Can't Help Falling For A Wedding

When you take a Brazilian European to Vegas, and you haven't been there since you were nine, you take him to a lot of fake shit.

Fake Paris. Fake New York. Even fake Italy. The city is a love letter to the counterfeit, a glittering monument to "close enough.” Despite it, we leaned in.

You convince him to gamble. He says no. He then becomes the only person in the entire group to actually win American money. You show him what a hidden speakeasy is, to which he pronounces "squiggel-lickey," and yet he still successfully finds it. You zipline over a mall, because he's an adrenaline junkie, and scheduling a last-minute helicopter to the Grand Canyon was just a little too hard. You collect fakes like souvenirs.

But the real fun? That's when you take him to get fake married.

The whole thing, contrary to what my friends and family believed for the better part of the day, was entirely fake. A social experiment, if you will. A way to test my mom, my friends, gauge the room a couple years before we actually do the real thing. Vegas was already a city full of fakes. We just added one more.

After my mom spent the entire trip driving us around like we were actually nine again, we finally got her to relinquish control for fifteen minutes so I could drive her to the chapel. We'd been dropping hints all day. "Last night was crazy." "We need to grab the papers." Exclusively playing Marry You, Can't Help Falling in Love, and Rude on loop on the drive there. Mr. International and I exchanged looks in the rearview mirror that should have given us away three songs ago.

She did not put any of it together until we were pulling into the chapel parking lot, at which point I believe she said "what are we doing here" approximately sixteen times in a row.

On the drive over, I had snuck my great-grandmother's ring, the one I was given when I was around nine, into Mr. International's pocket. So when we asked my mom to please just hold the camera and take a picture of us in front of the sign for fun, and Mr. International pulled out the ring, the entire voiceover of the resulting video sounds like "what" "guysss what is happening" "guys what are you doing" "just wait until your father sees this." He didn't get on one knee, we're saving that for the real thing, but it was still enough to make her break.

We ran around the chapel, waving to Elvis, taking pictures under every iconic spot, me checking how my finger looked roughly fifty times in between. The front desk clerk told us that a wedding room was open. No words were exchanged in there. Mr. International and I just grabbed hands while my mom snapped photos of us laughing into a kiss. Good practice for later.

The highlight, possibly of my entire life, was the three of us standing in front of the wall of marriage certificates, a real bride sitting in the waiting room behind us, and my mom rattling off the ratio: seven out of eight celebrity couples who got married at this chapel are no longer together. (Mom, smh.)

So yes. It was fake. It was a ploy to see if my mom would break. (She did, sixteen times.)

But here's the part I didn't see coming.

Apparently, people pay less attention to Instagram captions than I previously believed, because despite explicitly writing the word prank, congratulations rolled in like waves on both our accounts. And the ones who did clock the joke seemed almost let down. Like they'd been rooting for it to be real. Like the bit had accidentally given them something they wanted.

It is, it turns out, a genuinely strange and wonderful feeling to be that loved. To realize that the idea of you getting married, a year into your relationship, before you've even graduated college, registers to the people who know you as not just acceptable but kind of obvious. Not crazy. Or, fine, a little crazy, but the right kind.

And the truth is, I have always dreamed of my wedding. I just could never quite grasp the feeling. The actual texture of it. What it would feel like in my chest to stand next to him and mean it.

Yesterday, I got a small taste, and it hasn't left since.

It's this sensation of: wow. This feeling I have every day. This love I get to experience. This could actually last forever. The fake gave me a real preview of the real, which is maybe the most Vegas thing that's ever happened to me. A counterfeit moment that turned out to contain something true.

What I didn't fully know, until he wrote it down later that night, was that Mr. International felt exactly the same way.

He beautifully wrote:

"She said yes to living in the present, always taking a step toward the future. She said yes to loving without prejudice, with an open heart and a peaceful soul.

Today we didn't get married… but it was beautiful and fun to get a smile out of this whole process. We're not in a rush to do it; I prefer to live each day knowing that moment will come at the right time, when we are both ready in every aspect of life.

Because, in the end, the most important thing has already happened: she said 'yes' to walking beside me through every stage of this life."