Here Comes the Bride - On Having a Green Card Marriage
I was standing in front of the mirror in my bedroom. It was the morning of my wedding day, but there were no bridesmaids fussing over my hair, no make-up artist, no photographer. There was just me, applying eyeliner then scrubbing it off, trying to decide between the only two white dresses I own. There was a short, flippy one with puffy sleeves, and a long wraparound one with little pink flowers on it. Was I more cute-punk-Courtney Love bride? Or was I more Grecian goddess bride?
Actually, I was Zoom bride, about to get married in my kitchen on a computer screen. More accurately than that, I was Green Card bride. And in a few weeks, depending on the speed of Brooklyn divorce courts, I won’t even be that anymore.
We had decided to get married a few weeks before. My presence in the USA was hanging by a tenuous thread, tied to a visa that was tied to a company I hated and didn’t want to work for any more. We’d been having dinner at a friend’s house, who had married her own boyfriend for a Green Card when her student visa was running out. We were discussing our situation, us on the sofa, her curled on the radiator, blowing cigarette smoke out the window.
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‘Why don’t you just get married?’ she asked, swigging her beer.
We laughed awkwardly, not looking at each other. On the walk home, kicking through piles of greying snow, he said: Well?
It was terrifyingly easy to organize. A couple of emails, a flash of an ID card and ticking some boxes, and our wedding was scheduled for February 28th, 2021. The ceremony took five minutes. The divorce has taken six months. And counting.
Being privileged enough to have been born with citizenship of a rich Western country, I had never had to think about immigration before. There are a lot of different ways you can get a green card to the US, but at the same time, almost no ways at all. Once you start going down the list and crossing out the options that aren’t available to you – invest nine hundred thousand dollars in the US economy, nope; go back to university and incur two hundred thousand dollars in student debt, nope; get hired by a tech giant in Silicon Valley as the only person who could write a certain type of coding language, nope – the average American wannabe is only really left with one option: marriage. It is ostensibly the fastest track to the American dream, and yet I remember chatting to a bartender once who had an English accent, and asking her how she was managing to stay in the US (the only topic of interest to me at the time). She told me she too was waiting on a marriage Green Card – and had been for four years.
‘I just love him so much,’ she told me. ‘I just want our lives to be able to start.’
And yet she and I both were privileged beyond measure to even have had the option of marrying someone we loved to get citizenship in another wealthy Western nation. We had both been lucky enough to be present in America already for some other, nebulous reason, lucky to meet someone by chance, our hope for our jaunt in the US solidifying into something more permanent. And of course there is the undeniable privilege of applying for a Green Card when already holding citizenship to a country full of possibilities, to pursue a slightly different type of affluent life. Immigration by want, rather than need.
Our marriage was real, but it was also not real. It was a legally binding wedding, and we were in love, in a serious relationship that we thought was careering down this path anyway. But it was also not something we would have ever done after only nine months of dating if US immigration wasn’t hanging over our heads like a vulture. And it’s this debate over the veracity over the marriage that is making it so hard to get over, more than a year later, since broken up and deported back to England.
We had both treated it like a joke. I had conveyed it as a joke to my friends, who were at first horrified and then overjoyed, adding it to an ever-growing list of stupid, impulsive things I had done (like moving to New York in the first place). He and I had joked about it to each other, googling whether or not we needed rings to make it a real wedding, signing a pre-nup to protect assets we barely had and then getting drunk right afterwards. We had joked about it during the ceremony, when we managed to fill out the license incorrectly and had to stop while I ran upstairs to print another one, as he killed time by explaining to the eighty-year-old officiant from New Jersey what Hinge was. We were both wearing sliders below our formal attire, because you couldn’t see our feet on the computer screen. The photos we took on the roof afterwards (to be used in the eventual Green Card application as proof that we were in love and I wasn’t an immigration bride) looked like an Adidas advert, the bright yellow umbrella we held to protect us from the February drizzle looking like a prop in our photoshoot. But if you zoom in on the photos – not the in-between-shots ones, most of which we are smoking in, and my favourite of which is of me smiling at the camera while he surreptitiously reaches down to pluck the cigarette out of my hand – in the proper ones, you can see in my face that I think it’s real. Every inch of my face is filled with ecstasy, with gorgeous disbelief. I could feel it in my sweaty palms as we said I do. I could feel it when I put the dress on. Whatever I may have said to anyone else, this was real to me. We were making a commitment to each other that we knew then (and certainly know now) it would be very hard to disentangle ourselves from.
And yet, whenever I talk about it now, in the aftermath, I immediately make a joke about it. I can’t ever talk about it seriously, because I’m so embarrassed that I thought it could have ever worked. The only way I can talk about it is to act like it meant nothing, that it was just a piece of paper that I could happily rip up and get on with my life, if the situation required it. Is it just a defence mechanism? Is it me making a joke before someone else can, because if anyone ever made a joke about it to me I would be forced to punch them in the face? Or is it to avoid reckoning with the seriousness of the situation, that I am a divorced 30-year-old who was married for just eight months, that I will forever after have to tick the ‘divorced’ box on any form I fill out, that I will have to explain this to every person I date from now on: that-time-I-got-married-but-not-really?
“We had both treated it like a joke. I had conveyed it as a joke to my friends, who were at first horrified and then overjoyed, adding it to an ever-growing list of stupid, impulsive things I had done.”
I think part of my compulsion to tell our marriage story with deprecating humour is down to the fact that I’m embarrassed to admit that marriage was something I actually wanted. Much of my life has been non-conventional, and I regularly wax on about how I never want to buy a house, or have kids, or tick off one by one the milestones that are implicitly laid out for women. Most people have caught up by now to the fact that feminism is about choice, but the thought that, beyond immigration, beyond ‘doing it for the story’, I did really want to be legally bound to someone, to be a wife; to say, even only in my head, that I had a husband – makes me recoil. Was I really just following convention after all? My main regret about getting married is not that it didn’t work out, is not that I’m now having to get divorced. It’s that we didn’t have a proper wedding, that our friends and families didn’t witness me walking down the aisle and saying vows, that we didn’t get drunk and dance and celebrate our relationship. It’s something I didn’t realise (or didn’t admit) that I wanted until we had already decided not to do it.
And as long as I’m treating it like a big laugh, I can’t expect anyone else to take it seriously. I can’t expect anyone to understand how this was ten times more devastating than your average breakup, because we had to fill out forms that said we had irreconcilable differences, that said we didn’t want to be together anymore, that we were so set on the fact we weren’t meant to be that we were making it official. Making it impossible to take back. And yes: maybe it was fun and crazy and devil-may-care, getting married in my kitchen over Zoom, keeping it a secret from most of the people we knew in New York and squeezing each other’s hands under the table whenever people brushed up against the topic. But there was nothing funny about taking the bus back and forth to the courthouse, going through a bodyscanner, handing over a stack of papers to a woman who had seen twenty people like me that day, watching her rifle through the detritus of what I thought my life was going to be, declaring it in order and rubber stamping it. Even I can’t turn that into a funny story.
No-one really knows what goes on in someone else’s relationship; what makes someone get back with the guy who used to put her down in front of her friends, or the girl who cheated on her. All the knowledge you have of someone else’s love is the sanitized parcels they hand to you when you ask about it. So it’s my fault that no-one really knows that in that moment, I thought I was married, that I was a wife who had a husband, that I could see my life unspooling before me, a life I never thought I would be lucky enough to have.
Words: Megan Jones
