Why, in My Mid-40s, I Suddenly Want a Wedding

Reported by Vogue.

There's a specific kind of cringe that arrives somewhere in your 40s, when you realize you've been introducing your long-term partner as your "boyfriend" to people who know better. For writer and Observer columnist Holly Smale, that low-level discomfort — plus two decades, two kids, a pandemic baby, and her sister's emergency town hall wedding — is what finally cracked open a question she'd spent years shutting down.

Smale and her partner Mark got together in their early 20s, fell into the rhythm of shared flats and communal living, and eventually bought a house and had children. By the time their 20th anniversary arrived, she writes, staying together had simply been a matter of silently agreeing every morning not to break up. Marriage, she had long argued, was a collision of patriarchy and capitalism — and as a heterosexual couple, wasn't cohabitation their one remaining act of defiance? Mark agreed, they moved on, and the relationship quietly grew up without a wedding to mark it.

When the Politics Stop Protecting You

The shift didn't happen in a single conversation. It arrived incrementally — through an interview with a queer historian who showed her how radically marriage has been remade over time, and then more sharply through her sister's cancer diagnosis, which turned an idle engagement into a panicked town hall ceremony watched over FaceTime. According to Vogue, Smale describes something "softening — or maybe decaying" in her as she watched that rushed, love-soaked moment on her phone screen. The political argument she'd been carrying for two decades suddenly felt less like a conviction and more like a shield she'd forgotten she was holding.

What she found herself wanting wasn't a performance — no remortgaged house, no name changes, no grand spectacle. What she wanted was something communal: a signal, after years of drifting forward on waves of chaos and routine and fertility, that the life they'd built together was intentional. On Christmas morning, Mark handed her two pearl rings in a box and asked. The kids came in. A friend who used to live next door came in too. They all went downstairs and ate toast. After all that deliberation, it felt, as she puts it, "worryingly simple."

There's something genuinely worth sitting with in that simplicity — the idea that a wedding, stripped of its more exhausting cultural scaffolding, can be less about tradition and more about choosing to look at your life clearly and say yes to it. When the chance to celebrate arrives, especially as grief and uncertainty crowd in, that's not capitulation. That's just being awake.

Read the original at Vogue.