It seems fitting to take a vintage dress and make it my own. There is no off the rack option for a late in life marriage, it takes intention and creativity to make something right for us. This weekend, we will marry, and we will build a new phase in our lives together, with something old, something new, something borrowed, and something blue.