The Bug in “Getting Married Today”

This is my third time watching Company.

For anyone who isn't familiar: Company is Stephen Sondheim and George Furth's 1970 musical about Bobby, a charming, perpetually single New Yorker turning 35. His married friends worry about him, though the marriages they show him don't always make a strong case for the institution. Over a string of evenings with these couples, Bobby moves from wanting marriage as something he can keep at arm's length, a change of circumstances that won't cost him anything, to being willing to let another person all the way into his life. Every couple around him is working out some version of the same question: what happens to who you are when someone else moves in?

This time, I thought I'd found a bug. It's in Amy, Bobby's friend and the bride who falls apart on her wedding day in "Getting Married Today," a breakneck song in which she tries to call off her marriage to Paul, the patient, adoring man she's been with for years. (In the 2018 revival, where Bobby became Bobbie, Amy became Jamie, a gay man marrying his boyfriend Paul. I'll use "she" throughout, since switching between productions tends to make readers think I'm talking about two different people.) I feel like, underneath the epitome performance of a panic attack, there's something that does not make sense: Amy repeatedly expressed self-loathing thoughts such as "I am not well", yet she was afraid of "we'll both of us be losing our identities". If she really hates herself so much, what identity is she afraid of losing? If she hates herself so much, wouldn't it be a good reason for her to go through the marriage, so she can adopt a new, probably better identity?

There are plausible answers. She's panicking, so what she says doesn't have to make sense. She's a pessimist who doesn't believe she'll change for the better, even with Paul's help. Or she loves him so much that she refuses to drag him down with her. None of these is wrong, but it just feels off to me, and after thinking about it longer, I realized the problem wasn't Amy's logic. It was mine. I smuggled a strange assumption into the question: that hating yourself should make it easy to give yourself up.

For starters, to loathe yourself you need a fairly substantial idea of who that self is. Maybe it's all negatives: I'm awkward. I'm neurotic. I'm difficult. But it's something. There's a self there, which means there's something to lose. The question is whether you want to lose it.

This is really about risk aversion. You can hate your status quo all you want and still not want to leave somewhere familiar. You can hate your house and still not want someone to demolish it while you're standing inside. If there's no new house when the dust settles, or no better one, you're homeless. Jump ship for a new identity and you might end up identity-homeless. Sometimes not being able to recognize yourself is more terrifying than recognizing a self you hate.

And when we say we want to become someone else, I'm not sure we always mean it. Take leaving a small town. You might hate how you act around people who've known you since childhood: how timid you become, how quickly you slide back into habits you thought you'd outgrown. Moving could help. But you're not really trying to become a stranger. You're trying to get somewhere you can feel more like yourself. There's something you're trying to preserve, even as you change your life.

So Amy's fear isn't the contradiction I thought it was. But risk aversion doesn't fully explain her, either. She says she's afraid of losing herself. The more I watch the show, the more I think she's afraid of the opposite: that marriage won't change her at all. She fears that she'll bring the self she has, mess and all, into a place where someone else will see every bit of it, every day, with nowhere left to hide.

The show makes this point in the very next scene. With the wedding falling apart, Bobby proposes to Amy himself. Initially stunned, she turns him down quickly: he doesn't want her, he wants to be married. He wants the environment, a new house to move into, without the person he'd have to share it with. Bobby is the one who's been hoping marriage will hand him an identity: the settled grown-up, finally one of the couples instead of their favorite guest. Amy, the "self-loathing" one, knows it won't. I think that's why she sees through him so quickly. She's spent the whole morning panicking about what it means to let someone see all of her, and Bobby hasn't even gotten to that part yet.

Then she runs out into the rain after Paul.

She hasn't stopped disliking herself, and nothing about her panic has been resolved. She has just decided the risk is worth taking, with this particular person, in this particular house. It's the same leap Bobby spends the rest of the show working up to, until he finally asks, in "Being Alive," for someone who will get close enough to need him, get in his way, even hurt him.

Company doesn't promise that marriage gives you a new identity. It suggests something scarier but also more hopeful: you keep the self you've got, and you let someone else live in it with you. You don't get a new house. You get someone to share the old one, and maybe, together, you finally fix the roof.