I watch as they walk toward the perfect, saturated sunset, hands linked.  He spins her around; she laughs as her soft white dress billows out around her.  A smile twitches at the corner of his mouth as she kisses his cheek.

It’s funny, I think, how everyone says that love like theirs is special, one-of-a-kind, though it seems to happen all the time to other people.  As a wedding photographer, I’ve seen couples just like them almost every day for the past seven years.  Smiling pairs, dancing on beaches, kissing in churches, holding hands in an autumn-colored forest.

Sometimes I wonder what that’s like.  To feel like you’re holding the world when you’re just holding a hand.  To be so in love with someone that your souls seem to intertwine along with your fingers, to memorize their image and find a strange, fluttering comfort in its flaws.  To sink into a wonderful sort of symbiosis with another human being, and spend your whole, long life growing alongside them.

It’s not even that I can’t feel that way. I’ve had my fair share of friendships that have made me feel on top of the world. It’s that I can’t feel it exactly the same way this twirling, copy-and-paste couple standing before me does. It’s that I can’t get married, or settle down, or devote my whole self entirely to one person when I have so many friends I care too much about. It’s that my stomach lurches every time I hear the words “I love you” and “my darling” and “forever”. And it’s because of that that I’m never going to be a bride. 

No, I will stay the photographer, the bystander, the one on the sidelines.  I’ll always be the one who’s ridiculed at family gatherings and met with awkward pitying smiles at high school reunions.  While my cousins and old friends are living out their romance movie storyline, I’ll always be sitting here, taking photos by myself, as the ultimate aromantic comedy show.