I was finally getting married. That’s what I kept telling people. I didn’t say I was finally getting married “again,” because bringing up a first marriage during the planning of a second marriage seemed to be a major buzz kill for everyone involved, especially me. I suppose this is because it reminds the bride and groom, at a time when their biggest worry should be buttercream versus spun sugar, that these partnerships don’t always work out. That love does not always conquer all. And I didn’t want to hang that cloud over my fiancé, Ian, because this was his first wedding (a term I didn’t like for him either, because it implied he might have a second wedding). So in the same way that World War I was known as the Great War until World War II, we were simply planning our Great Wedding, and we tried not to talk about first anythings until our first meeting with the rabbi.
Ian called our rabbi “the hot rabbi,” because she was young and hip and, okay, let’s just say it: hot. I didn’t mind him calling her hot. In fact, I found it reassuring, because it was a clear sign, exactly when I needed one, on the brink of our Great Wedding, that Ian was not gay. The one wedding detail I was certain about was that I did not want to publicly declare my love for someone in front of my closest friends and family only to have that someone, two years later, realize he might be gay. Again.
Yes, okay, yes: That’s what happened to me the first time around, and that’s what I told the hot rabbi at our first meeting when she asked if either of us had been married before.
The hot rabbi blinked, then nodded. Like I said, she was hip. She lived in New York. What woman today doesn’t have a guy-who-turned-out-to-be-gay story? Admittedly, it’s a smaller, and somewhat stupider, subset that has a husband-who-turned-out-to-be-gay story, but my point is, the hot rabbi was appropriately not shocked. She said she didn’t need to know all of the details, although she was happy to listen if I needed to talk. But I didn’t need to talk about that. I have talked about it so much, the story is on Audible.com. (Seriously.) It was more than a decade ago. It was amicable. We labeled index cards with our meager belongings and divided them up. We shared a cat for a while. It stung me a bit when I realized he was going to have a husband and kids before I did. I think it stung him a bit when he realized I was getting paid more to write sitcoms than he was getting paid to save lives. So we gave each other space to have—or have not—without judgment.
The hot rabbi then asked if my ex-husband was Jewish. This seemed like a moot point to me, but I told her, yes, he was Jewish. She nodded again and made a note.
I remember how happy my parents were that I was marrying a Jewish doctor. It was like winning the Jewish lottery, until he turned out to be gay. After that, my parents cared less about my boyfriend’s religion than his ability to name at least three pro ball players. Therefore, it was nice, but not essential, that Ian turned out to be Jewish as well. Ian was a bad-boy motorcycle-riding tattooed lawyer-poet-chef who proposed to me on a beach at sunset, riding a white horse, dressed as a knight. The fact that he was Jewish was the least remarkable thing about him.
In the spirit of full disclosure, Ian told the hot rabbi that his mother had converted to Judaism before he was born, but she might now consider herself more of a Buddhist, and while we were on the subject of the gays, she was also a late-in-life lesbian who had recently married a woman. The hot rabbi made another note, then mused that it was perhaps fitting that our wedding was taking place during New York’s Gay Pride weekend.
This fact, I have to admit, had somehow eluded me. As I started contemplating the irony of this, and wondering which of our carefully laid plans might be derailed by the parade route, Ian went on to explain that his dad was Jewish, and although his dad died when Ian was young, Ian still considered himself a Jew, and wanted a Jewish wedding, so here we were. Ian and the hot rabbi smiled at me. I smiled back, pretending to have been paying attention. Then the hot rabbi had this question for me: “Did you ever get a get?”
I had heard of a get. I knew it was some kind of Jewish divorce certificate, but it felt like Number 1,764 on my list of priorities when my marriage ended—slightly less pressing than figuring out what to do with all of our wedding photos, and about as exciting as informing my credit card companies that I needed to change my name back. Our Jewish divorce was definitely less urgent than our non-Jewish divorce, which was complicated enough, especially since I was attempting to fill out the forms myself with the help of a do-your-own-divorce book and a gay production assistant from the show where I was working.
I mention the gay production assistant not only because he was very helpful, but also because at that time in my life—when my marriage was ending for the most irreconcilable of differences—it seemed like everyone in the world was gay. It wasn’t just my husband: Two of his groomsmen came out after our wedding, and, in a very unexpected twist, one of my bridesmaids. Looking back, I’m not sure if it was a wedding party or a White Party.
I was tinkering with stand-up comedy then, and onstage I only talked about things like why a clerk at the ninety-nine-cent store would shout, “Price check!” Offstage, however, I would talk to my friend Rob, a fellow aspiring stand-up, about everything else. Rob was a big guy with big glasses and a big personality. He was also the first person who tried to make me laugh about the fact that my husband had realized he was gay. Rob was endlessly fascinated and amused by my story, and asked me a lot of questions like: What were the signs? Has he told his family yet? How did he tell you? A year later, Rob came out. He also lost about half of his body weight, since he wasn’t hiding anymore, and it became clear to me that in Rob’s eyes (now in contacts), my husband was the hero of my story.
My story: Every time I told it, someone came out to me. I was telling it at a Hollywood party to a cute guy who I thought was flirting with me only to realize he was married. To a man. He explained that he had never even dated men until he met his husband while traveling abroad. Then I told that story to my friend who hosted the party, and he confessed to me that he considered himself bi, which he said was difficult for any potential partner to comprehend. For example, he said, how would I feel about dating him? When I realized his question was not rhetorical, I blushed and respectfully declined. Then I told that story to a male friend whom I knew was straight, and he also confessed he was thinking of dating men, but after coming out to his stunned Beverly Hills parents and getting a couple of gay relationships under his belt, so to speak, he decided he was actually more interested in women, and he’s now married to a woman who had previously considered herself a lesbian. My feeling, at this point, when everyone’s sexuality seemed to be in flux, was simply: Pick a side! I’m fine with it all! Just declare a major!
I was thinking about what a relief it was that I could finally tell my story without outing anybody when the hot rabbi announced that I should “get a get.”
She explained that Ian and I did not technically need the get in order to get married, but without it, under Jewish law, our children would basically be considered bastards. This might be a problem when and if they wanted to marry a nonbastard Jew or go to a Jewish school for nonbastards. (She didn’t use those words exactly; she may have used the term “illegitimate,” but that was the idea.) She also thought the process might be good closure for me.
It sounded like the opposite of closure. It sounded like it would require reopening the lines of communication that my ex-husband and I had finally and, I would say, mercifully, shut down, after trying for years to prove that we were actually the friends we kept saying we were. We were friends. We wished each other well. It was just easier, I think, to wish each other well from afar.
Also, we’d had a version of closure. At one point, when his parents were having a hard time accepting the idea that their son was gay, that it was something he was born with, they cut him off financially. He was in med school at the time and rather strapped for cash, and the one thing he really wanted was to buy a house. So I decided to help him with the down payment by giving him back the extravagant emerald-cut engagement ring that he, out of guilt, had told me to keep. I had stored it in a safe deposit box, not wanting to wear it, not ready to sell or reset it. I would occasionally visit my ring, visit my old married self, but even with nobody present to witness it, I was aware how pathetic I looked sitting in a bank cubicle modeling my wedding ring. So when I had the opportunity to return it to its rightful owner in the spirit of forgiveness and friendship, I jumped at the chance. I said, “With this ring, will you not marry me?” And we had a little moment, and he bought a little house, and that was that. Until now.
In order to get a get, I would need to get back in touch with my ex-husband and persuade him to go before a panel of three rabbis and officially “release me.” The process is actually more offensive than I am making it sound. The tradition is based on a completely sexist biblical verse (Deuteronomy 24:1), which states: “A man takes a wife and possesses her. If she fails to please him because he finds something obnoxious about her, he writes her a bill of divorcement, hands it to her, and sends her away from his house.”
First of all, I do not think my ex-husband found me obnoxious. He might have wished I had a penis, but if anything, I was the one who had grounds for “sending him away from my house.” However, with my Great Wedding less than three months away and the hope of legitimate children on the horizon, I decided this was not the time to go Gloria Steinem on the Old Testament.
When I called my ex-husband in Los Angeles (I was living in New York at the time), he was surprised to hear from me, happy to hear I was getting married, and a little dubious about what I was asking him to do. I assured him I would pay the fee and do all the homework; his only responsibility would be to show up. We decided that although it was possible to get a get without being in the same place, we would try to get ours the next time I was in Los Angeles. He even suggested we have a “get-together” afterward so I could meet his kids. I started to like the idea of a get. It sounded like it might actually be good closure after all.
Our awkward reunion took place outside a barely marked industrial building that served as an office for the Orthodox rabbi whose name I got through an online organization that facilitates gets. (Yes, there is such an organization, it’s based in Brooklyn, and operators are standing by.) We made small talk while I pressed the buzzer. (You look good. You, too. How are your parents? How’s New York?) It slowly became clear, as we ran out of small talk, that nobody was responding to the buzzing. We called the rabbi’s number, which was his home number, and unfortunately he answered, and that’s when we learned that there was confusion about the time, and we’d have to reschedule. We explained that we couldn’t reschedule. It had taken us over ten years to make this appointment. The rabbi said he would try to locate two witnesses, and we should give him an hour.
That’s how it came to pass that we had an hour to kill, and my ex-husband said his partner and kids were nearby shopping, so maybe we should have our get-together now. It was too late for lunch and too early for dinner, which seemed appropriately symbolic of our relationship, but we found a faux-French café nearby that would take us.
It’s not often a girl gets to sit down with the man she thought she would have kids with and the man he had kids with, but the truth is, they were a pretty perfect family without me. I had met my ex-husband’s partner at a Christmas party years earlier, and I liked him immediately. He was handsome and smart and kind and funny, and whether it was accurate or not, I found it flattering and comforting to imagine that he was the male version of me. Now they’d adopted two beautiful boys who looked like they crawled out of a Baby Gap ad. As I watched my ex-husband juggle juice boxes and crayons and children’s menus, he smiled at me and warned: “Get ready.”
Finally the rabbi called and said he could see us. When we arrived, all of us, he explained the process might take another hour, so my ex-husband told his family he would call them when we were done.
The rabbi was old, and his two witnesses were even older. They sat on one side of a table and we sat on the other. We had to say our names in Hebrew, which already was a problem because mine was supposedly Ariel, but I was told in Sunday School that the female version of Ariel is Ariella. Feeling strongly that somebody should be the female version of me in this process, I went with Ariella. We also had to state that we had come freely without coercion, and then we watched in respectful silence as the rabbi, who was also officially a scribe, wrote our divorce document by hand, with pen and ink, in Hebrew.
After what seemed like an eternity, the document was half-finished. When my ex-husband left to feed the meter, the rabbi fixed me with a stare and asked the question that had clearly been bothering him since we arrived: “Who was that other man who came with you?” Since I wasn’t sure what the official Orthodox stance was on homosexuality, I said it was my ex-husband’s friend. “And whose children were those?” he asked. I didn’t like where this was going. I asked if this would affect the get process, because we had been there a long time as it was. He assured me it would not, so I admitted that my ex-husband was gay, and that the other man was his partner, and those were their kids. The two ancient witnesses looked at each other, which was the first and only indication that they spoke English. “I think that’s sick,” the rabbi said flatly.
“It’s not sick,” I said. “They’re very happy.”
Then, in a terribly unoriginal attempt at a joke, the rabbi said, “Which one is the man?”
“They’re both men,” I said. “They’re both very good men.”
When my ex-husband came back into the room, I felt ill. I had flown cross-country and paid five hundred dollars in cash so three old holy men could sit in judgment of him for an hour. And the irony was, he was much more Jewish than me! I barely remembered when Passover was every year, while his partner had converted so they could raise their children as Jews. I was fuming, wondering if we should forget the get, get out, get while the gettin’ was good. I was composing an angry letter in my head, venting to the hot rabbi, praying this wasn’t representative of my faith, when we were informed that our document was complete. Then we were asked to stand. And face each other. And then my ex-husband was asked to look into my eyes and repeat some phrases that meant basically: “With this document, I release you.”
And as we stood there, just as we had on our wedding day, he looked even more handsome. And grown-up. And happy. And I thought about why he had married me in the first place. Yes, he loved me, but also, he was probably afraid he would never be able to have a family if he didn’t marry a woman. And now he had that family without having to compromise any part of who he was. And I thought about what he gave me all those years ago when he had unofficially released me. He gave me my single life back. And as much as I hated the heartbreak and longing, it became the basis of my writing career, which led me to a job on Sex and the City, which led me to New York, which led me to my bad-boy motorcycle-riding tattooed lawyer-poet-chef.
And then I thought about how this tribunal, this ridiculous judgmental tribunal, is what my ex-husband faces every day, sometimes when he least expects it, sometimes from family, sometimes from within, and how hard it must have been to overcome that judgment in order to be honest with me and with himself. So as he dropped the get into my open palms, which made it legally binding, I felt proud of him, and proud of us, for releasing each other to our proper destinies.
“I’m happy you’re getting married,” he said. “Now I can finally stop feeling guilty.” I told him he had no reason to feel guilty. But he said he couldn’t help it. Some things, I guess, we’re just born with.