The End of Men(95)
I asked Jenny about her parents; how were they reacting? “I told my dad we should just cancel the wedding and he was horrified. ‘I didn’t spend all this money for it to go to waste!’ he said. I think they found it easier to focus on the wedding rather than acknowledge what was happening.”
Jenny and her fiancé, Jackson, got married the next day. “The wedding was terrible. The officiant didn’t turn up. Fortunately, there was a pastor staying in the hotel. A quick-thinking hotel employee asked him to perform the wedding. He had a Southern accent and wore his coat the whole time. Maybe it was kind of wonderful. I remember looking at Jackson and thinking, ‘Remember every second of this, Jenny. It’s never going to be this good again.’ Thirty people came to the wedding in the end. Jackson’s parents weren’t there. We didn’t leave each other’s sides all night. A reception with an abundance of shrimp and champagne can be amazing or a complete disaster. Ours was a bit of both.”
After their wedding, Jenny and Jackson hibernated in their apartment. Jackson survived for another two months. Jenny says she hated the inevitably of the Plague; men will die, women will live. “It was a spectator sport. We had to watch and wait, the sexist notion of womanhood writ large by a disease. It was like in the movies when a woman says, ‘Oh, darling, stay here. Don’t go out there, it’s too dangerous! Don’t leave me behind!’ And yet that’s all I wanted to say to him. Please don’t leave me behind. Please don’t leave me behind. Please.”
Jenny first tried Adapt eleven months after Jackson died. Her friend Ellerie told her to try it. She filled in the dating app profile (nervously, having never dated online before), swiped right on a few people and organized to meet a woman with dark, curly hair whom she thought had a nice smile. Her date arranged dinner at an Italian restaurant and when she turned up, she met me.
That was three years ago. On that first date, Jenny and I talked for seven hours. She made this heartless crone feel hopeful about the future, and I’m reliably informed I made Jenny “feel like something good might happen after a long time when everything felt hopeless.” Reader, I married her.
It was a small ceremony. There was no Southern pastor wearing his coat. Our friend Kelly married us. All our friends, whom we’re still lucky enough to have with us, were able to attend. Jackson’s mom came, which was wonderful and unexpected and made Jenny cry all of her mascara off. We both wore simple white dresses. It was perfect.
When I received such an outpouring following my Bryony Kinsella article, I realized the discomfort I felt was rooted in deceit because when I wrote that article I was already with Jenny, and had been for a long time. It had always felt sensible to keep my life with her private. After the article, it felt fraudulent. And so, in typical journalistic fashion, I’m letting the world know that I’m married to a woman and getting some good copy out of it. This won’t be the last of these articles I write. Jenny and I have talked about this at length and we feel passionately that the questions surrounding love, romance, sex and relationships between women who had never previously dated women must be answered with real-life stories. There will be studies and academic analysis, of course, as there must be, but that cannot be the whole picture. I’m not sure how often I’m going to write about Jenny’s and my life together, but I promise I will. I want other women in similar positions to us to see they are not alone. Much of my work since the Plague has been focused on telling the stories of those most affected by it and this will be one facet of that.
So, I will leave you not with the story of our first dance (to “At Last” by Etta James) or the joyful challenge of decorating our first house together (I like mid-century, she likes modern; aesthetic chaos ensues), but of an argument. The only real fight we’ve ever had. I asked Jenny, two years ago, if she thought she would ever have dated a woman if Jackson hadn’t died. She nearly hit me, she was so angry. Here’s her response: “If Jackson hadn’t died, I would be married to Jackson. I never dated women before the Plague, never even considered it. I don’t know why I’ve been able to fall in love with you, Maria. There are psychologists and anthropologists and journalists and all kinds of other people busily trying to figure out women’s behavior. I don’t think it’s rocket science. I know I was lonely. I missed someone moving around in the background of the apartment as I read the New York Times on a Sunday. I missed feeling desired. I missed sex and intimacy and sharing my life with someone. I don’t think that those feelings made it inevitable that I would fall in love with a woman. But my husband was dead and I happened to go on a date with you and I fell in love. I could twist myself up in knots wondering how and why and what if but I choose not to. What’s the point? I’m happy, you’re happy. What does it matter how we got here?”
DAWN
London, United Kingdom (England and Wales)
Day 1,698
It’s how much?”
“￡768,” the mechanic says apologetically.
“￡768?” I repeat, as though repeating the number will magically decrease it.
“Safety first,” she says hopefully. There’s no point getting annoyed with her. It’s not her fault that the government’s new Department for Change has decided to review every bloody thing we use, buy and think about. Normally, I’d think it was an excellent idea, and at heart I do, but being legally required to spend nearly a grand for a new airbag (tested on female-modeled dummies), a seat belt adjusted to my height (rather than the standard male height) and a new head rest (to accommodate my height) makes me pause. I’m as grateful as anyone that deaths in car accidents have fallen by 84 percent since 2025 but I could also churlishly point out that the population has reduced by half, the economy contracted so people stopped driving as much and female drivers are safer.