Marriage and Commitment

Marriage and Commitment is a recurring fault line between Tessa and Hardin, separating their visions of a shared future even as Hardin insists that he wants her for the rest of his life. Tessa’s hopes make marriage more than an abstract question: refusing it has already helped end their relationship, while family weddings and affairs force both characters to confront what commitment might mean. Hardin’s position remains categorical, but his possessiveness and anxiety about losing Tessa make his rejection of marriage look less like indifference than a refusal to trust the future it represents.

Tessa’s hopes and Hardin’s refusal

Hardin understands that taking Tessa to a wedding could intensify her hopes. He worries about watching her eyes grow watery and then having to remind her that she will not have a wedding of her own with him. When Christian asks whether he is trying to prevent Tessa from getting ideas, Hardin says that she already has them. He describes marriage as something she raised unusually early in their relationship, and says that she broke up with him after he told her he would not marry her. His account is openly dismissive of her hopes, but it also confirms their practical consequence: this disagreement has not remained hypothetical; it has helped drive them apart.

Hardin adds that marriage seems especially unreasonable to him because Tessa is not yet twenty. That appeal to her youth does not soften his refusal. Later, after his mother jokes that Tessa is her only chance at grandchildren, Hardin is angry that the remark might make Tessa feel guilty or obligated. He says the couple have already agreed not to have children and identifies marriage and children as the subjects behind most of their fights. He wants Tessa every day for the rest of his life, he says, but insists that he will never marry her. The contrast makes his position precise: he expresses a desire for lifelong attachment while rejecting the public and familial forms of commitment that Tessa appears to hope for.

Jealousy, anxiety, and the contradiction of commitment

Christian challenges Hardin’s claim that marriage is absurd by pointing to how little distance Hardin tolerates between himself and Tessa. Hardin acknowledges that he does not want her more than three feet away, but initially treats that fact as separate from any intention to marry. Christian draws the connection more directly: Hardin’s temper and anxiety rise when he fears Tessa will leave or when another man pays attention to her. The exchange reveals a tension Hardin does not resolve. He resists promising a future together, yet reacts intensely to threats to the relationship in the present.

His suggestion that Tessa could move to England sharpens that contradiction. She reminds him that he will not take her there for a wedding but is proposing that she move there. Hardin tries to defer the conversation, and Tessa answers that it is always deferred. Her drunken fall from the bed interrupts the argument, but not its substance: he can imagine her relocating for him while resisting the wedding that would give their future a different kind of assurance. At a family meal, Hardin confirms that he has decided to go to England; when Ken asks whether Tessa is going too, the question places their possible future together in the open without settling what commitment would look like.

Weddings and family models

The wedding of Trish and Mike brings Hardin’s private resistance into a family crisis. After learning of his mother’s affair with Christian, he compares the situation to Tolstoy’s The Kreutzer Sonata, a work Tessa associates with a dark view of marriage. She can see him making comparisons between Trish’s actions and their own relationship, and she worries that her mother’s mistakes will affect how Hardin sees their future. When Tessa asks whether the discovery changed his view, Hardin answers that he never planned to marry and still does not.

This response distinguishes his longstanding refusal from the immediate shock of the affair: he says the revelation did not change his position. Yet the scene leaves the emotional stakes unsettled. Tessa asks whether they might make their own story; Hardin doubts they can, and says he thinks their relationship will end in one of two ways. The wedding’s approach—by then it is nearly four in the morning, with the ceremony expected that afternoon—makes the question urgent, while the affair supplies a bleak family example that neither can simply set aside.

What commitment means for the couple

Across these moments, marriage functions both as a concrete disagreement and as a test of whether the couple can imagine a future without repeating the failures around them. Tessa’s wish for a wedding is not presented as a settled plan, but Hardin knows that the possibility matters to her and has already been at the center of a breakup. His concern about raising her hopes, his refusal to marry, and his anger at pressure to have children all keep the boundary in place. At the same time, he describes wanting Tessa for the rest of his life and cannot bear the thought of her leaving or drawing another man’s attention.

The text therefore leaves commitment unresolved rather than converting devotion into a promise. Hardin’s feelings are intense, but intensity does not answer Tessa’s question about what story they can build together. The approaching wedding, his mother’s affair, and his insistence that he will never marry her place romantic attachment beside a family history he fears repeating. Their conflict turns on the gap between wanting someone permanently and agreeing on what a shared future requires.