The Accidental Marriage

Married first, introduced second. The accidental marriage wakes its leads into vows they do not remember or paperwork they did not intend, the Vegas chapel, the foreign formality that turned out to bind, the joke certificate that was never a joke, and then makes the discovery everyone expects impossible to simply undo: an inheritance clause, a visa, a public that already knows.

The trope is farce with a load-bearing frame. The comedy of the premise buys the reader in, but the machinery underneath is serious, two people forced to perform history's most intimate contract from a standing start, and the form's best versions let the performance teach them what the real thing would ask. The desk's test is the lock: the reason the marriage cannot be quietly annulled must hold under adult scrutiny, because the whole book leans on that door staying shut. The common failure is a lock made of embarrassment alone. The shelf holds no clean example yet; the desk has acquisitions to make, and this entry will name them the day they arrive.