Early in the pandemic, my longtime friend Jane Yin and I made a if we were both single on her thirty-third birthday, we’d get engaged and plan a simple wedding. We were lonely, envious of people who weren’t isolated in apartments by themselves.
More than three years have passed, and I’m ready. Even if I’m outgoing and optimistic on the outside, I’ve given up on romantic love, and it’ll be nice to build a life with my friend. With both of our savings, we can actually afford a house. Jane also longs to be part of a family, and I can give her that. It sounds convenient and comfortable, but we won’t have a physical relationship.
It turns out that married life is just what I want it to be. We buy a place in the suburbs and eat dinner together every day. Neither of us is attracted to the other, except…
Oh hell. I’m definitely starting to wish I could share a bed with Jane, and my feelings are much more complicated than I expected. Unfortunately, I doubt my serious, perfect wife feels the same way, and I don’t want to screw up this marriage of convenience by revealing the truth.
But it’s getting harder and harder to hide my desire.
I picked up this book for two reasons. First, the premise felt like someone had peeked into my brain and turned one of my long-standing life declarations into a novel. I, too, have made sweeping proclamations that if I hit a certain age and remain tragically single, I’ll just marry any one of my best friends – whoever is also on the market for long term, low stakes companionship.
The second reason, which is also the actual actual reason? I wanted to mine it for ideas. The synopsis reads like a short story I’ve been failing to write for two years. My story is a tale of two friends who tie the knot to get their families off their backs, only for their relatives to continue intruding on their lives. However unlike Jackie Lau’s (very) short novel, my characters don’t fall for each other. In fact, my characters stay platonic.
In real life, I am a firm believer of platonic love as the ultimate, most fulfilling connection. I want more narratives about friends just being friends, and it’s not portrayed as some second place price or that there’s like some secretly pining over the other. Like, I am all for decenter romance altogether and that friendship in itself can be an end all be all.
Not in the fiction I’m reading though. Like the raging hypocrite I am (re: people contain multitudes) grand stories about friendship are not the stories I actively seek out. My favourite genre remains romance. If you know me, you know I want the pining. The tension. The slow, aching realization that this person – the one who was right there all along – is actually the love of your life. I may root for friendship in reality, but in stories, I want romance to crash in like a tidal wave and wreck everything in its path.
“Why on earth am I feeling a prickle of attraction toward my wife?.”
― Jackie Lau, Two Friends in Marriage
Still some romances are surely better than others. As for me? I’m not really a fan of friends to lovers. I like angst and pining and it’s kind of hard to do when it’s just friends because the transition from friend to love is usually quite smooth. But then again, I’ve never seen it layered with a marriage of convenience and also, sort of forbidden love until this book. Well not that forbidden, but like “do they want me too or will I just mess up the dynamic?” The premise of this book literally had me. Bonus points that the main female character is on the ace spectrum? How could I not be sold.
However, this might be the okay-est book I’ve ever read. Not great, not terrible – just aggressively fine. It’s short and honestly kind of dry. It actually felt like it didn’t want to be written. The sentences exist, but they don’t linger. It’s more tell-y than show-y. The story just be moving from one thing to the next without stopping to breathe.
Even the kiss – something I usually anticipate in a romance – was just… meh. Not bad, not good. Just there. I can’t even say I’m disappointed because I don’t think I had enough feelings about it to begin with.
The characters, I cannot, for the life of me, tell you anything about their personalities. They exist, they speak, they do things. They sort of feel like cardboard. And for a book that hinges on the intimacy of a friendship-turned-marriage, that’s a bit of a problem.
I will say the domesticity of it all was really kind of nice to see, but it definitely was not exciting. The book was not a total bust, it was just there. The flattest 2.5/5 stars I’ve ever given
