The day after my friend's wedding, his brand new wife was talking about watching the wedding video, which (this being the digital age and all) she had just seen that morning. She described the camera, panning across the assembled guests, as she and the groom walked back down the aisle together, married. She described their glee and jubilation, their smiles and even their high fives, and all I could think was, "Shit! Please, please let the videographer have missed my face." Because I know that among all those beaming faces, there was one face (mine) that, if the camera lingered, would show something very unlike happiness. And I don't know if they will understand what that means.

Mark tells me I have a smile that doesn't reach my eyes. I used to use it, back in the days before I knew about his sex addiction, when I would meet his female "friends" who gave me a bitter feeling I couldn't explain. I used it in the months after I found out about his addiction, in situations when social custom dictated that I smile but when I felt so ripped apart inside that it was nothing more than my lips conforming to convention. There is some chance that something like that false smile, a smile of my lips but not my eyes, was plastered across my face like a disguise at the wedding. But I suspect, in fact, I hope, that unwatched as I felt I was in that moment, I didn't even try, but let my honest gaze follow them, thoughtful and unsmiling.

I had not been to a wedding since Mark's revelation of sex addiction and the ceremony was the part of the weekend I was dreading. I walked into it, full of nervous tension and false bravado, knowing this was the great obstacle I must pass before I left. In preparation, I treated the family friend, with whom I was sharing a suite, to my Gollum-like rantings before the wedding. I had gone up to the room to shower, after dismissing her suggestion that I watch the photos being taken. So, she entered the suite, unheard by me, while I was in the bathroom: in the bathroom, clutching the sink, watching my face go through ugly contortions as it tried to hold back tears; in the bathroom, sobbing and cursing in the shower, tight chested and hurting and angry.

She was lying on her bed, silent, as I left the bathroom and went to my part of the suite, where I tried to sit in meditation, tense and breathless, until I gave up, slumped forward and began muttering and cursing to myself aloud. I told myself I was strong. I told myself I could do this. I told myself I would smile: smile my falsely, unnaturally lipsticked smile. I took a deep breath, and walking back to the bathroom to paint my lips to receive that false smile, said fully aloud, "I can do this!" And she called my name to let me know she was there, quietly thinking I was a raving lunatic.

I took my seat, on the groom's side, and watched the other guests. I watched the bridesmaids file down the aisle, doing that silly stepping thing that all bridesmaids (except mine, I would have none of it) do. And I watched the bride, walking down the aisle with her mother. Her mother, the widow. Her mother, who had almost lost her only daughter to a serious illness around the time that daughter met my friend. Her mother, whose face was contorted, like mine had been before the ceremony, in trying to hold back a different kind of tears, tears of love and pride and joy. And I wanted to weep again at the fantasy of weddings, at this day that doesn't represent all that marriage is or will be.

I listened to them make their vows, listened to them promise to be loyal and faithful, to be with each other for better or worse, in sickness and health, until death parted them. And I thought of how sincerely the groom made those same vows to a beautiful woman years ago, and how he did not keep them. And I thought of how Mark made those vows to me, how he insisted on including the word "faithful" as a talisman to keep himself safe, and I remembered how his vows floated up and dissolved against the chapel roof, gone as soon as spoken. I thought about how the weight of eternity in those vows is a crushingly heavy burden for any of us to bear, and how marriage, like recovery, is best taken one day at a time.

As I watched them walking back up the aisle arm in arm, newly married, I may have smiled, but that smile was a lie. Yet the way I felt in that moment was not angry or tense or hurt anymore, but sorrowful, compassionate, solemn, wondering where those vows would lead them.