My email junk folder is like a glimpse into a fantastical world where Ray-Bans are free and Michael Kors is always having a sale. Typically I don’t open any before clicking “delete all,” but that day one caught my eye: “Congratulations Nell Stevens! You have won a luxury honeymoon to India!”
I felt a dart of excitement followed by instant dismissal. But I found myself returning to it, rereading, showing friends. Because the thing was, maybe I had entered a competition to win a honeymoon.
In the preceding months, I had been in the fateful state of being both bored and in love, completing my Ph.D. in London while the man I was going to marry worked in Boston. In the rare books reading room at the British Library (where I went to write), I spent a lot of time entering online contests, filling out form after form in the hope of winning vacations, designer clothes and theatre tickets.
I didn’t care what. All I wanted was a distraction and to indulge the fantasy that my life was about to change with little effort from me. I was so indiscriminate and prolific that I lost track of what I had entered. But in my loved-up, idle state, it was quite likely I had tried my luck at winning a luxury honeymoon to India.
It was real. I was going to India.
“Can you believe it?” I crowed to friends, family, anyone who would listen. “Can you believe I actually won?” It felt miraculous, this random gift from the universe.
Friends looked at their shoes; my mother cleared her throat. Nobody wanted to ask, but somehow they managed: “Who are you going to take with you?”
I don’t remember the call as it happened, but I recall the aftermath, when I was crying too hard to stay upright and crawled under my coffee table, howling like an injured animal. Friends arrived, peeled me off the floor, fed me and eased my path into the wilderness of heartbreak.
Everywhere I looked, I saw question marks: What happened? What did I do wrong? Who will come with me on my honeymoon? What, really, have I won?
The prize wasn’t a gift from the universe so much as a cruel joke.
When we got to the hotel, a man delivered cocktails to our room with a note congratulating the “happy couple.” He looked confusedly at the two of us and said, “Where is Mr. Stevens?”
At breakfast the next day, the manager came to greet us as honoured guests. “Our lucky winners,” he said, beaming, and then, “Mrs. Stevens, I am so sorry Mr. Stevens is not here.”
Around us: the happy murmuring of other people’s conversations, cutlery scrapes, eruptions of laughter from distant tables. A brief silence, and then what could I say in response? Yes, me too? I too was sorry my husband wasn’t there — sorrier than the hotel manager was, I bet.
They were baffled at the sight of two apparently unattached women sharing the honeymoon suite. The question that had been filling my brain before I arrived — “Where is your husband?” — was now being posed, politely and persistently, on a balcony in Agra with a view of tiered swimming pools and the Taj Mahal, on the back of an elephant climbing to Jaipur’s Amber Fort, on a boat gliding across Lake Pichola beneath a bat-filled sky.
We got back from excursions to find the trappings of romance spirited away from our room and replaced by other, more platonic gifts: jewelry, scarves and once, unnervingly, a pair of dolls, nestled between the pillows. Then we’d arrive at the next leg of the tour and it would happen all over again: “Where is your husband?”
I repeated this refrain, along with variations, to my best friend: “Where is he? Why isn’t he here?” The price she paid for this luxury vacation was having to endure the most miserable travel companion of all time. She swam and sunbathed, wore a succession of very good hats and bought a Kashmiri rug; I huddled in the corner of our room and called the man who had chosen not to be there, leaving voicemail messages: “Where are you? Why aren’t you here?” I was the most self-pitying of lucky winners, having won the honeymoon but lost the fiancé.
Here’s the lesson I was learning about winning: It is impermanent, unstable, transient. It isn’t a happy ending, just punctuation between sentences, a triumphant pause before life rolls onward in uncontrollable directions.
If you win one race but lose 15 others, have you won at all? If you earn someone’s respect, attention and love, and then lose it again, what did you win? Winning can be lost. You can lose at winning.
“We’re going to win so much, you’re going to be sick and tired of winning,” a presidential candidate would later promise an entire nation. “You’re going to come to me and go, ‘Please, please, we can’t win anymore.’”
“I’m going to get him back,” I said to my friend as we lounged by the pool, doused in dark yellow sunlight. “I’m going to win back his love.”
Her face in response: a perfect composite of pity, scepticism and restraint. She knew it wouldn’t go that way, and knew, too, that I wasn’t ready to hear it.
Of course, I did not win him back. But here’s another lesson I have learned about winning: not just how unstable it is or the way it can shift to loss, but how it can eventually transform into triumph all over again.
How would it have been, I think now, if that trip had really been the beginning of my married life to the man in Boston? It would have been delirious, ecstatic. Ten days of happiness, followed by a month, or two months, or a year of contentment.
And then, one by one, the problems the man predicted on that Skype call would have come to the fore: he needed to focus on his career and decide for himself what he wanted to do.
And didn’t I, really, prefer women to men? And didn’t I, really, have an aversion to the straight and strait-laced married life I would have signed up for in the giddiness of love? My mood swings and impulsiveness would have frustrated him. His caution and risk aversion would have made me feel stifled. One of us would have been driven crazy by the way the other chewed or swallowed or breathed. In short, it would not have worked out. That win was never going to last.
I am in love with someone else now, a woman, and happier than I have ever been. When I think back to the honeymoon, to the hotels and the good food, the gifts and the lovely, dusty luxury of it, I don’t feel any loss at all. Those days my best friend and I spent in India, wandering through a choreographed, red-rose, moonlit version of romance without knowing the routine, was a premonition of queerness before my own queer life got underway.
I could not have foreseen, on that lovelorn journey, that I would look back on it as one of the greatest examples of having it all. I want to crow to my heartbroken former self: “You got the honeymoon, but you didn’t have to have the husband.” What a coup! What a win!
