There’s a lunch place Hugh and I often take people to in Amsterdam. I like it because it’s quick—no waiting around for menus or the check. You order and pay at the counter, and the food is good, which is to say that it’s not too Dutch. At night, a leisurely meal is fine, but in a city where the stores open late and close relatively early, I can always feel the clock ticking, especially if one or more of my sisters is with me.

On my most recent visit, it was Gretchen. The restaurant was half full when we arrived and took a table beside a group of six people in their early thirties. I guessed that they were in the middle of a business lunch and that their business was something I would never be able to understand: they optimized output strategies or were leasing the letter “W” to some country that never knew it needed it. None of them sounded like a native English speaker, but that was the language they were all using. “Me, I will be getting married next summer,” said one of the three men in their party after they’d all put their tablets and laptops away. He was balding and seemed to have no eyebrows.

“Congratulations!” said the woman seated across from him. Then they all raised their glasses in a toast.

“Do you think you’ll get married next summer?” I asked Gretchen, who is two years my junior and was wearing a tentlike black-and-white striped dress that looked good with her long silver hair. It was a ridiculous question, like asking if she might become a stripper or an electrician.

“I can’t,” she said.

Hugh asked why, and she pointed at me with her fork. “When I was twelve, David made me sign a contract swearing I’d stay single for the rest of my life.”

“I forgot all about that,” I said.

Gretchen turned to Hugh. “He made Amy sign one, too.”

“Why?” Hugh asked.

“I didn’t want to lose them,” I said. “You know how it is—girls get married, then they start having kids and you never see them again or never want to, because they’ve been remolded by their awful, controlling husbands.”

“O.K.,” Hugh said. “But a contract?”

“I drew them up all the time,” I told him. “Once, I bought Amy and Tiffany’s bedroom for a dollar. They were in kindergarten and the second grade and thought that, with fifty cents each, they were rich now.”

All these years later, I could still see their room so clearly: its dark, almost black wood panelling, their checkerboard-tiled floor. It was three times the size of mine and a lot quieter. I’d just bullied their mattresses into the hall when my mother showed up and put an end to it. “But I have a contract!” I told her. “They signed it. The matter has been legally settled.”

The bedroom exchange never went through, but both Amy and Gretchen have honored our 1970 agreement. Gretchen has a long-term boyfriend who lives in another town, but Amy hasn’t even dated since the early two-thousands. I used to refer to them as spinsters. Then I learned that, historically, the word applies only to unmarried women up to the age of twenty-five or so. After that, they’re called thornbacks, a thornback being a bottom-feeding skatelike fish with sharp spikes running along its spine.

Meanwhile, an unmarried man of the same age is simply called a bachelor, or, in gaming circles, a wizard.

Often I think that I did my sisters, particularly Amy, a favor. Oh, to be single and accountable to no one. Then Hugh will do something sweet and I’ll remember that it can actually be nice to have someone around. Recently, for example, he trimmed my toenails. I used to do it myself, but now I have arthritis in my back and can only reach my feet in Arizona.

I didn’t ask Hugh to clip my nails. He just saw two of my toes poking out from the holes they’d stabbed in my socks and offered. Watching him tackle the worst of it with a pipe cutter, I thought of a poorly drawn syndicated comic strip that used to run in the Raleigh newspaper. Each pictured a boy and girl who were naked but had no genitalia. “Love is” was written near the top of the frame, then every day, beneath it, there would be an example: “love is . . . laughing at the same old joke,” “ . . . wearing ‘his’ and ‘hers’ T-shirts,” “ . . . quietly watching a hummingbird having lunch.”

I don’t recall “love is . . . clipping his amber, daggerlike toenails,” but then, I didn’t read it every day.

Of course, love is different from marriage. It can exist within a marriage, flickering like a tea-light candle at the bottom of a hurricane glass, but it’s hardly guaranteed to endure. That’s why one doesn’t want to draw too much attention to it. Having a wedding or an engagement party, running off to couples therapy, renewing your vows: isn’t that all just courting disaster?

How hypocritical that of me, Amy, and Gretchen, the only one married is me. It happened in 2016 and was done secretly—it was essentially a shotgun wedding, completely the idea of my banker, Cindy, and undertaken solely for financial reasons. We did it at the county courthouse in the small town of Beaufort, North Carolina. Entering the building late that spring morning meant passing through a metal detector. This is the last time I’ll empty my pockets as a single person, I thought, surrendering my wallet and the old man’s leather coin purse I’ve carried since 1992.

Neither Hugh nor I was particularly dressed up, though we weren’t slobs, either. We probably looked as if we were being audited: slacks, freshly ironed button-down shirts, and the facial expressions you assume after learning that the doctor who’ll be checking your prostate decided to grow his nails out. At least that was my expression. Just close your eyes and think of the money you’ll be saving, I told myself.

I guess that, during the ceremony, I recited whatever words I was instructed to: “I solemnly swear” and “in sickness and in health.” Hugh and I would never kiss in public, so at the end we shook hands. Neither of us choked up. The wedding took a matter of minutes. Afterward we thanked the magistrate and the white-haired stranger who acted as our second witness. Then we went with our banker to a sad sandwich place for lunch.

Aside from saving money, all I cared about was keeping my marriage a secret. It’s not that I was embarrassed by Hugh or that I thought someone better might come along. I just shudder when I hear a man say the words “my husband.” Something about it sets off alarm bells in me. It’s like “my unicycle” or “my rescue ferret”—just creepy. Before same-sex marriage became legal, I hated the word “partner.”

“Is that your partner?” someone would ask, referring to Hugh.

“My boyfriend,” I’d correct them.

Now it’s, “Is that your husband?” People just assume it for some reason.

“God, no,” I say. “He’s just my boyfriend.”

I have lied in interviews, on forms; wherever the question is asked, the answer is “Nope. We just live together.” My best friend doesn’t know that I’m married. Neither does Amy, Gretchen, or anyone else in my family. Hugh and I don’t celebrate our anniversary, and I’d be at a complete loss if asked to give the month, much less the date. The season I recall, but nothing else. Years go by without my remembering it ever happened, then Hugh will threaten to divorce me, and I’ll say, “How can you divorce me when we were never . . . fuck.”

In this day and age, can’t I be a husband but identify as a boyfriend?

I think of all the wedding pictures I see in the Times, both gay and straight. The people who plan years in advance, who spend great fortunes, and for what? You love someone. You want to build a life together—great, but why bother other people with it? Why make them buy unflattering outfits and get on airplanes to places only you think are fun? Why do they have to give you gifts or, worse still, listen to your handcrafted vows, which are always just a string of clichés: “When we met, I knew I’d found my soulmate.”

I’ve never liked that term, but I think I might hate its replacement even more: “My person.”

Honestly?, I think whenever I hear it. Let’s say that in a world of more than eight billion people there is a single individual who was meant to fit you like a puzzle piece. What are the odds, then, that they live in your same apartment complex or that the two of you wound up at the same community college eight miles from your house and six and a half from theirs? Why has no one you’ve ever known found their person standing outside an electronics superstore in Busan, South Korea, or baking bricks in a kiln in India? Why do so very few people have to leave their state, let alone their country, to find the one person they’re supposedly meant for?

I met Hugh twelve blocks from my apartment in New York and often wonder, What if I hadn’t gone with my friend Lily to his loft to borrow a ladder that night? What if we’d missed each other? Had that been the case, he’d have found someone else, as would I, most likely. I never had that “There you are!” feeling, the way my sister Gretchen did a few days before we went to Amsterdam, when she found a Daniela Gregis blouse at the Dover Street Market in London. It was made of thick cotton and was white on the outside and soft pink on the inside, like a shell. “I have been looking for this shirt all my life,” she said, holding it to her face and breathing it in, the way I’ve seen people do when reunited with a lost child.

I was happy to meet Hugh. I hoped it might work out between us and am delighted that it has. When I tell people that we’re breaking up after thirty-five years together—which I do all the time as a joke—hardly anyone believes me, which is frustrating but also a sign that to our friends and family we seem like a pretty good fit.

Married, though!

My father thought that was all his daughters were good for. “That guy’s just taking advantage of you,” he said when Amy, aged twenty-three, moved in with her Greek boyfriend in Raleigh, and Gretchen, not long afterward, moved in with her Greek boyfriend in Providence, Rhode Island.

I said to him, “At least they’re Greek.” But he wanted all of the boxes ticked. Lisa got married. So did Paul. Tiffany had boyfriends but never married any of them, most often because they already had wives.

I hadn’t presented any of those siblings with contracts, though. It wasn’t that I didn’t like them, just that I could bear the thought of losing them to their new families. We’d write, I’d imagined. Every so often we’d talk on the phone. Plans would be sketched for shared vacations, but something would probably come up.

With Amy and Gretchen, it was different. I drew up their contracts because I didn’t want anyone else in their hearts. At fourteen, I didn’t know that you could actually stuff quite a few people in there and still have room left for hobbies and addictions. My sisters certainly haven’t lost me to Hugh. If anything, it was our careers that posed a threat to our time together.

That’s something that never occurred to me when I was in the eighth grade, maybe because I couldn’t imagine myself with an actual profession. I mean, could a person make a living jerking off into an athletic sock?

I remember learning a few years back that a close friend had undergone treatment for breast cancer. We were in contact during her hospitalization and recovery, yet she never mentioned a word of it. When she finally told me, I felt relieved that she was O.K. but also insulted and shut out. Would that be Amy’s and Gretchen’s reaction to my marriage? That day in the Amsterdam restaurant, I was right on the verge of confessing, imagining how liberating it might feel to finally come clean, when Hugh stood up and reached for his jacket. “If you two want to hit the next couple of stores on your list, we have to get going,” he said.

I looked up at him and thought, Would it kill you to give me a few extra minutes? Yet I got to my feet, and willingly. He’s so controlling, yet so very handsome, my husband. ♦