pLaCe.WhErE.pOOh.rEsIdEs.

Married at 24: Crazy in Love or Just Crazy?

While her friends were hooking up and reveling in singledom, Elissa Schappell was tying the knot. Crazy in love? Or just plain crazy?

By Elissa Schappell

I’ve never placed, nor answered, a personal ad. Never dated my boss. Never gotten drunk at the office Christmas party and snogged a coworker. Never had my heart broken by a boy who was shaving regularly. I’ve had plenty of other soul-testing, humiliating, heartrending experiences, but falling in love and marrying young saved me from — or, one could argue, deprived me of — these.

It was November 1986. I was fighting my way down the congested stairway at Track 10 in New York’s Penn Station, heading for a southbound Amtrak train, when the hand of fate flung my future husband and me together.

He said, "This is hell, isn’t it?"

I said, "Yes, it is."

In that way the die was cast.

I’d spotted him earlier in the station. I’d quickly ascertained — given his disheveled hair (the cut undeniably a home job executed under the influence), his attire (black pants, turtleneck sweater, ripped coat, high tops with safety-orange socks), and his demeanor (coolly reading a bio of Cocteau while drinking coffee) — that he was not my type.

Which isn’t to say I wasn’t interested in him. His type — tufted, intellectually superior hipster — was on the list. See, in the way that birders keep a life list of the species they’ve spotted or long to spot, I had a list, of sorts, of people I wanted to have sex with: the bearded, migratory Peace Corps worker; the native-to-NYC nice Jewish boy; the flashy European artiste; and, if the situation were right, a ruby-throated girl.

On board the train, Rob grabbed the seat across the aisle from me (cheeky of him) and began telling me how he’d dropped out of grad school in Arizona and flown to New York with nothing but the coat on his back and 50 bucks in his pocket, about how he was working in an art-postcard factory and living on Staten Island with three actors, each paying $90 a month in rent. He wasn’t sure what he wanted to do — maybe start a magazine. He did know he needed to be with people who, as he said, quoting Kerouac, "burn like fabulous yellow Roman candles." A fabulous Roman candle I was not. Selling earrings at Tiffany’s, eating candy bars for breakfast — let’s face it, I was a cherry bomb.

He told me he was on his way to Baltimore for a two-day party. I told him I was on my way to DC to visit a friend from college. I left out the bit about the trip being fueled in part by the expectation of bedding an old boyfriend, who was confirmed to be STD-free.

Somewhere around the two-hour mark of our journey, he passed me a postcard. It was Robert Doisneau’s photograph of a French couple kissing on a bridge, and I blushed. Minutes later the train broke down, and I was struck by a thought so disturbing I shuddered in horror: I am either going to marry this guy, or I’m going to kill him so no one else can have him.

It wasn’t the discovery of my inner murderess that made my blood run cold. It was the idea that I wanted this man — not for the challenge or the novelty or the kicks. I wanted him to be mine. Forever. And I wasn’t ready for that sort of love. It was too soon!

In the end it took six hours to get to DC. At my friend’s house, I phoned my ex. "I can’t see you," I said. "I met this guy on the train . . ." At which point he started laughing. He’d laugh again, I was told-but not as hard — when he heard months later that I was still dating Rob. I couldn’t blame him. No one was more surprised than I was.

After all, I was supposed to be Holly Golightly, traipsing around Manhattan in search of raucous parties and hearts to break, not Holly Homemaker ferrying out to Staten Island at midnight because she couldn’t go one night without sleeping in her boyfriend’s bed. Still, as Rob doubled me back on his bike to his place from the ferry station singing Sonic Youth’s "Schizophrenia," I realized it was only a matter of time before we’d wed.

Getting married at 24 is a curious thing. The news of our engagement wasn’t met with the collective sigh of relief that comes from family and friends when you settle down later in life. There was no, Oh, thank God, she’s not going to die alone. Or, Finally I can stop fixing her up and worrying about her putting the moves on my husband.

There was, however, shock. My college friends (who admittedly had been forced into playing air-traffic controller on more than one occasion to keep boys from colliding in the hallway outside my room) had always joked that by the time I settled down and got married, I’d have to be wheeled down the aisle in an iron lung.

On top of bafflement was the sense that I’d cheated. Gotten out of line and moved to the front. Even had a church ceremony, after which our wedding party, none of whom were married, shot us with Silly String and pellets from toy guns.

Having never lived alone — I’d gone from a communal house in college to having roommates in New York City to living with Rob — I had never had any privacy. Even though I didn’t feel dependent on my roommates, I wasn’t exactly independent. In hindsight, it would have been good for me to realize I could live alone, with no one to let me in when I forgot my key, no one to pay the bills, no one to talk to me in the middle of the night when I couldn’t sleep.

On the other hand, Rob and I hadn’t had a chance to develop the deadening domestic routines that can come with years of living alone. We had no issues regarding how the bathroom should be cleaned, no boring rituals like insisting every Sunday be spaghetti night. And while we were both occasionally haunted by the specter of old lovers, there was no tangible wreckage to deal with. No insurance dramas, no divvying up of real estate or sharing of country houses. No issues of custody regarding pets or children.

And yet, even as I was grateful for my mostly happy marriage, there were times when I was jealous of my unmarried friends’ romantic dramas. It’s twisted, but when my friends talked about how, through some intricate web of sexual liaisons, they’d all gotten genital warts from the same guy, who supposedly got them from a girl who’d slept with a famously promiscuous rock star, I envied them the rock star’s genital warts.

I felt even more out of it when, after listening to them lament the sorry state of their personal lives, they’d say, "You wouldn’t understand; you’re married." It was like saying, "You can’t appreciate this rose because you’re blind."

But I was grateful to have avoided the anxiety brought on by years of playing romantic musical chairs, where one by one everyone grabs a partner until the music stops, and you’re the only one left standing. I’d never be the desperate buyer in a sluggish real-estate market having to settle for perfect-only-if-you-squint-the big fixer-upper.

The fear of not finding anyone is compounded by the urgency of fertility. Because Rob and I married early, my biological clock wasn’t an issue; indeed, we waited seven years before getting pregnant. Which was great. If the transition from single to married is difficult, civilian to parent can do you in: Just when you’ve gotten used to the feel of a wedding band around your finger, suddenly you’re adapting to the weight of a baby on your hip and bills on your shoulders. Had Rob and I not had those seven child-free years as a couple, we’d never have laid the foundation necessary for us to raise kids without killing each other.

Over the past few years, my friends who had shaken their heads at our youthful folly began singing another tune. One aging bachelor friend laments not marrying his old girlfriend when he had the chance several years ago. A year after they broke up, she married — and now has two kids. She was, he’s now convinced, The One. On top of that, he’s dealing with the disparity between whom he’s attracted to and who is now attracted to him. The window for finding someone hot and young has slammed on his fingers, leaving him a voyeur, peering into a life he could have had. "Now I have to wait for them to work through their first husbands and hope they’ll want to have kids with an old man," he says, adding, "I’ll be ready to commit this time."

But there’s been a downside for me, too. While I knew that committing to Rob obviously meant a big change in my life — it would really cut into my dating — it never occurred to me how tying the knot might affect my career. Outside of a sunburn from our on-the-cheap weeklong honeymoon in Portugal, nothing, as far as I was concerned, had really changed. But in the eyes of the world, I had. I was a wife. Off-limits. Some days it seemed everywhere I looked — publishing, retail, the art world — doors were opening for single women simply because they still had sexual currency to spread around.

As a feminist, I was embarrassed and horrified by the idea that a woman today (say, me) would use sex, or the promise of it, to get ahead, but it did seem you could move up the ladder of success a lot faster if you were potentially available. When, at a party, a very famous, very dashing older novelist put his hand around my waist and asked me if I wanted to go skinny-dipping later that evening, my first thought was, Wouldn’t that be a story to tell the grandchildren? Forget that — wouldn’t it be good for my career? My second thought: I’m married. "I can’t," I said, regretfully holding up my left hand, feeling like I was flashing an invisible handcuff. "Oh, come on," he said in a conspiratorial whisper. Then, before I could answer, he shrugged and moved on. I felt a pang.

It wasn’t until recently that I realized my engagement ring — two tiny jewels riding a golden wave — is a child’s ring, and how appropriate that was at the time. I had no clue about marriage. I had no idea about the storms lurking out at sea, the rocks, how desire could rise and fall like the tide. And I’m glad I just blithely plunged in. Had I really thought about it, I might have bolted back to the singles jungle with my life list in hand.

In a way, Rob and I grew up together. We helped make each other — for better or worse. Getting married wasn’t about settling down or having stability; it was about joining forces for an adventure neither of us could have alone. It was like standing at the edge of a cliff with rushing water beneath us. We were happy, terrified — and against all expectations, we jumped. But we were holding hands, and even if we were falling fast, we were together. Are together.

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Marriage - The joy of growing together, growing old together.

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