My mother, in an effort to keep me humble and rooted, likes to remind me of embarrassing facts from my childhood. Her favorite one lately: I marched up and down the hallway belting out “Here Comes the Bride” with a sheer beige curtain over my head as a veil. If anyone asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, my 5-year-old voice proudly said, “a bride.”

When my older sister overheard this, she said, “You can only be a bride for a day, idiot. What do you want to do with your life?”

I thought about it briefly and corrected my answer: “A wife. I want to be a wife.”

In my mind, the image remained the same: a radiant woman, front and center, dressed in full bridal plumage. Only a vague sense of a spouse entered this fantasy. A hazy outline of a man, wearing a tuxedo, hovered in the background like a waiter ready to fill my water glass. The idea that a bride, or wife, requires another person to define it never occurred to my childhood mind. A bride is a starring role.

Not so much, I realized much later, as a wife.

When I met my future husband in my mid-20s, I had long forgotten my childhood fantasy. Both of us were anti-marriage. Products of bad divorces, we bonded over our aversion to the concept. Late at night in bed, postcoital, eating toasted baguettes with butter and feta cheese on top, we talked and mocked that worn-out, passé ritual.