Never Tear Us Apart
We picked this song in 2011. Standing in our kitchen, laptop open, scrolling through a Spotify playlist called “Wedding First Dance Songs” like we were ordering takeout. Most of them were garbage—Ed Sheeran deep cuts and Bruno Mars songs that would date the photos. Then the strings hit.
“This one,” she said.
I didn’t argue. You don’t argue with a woman who’s just found the song she wants to walk into the rest of her life to.
Michael Hutchence sold it. That voice—confident and terrified at the same time, making promises so big they needed a 60-piece orchestra to back them up. “Two worlds collided, and they could never tear us apart.”
We believed him. We believed us.
The wedding was in October. Vermont. Leaves doing exactly what leaves are supposed to do in Vermont in October. Her dress was simple. My suit was rented. Neither of us could stop smiling during the vows, which made the photos look slightly unhinged.
Then the DJ played the song, and we held each other, and I remember thinking: this is it. This is the moment everyone talks about. I’m in it.
Three minutes and one second. That’s how long the song lasts. That’s how long we swayed in front of everyone we loved, pretending we knew how to dance, pretending we knew how to be married, pretending the strings and the orchestra and Michael’s voice could carry us through whatever came next.
The papers were signed in 2019.
Nobody plays music when you get divorced. There’s no first dance in the lawyer’s office, no Spotify playlist called “Amicable Separation Songs.” You just sign where they tell you to sign and try not to look at each other too long.
But I heard it last week. Grocery store. Frozen foods aisle. Standing there with a basket full of single-person portions, and those strings started, and I couldn’t move.
“I was standing, you were there.”
Yeah. We were.
Hutchence died in ‘97. The circumstances were ugly—hotel room, belt, questions that never got answered. He made promises in this song that he couldn’t keep either. Maybe that’s the point. Maybe the song isn’t about forever actually lasting. Maybe it’s about meaning it when you say it, even knowing you might be wrong.
We meant it. For eight years, we meant it.
The worlds collided. They tore apart anyway.
But for three minutes in Vermont, with the leaves and the dress and the rented suit, nothing could touch us.
I still believe that part.
