“My friends and I don’t belong to each other by blood, by marriage, by law, by ceremony.
We owe each other nothing. Yet we DO take care of each other in sickness and in health.
Till death do we part, apparently. Because we just love each other. We just DO.”
-Elizabeth Gilbert

These words, from Elizabeth Gilbert, have been sitting with me for a full week. They’ve been rattling around in my bones, showing up behind my eyelids as I drift off to sleep. She posted an update on her Facebook page, which I didn’t even know I followed until it popped up on a recent scroll, though I’m guessing I liked it during the “Eat Pray Love” times, or when my own interpretations of that novel led me to make some major life changes (well, as many “major” life changes as a 21-year-old college student at a liberal arts college in Minnesota can make). She had surgery recently and posted an ode to her friends as they helped her come back to health. It is an ode to the voluntary love they share, the unspoken vows they have with another, to care for and be present with and to love, always. If you want to read the full passage, it’s here.

I’ve got a pretty weird and random faith in the divine; I don’t believe that God makes things happen or not happen for us, and don’t you dare console me about a breakup or a diagnosis or any shitty thing (or any good thing, for that matter) with the phrase, “Everything happens for a reason.” And yet! I still believe that words -- books or poems or posts by Elizabeth Gilbert, for example -- come to us when we most need to hear them. That words show up in the display section of the library, or as a gift in the mail, or on our Facebook scrolls for a divine reason. This post and these words struck a particular chord with me (see: bone-rattling and eyelid-movie-screening mentioned above). I needed these words this week, and there they were.

If you’ve been around my Instagram this past year, you may have seen that in the course of a few months in 2019, I became an ordained minister and officiated not one but two! weddings of some of my dearest friends. It was the greatest honor of my life to stand with them, to speak to them, as they made hopeful, deliberate promises to one another and the life they share together. I rehearsed the ceremony in front of my mom for each wedding, getting all of my ugly tears and snot out in her living room instead of in front of Owen and Marilee and Ben and Natalie and their closest friends and family. I believe in their love -- and their love has given me further belief in marriage, partnership, and love in general.

And, if you’ve been around my Instagram this past year, you may have also noticed that there are lots of pictures of me. Just me! I am single, without a partner, though I’ve gone on dates (one day I’ll write a post about the hilarious blind date I went on where a man tried to convince me that the Earth is, in fact, a snowglobe) and actually dated (like boyfriend-girlfriend-level dated) someone this year. But, I’m not near the kind of romantic love that leads to a decision to enter into a lifelong partnership involving the government and a marriage license, or a party involving dancing and free wine. 2019 has been a year full of marriage for me -- writing sermons about love, choosing poems to read that represent that love, crafting vows to carry that love beyond a ceremony and into life -- but it hasn’t led me closer to my own kind of partnership. My family has not-so-jokingly mentioned that they’re going to create a Bachelor audition video for me titled “Always The Officiant, Never the Bride.” (At this point, who knows! Hey, Chris Harrison...?!)

I write about that -- the gentle irony of a human who’s been single for most of her 20s ushering people into marriage -- not to gain sympathy or to have you set me up with your boyfriend’s cousin’s older brother (though online dating is a bit of a drag so maybe I will take that blind date), or even for the unsolicited “You Do You, Girl!” encouragement so often bestowed upon 28-year-old single gals. I write about that because one does not need to be married, or even close to it, to understand the concept and philosophy of marriage, of love, to have the capacity to hold two souls in your heart as they make promises to each other and to those in their circle, to wholeheartedly rejoice with them as they say, “I do.” And I write about this because this year has caused me, like Elizabeth Gilbert’s surgery caused her, to think about all of the other marriage-like relationships I have in my life, particularly those with dear friends.

My friends and I haven’t stood up in front of our loved ones and make vows to one another, though a strong argument could be made that vows are embedded throughout our friendship -- in every action we do, in every word we say to one another. They’re in the Instagram posts I write, the karaoke duets I sing, the weekly phone calls, the cards sent just because, the Venmos sent for coffee on Friday mornings, the gifts outside of birthdays. They’re in the promise to show up when shit gets hard and messy and sometimes a little weird, and the follow-through of that promise.

The vows are in the listening to understand even when the idea or thought being shared is a little bonkers, in the holding space for one another as we get to that realization on our own, in the calling each other out on our unhealthy enneagram-type bullshit when necessary. They’re in sharing a bed when we stay at each other’s homes, even though there’s a guest room or a couch and we are in our late 20s, so we can fall asleep debriefing the night’s wild adventures or giggling over the song we sang in our 8th-grade choir. The promises are in the crying and laughing and praying and dancing and hugging, in the FaceTimes and cross-country flights and the postal service’s delivery of word after word of gratitude, strength, inside jokes, love.

The vows are this Elizabeth Gilbert post, sent and shared with a little heart emoji. The vows are lived, every day. And these friendship vows are just as valid as romantic love vows, even without rings or a priest or a DJ to mark them.

At both weddings I officiated, I tried to say something like this. How these couples were gathered on one particular day to make these vows, but that this ceremony -- these words they were about to speak -- were just the start of this love-filled life together, of promises to show up and love and be there for each other, through the best and worst of it. That the not-so-glamorous, everyday living that came after this Big Exciting Day, was what mattered. “I do” is a verb.

And that’s true for any kind of relationship. Vows be damned, words written in cards or typed out on Instagram or spoken over coffee or wine be damned, too, if they’re not put into action. Words matter, but what matters more is how we make those words come alive, take on meaning with our partners and friends and chosen loves of all sorts.

Just like I believe something divine planted these words in front of me, I also believe in some kind of magical divine that has connected me to my dearest loves. I hope that, one day, I’ll have a ceremony with a partner where I can write my own vows and ugly cry in front of a bunch of people and dance my ass off and -- above all else -- promise to love and try, and to keep trying even when those vows are broken and get a little beat up over the years.

And though I probably won’t throw a ceremony for me and each of my friends to celebrate our chosen unions (though that sounds like an amazing use of my time and expendable income), let this little blog post be a reminder to all of us -- single, married, coupled, humans in love and searching for love, humans who have given up on love -- that other kinds of love abound, if we choose to see it. That our lives and every relationship we have can be our own ceremonies, our own vows.

That each day can be a reminder to everyone in our circles: “I do.”