When I finally caved and agreed to marry TJ, everything accelerated like a runaway shopping cart—loud, wobbly, and pointed directly at a disaster, and I had no way to steer.

First, he insisted I get a diamond ring. I didn’t like the idea of wearing a big, sparkly “I’M GETTING MARRIED!” sign on my hand when I was doing it against my will. But he was adamant. So, we went to the store and found a ring in the clearance section—something I wasn’t allergic to, with a diamond …just large enough that he could brag about how much he’d spent, which was—objectively—not impressive.

Then he planned a trip for us to visit a friend of his—one I’d never once heard him mention—in San Francisco. We had never traveled together before. And I assumed he wanted to take this trip because he had planned some big proposal. So, we went. And because I was still determined to be a good Mormon girl, I could not demand a hotel room. We stayed at his friend’s house, and he was our chaperone.

Instead of exploring San Francisco, TJ insisted we drive down to San Jose so I could “show him my old haunts.” I absolutely did not want to introduce him to anyone who actually knew me, so I took him to the Winchester Mystery House.

For those unfamiliar, this is a sprawling architectural fever dream built by a woman who believed she was haunted and tried to confuse ghosts by adding staircases to nowhere and doors that open into walls. It is not romantic. It is a monument to anxiety, grief, and very bad coping mechanisms.

So naturally, this is where he proposed.

The tour ended. We were funneled out into the gift shop, blinking in the sunlight, mentally recovering from Victorian-era paranoia. I was still thinking about staircases that ended in ceilings when TJ suddenly stopped walking.

He turned toward me.

Reached into his pocket.

And produced a ring.

I remember thinking, Oh. This is happening here.
Not at dinner.
Not overlooking the city.
Not even in a park.

But outside a house designed to trap restless spirits.

I had so many questions and none of them felt appropriate to ask in the moment. Had he planned this? Had there been a different location? Was there a flowchart where ROMANTIC PROPOSAL led accidentally to TOURIST ATTRACTION BASED ON MADNESS?

Did he look around at the exit sign, the crowd of strangers, the informational plaque, and think:
Yes. This feels right.

I stared at the ring.
I stared at him.
I stared at the wall behind him, which—statistically—probably hid a staircase.

And because I had already been emotionally frog-marched to this point, I said yes and put the ring on.

Which felt fitting.
If you’re going to make a life-altering decision based on confusion and fear, you might as well do it outside a house that exists for exactly those reasons.

When we got home to Utah, I bought a clearance-rack dress that I was not at all excited to wear. We booked a church gymnasium—exactly the tacky, fluorescent-lit, basketball-court wedding I had sworn I would never have—and TJ asked my bishop, the same man who had dictated I make this terrible decision, to officiate.

Somewhere in the chaos between getting engaged and getting married, I made the mistake of existing in front of TJ’s mother. Noting my massive bosom (a hobby of many people), she speculated aloud that I must have a terrible time finding lingerie.

Well… yes. My bras were not lingerie so much as structural engineering feats. The Hoover Dam had nothing on these.

She clarified, for the wedding night. Which was adorable, because I was already about as excited for this marriage as a cat is for a bath—I hadn’t even considered a trousseau.

TJ’s mom, however, decided to fix this. She took me department-store hopping to locate the very small selection of bras available in my size that weren’t white, black, or “sad beige.” Then she marched us to a fabric store, selected coordinating materials, and—this is where the story fully leaves the tracks—

She made me custom, hand-sewn babydoll lingerie.

My fiancé’s mother handmade my honeymoon underwear.

Awkward is a word.
Hilarious is another.
Possibly “traumatizing” is a third.

I accepted it politely, because Mormon conditioning is a hell of a drug. I kept it, too. Out of shock. Sheer incredulous respect for her gall. And in case I ever needed physical proof that this had really happened.

Anyway.

On the day of the wedding, every cell in my body wanted to run. I wanted to pull my dad aside and tell him I didn’t want this. That I wasn’t ready. That this wasn’t love—it wasn’t even “like”.

But I didn’t.

I believed I had no choice.
I believed this was repentance.
I believed marriage was the price of readmission.

As a final flourish, TJ’s dad gifted us a honeymoon to the wildly romantic destination of… San Jose, California.

Yes. Again.

We spent our wedding night in a Salt Lake “romantic theme” hotel—the kind with heart-shaped tubs and mirrors that show angles no one consented to. We kicked things off with a celebratory dinner at The Olive Garden.

The Olive Garden.
A place that continues to haunt my personal mythology.

By the time we got to the hotel, the vast array of bobby pins holding my hair together had unionized against me. I started pulling them out, but apparently not fast enough, because TJ insisted on helping. His method was to grab, yank, and remove both the pin and a respectable amount of my hair. When he finished, he announced — with all the subtlety of a prison guard — that it was “time.”

I was not ready.

I complied anyway.

He told me to get undressed.

I did.

He made a snide comment about my boobs not pointing the same direction.

Romance was dead on arrival.

Then he undressed, and suddenly I was confronted with my first penis. The medical encyclopedia’s anatomical illustration did not show THAT.

What followed was not intimacy so much as a traffic accident.

When it was over, he stood up, looked down at me, and said, “You are disgusting. Go wash yourself.”

I did not respond. I did not have language yet.

Just humiliation.

Once, while watching a movie with my mom, there was a scene where a groom’s friends rushed the bridal chamber the morning after the wedding, and they draped the bed sheet out of the window to public applause, I asked her why. I got a vague answer about virginity that explained nothing and only added to the mystery. But it created an expectation.

That night, I stood up and realized that instead of the delicate, dainty droplet of blood the movie had shown, the bed looked like a crime scene. Not symbolic. Not poetic. Forensic. The sheets were drenched in blood. For a moment, I honestly wondered if something was medically wrong with me.

I scrubbed myself clean in the bathroom, shaking.

When I came back out, he had stripped the top sheets. The mattress pad underneath was soaked.

He pointed.
“You’re sleeping on the wet side.”

And that was our wedding night.

The rest of our honeymoon wasn’t much better.

We flew out to San Jose. And checked into the cheap hotel his dad had booked for us.

I found myself, once again, traipsing through the joyless Silicon Valley. And I was supposed to entertain him.

No, not that. He showed no further interest in me whatsoever, and when I tried—because I thought that’s what were supposed to be doing—he told me to stop and said I wasn’t sexy.

So, we went to a tiny roller-coaster park, we saw a couple of movies, and ate at more chain restaurants than any human should.

And I realized I did not know this man very well – because it turned out I didn’t know about a very strong opinion he had. He didn’t believe in soap.

I mean, he knew it existed; he just didn’t think it was necessary. You use laundry detergent, of course, he wasn’t an animal. And he thought a LITTLE dish soap was OK, as long as you don’t go too crazy using hot water.

And he believed in shampoo.

He had an almost religious faith in shampoo. He thought that shampoo was magical, be believed that the suds you rinsed off of your head contained enough cleaning power that as it ran down your body to the drain it was able to wash away all other germs. Without any additional soaping, scrubbing or grooming. And a heavy shellacking of Axe Body Spray would do the rest.

It explained a lot. Including why I could never breathe around him. The dread didn’t help, but neither did the chemical fog.

If this was how it was starting, I was terrified how it was going to end.