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I Married For Love — But Also For Money
It’s shocking how many perks the military married get.
I’m gonna be real with you. I never wanted to get married, and neither did my sweet husband, Jonny. The institution of marriage just didn’t jive with our loose, artsy, nomadic lifestyles; plus, we’ve both spent our entire adulthood giving the finger to social conventions of all stripes. Forging a stable career path? Who needs it. Monogamy? Fuck that. Marriage and kids? DON’T YOU TOUCH MY FREEDOM I’LL KILL YOU!
Needless to say, a lot of jaws dropped when we announced that we were getting married only a few months after we met.
Everyone assumed we’d let a whirlwind romance consume our better judgement, and we even went around saying obnoxious engaged-people things like, “When you know, you know.” The beatific smiles were just dripping off our faces.
Letting our friends and family see us as impulsive kids was easier than trumpeting the truth:
We got married because the U.S. Army would literally pay us if we did.
Flashback to summer 2019: I met Jonny, the free-spirited, guitar-strumming world traveler of my dreams. He’d been gallivanting through the ports of the world as a singer and guitarist on cruise ships for the past fifteen years. I was freshly back in New…
