Marriage of Convenience

The wedding comes first and the courtship after, with the paperwork signed for visas, inheritances, insurance, appearances, anything but love. The trope inverts the genre's usual sequence and thereby gets its richest subject: two people performing the domestic forms of marriage, shared address, shared calendar, in-laws, while the content those forms exist to hold arrives late and unsanctioned.

The promise is that structure can precede feeling and still produce it honestly, that vows spoken as logistics can be grown into. The mechanism is ritual: cohabitation manufactures a hundred small marriages a day, coffee orders learnt, families managed, sides of the bed settled, and the leads are wed in practice long before either admits it in fact. Craft lives in the convenience being real, an arrangement with genuine stakes and a genuine expiry date, because the ticking dissolution is what converts comfort into urgency. The common failure is forgetting the contract's end, letting the deadline that powers the trope drift quietly out of the book.