In a country where death is increasingly structural,
love becomes a daily practice of anticipating loss
and choosing presence in spite of it.

The first time my partner and I discussed our wedding, we were sheltering inside our car, caught in an unannounced heavy storm. 

Huddled together against the drumming rain, I told him I didn’t want a grand resepsi. I wanted to go to the Religious Affairs Office (KUA), to return to the legal and spiritual essence, instead of impressing a crowd. As a middle child accustomed to not craving family’s attention, he welcomed the idea immediately. 

We didn’t yet know if our parents would support this choice, so we sketched a Plan B: an intimate celebration with a comfortable budget. No matter the outcome, we agreed it will be grounded, practical and still very much magical. 

But soon, this optimism gave way to a darker turn.

I began to imagine my husband-to-be dying. The thoughts arrived daily, then more frequently. His deaths always look plausible: a collapsed bridge, a neglected road, a climate-driven disaster. They consistently appear not as fate, but as infrastructure.

I’m frightened by the possibility that it could happen far from me, without my arms holding him, without our life having had time to fully begin. 

In a country where death no longer feels simply natural or accidental—where it feels produced, repeated, and deliberately distributed—what if one of us is taken too soon, before our vows can be spoken?

Structural deaths

My fear follows a pattern. In 2025, the news has become a relentless scroll of loss. What’s changing is not just the number, but how people are dying. 

Ojol driver Affan Kurniawan’s tragic death on August 28th marked a turning point for me. After he was struck and run over by a police tactical vehicle, public criticism intensified over the absence of a genuine legal response. 

Authorities announced only an internal administrative sanction followed by a formal apology issued to the National Police institution.

What this reveals is not a flawed legal procedure in an isolated case, but broader regulations tasked with ensuring safety and justice repeatedly fail to protect the inherent dignity of life. 

Accountability is displaced onto bureaucratic rituals, while risk is systematically offloaded onto those least protected. 

The Terra Drone fire, which killed 22 workers—including a woman pregnant with her first child—stands as a grim reminder that workers’ lives are treated as expendable.

Those who are vulnerable keep paying the price. Indigenous and local residents in resource-rich areas are repeatedly sacrificed to greed that rationalizes ecocide. 

Recent floods in Sumatra have claimed over a thousand lives in less than a month, according to the National Agency for Disaster Countermeasure (BNPB). Nearly two hundred people remain missing, and close to five hundred thousand have been displaced.

This catastrophe is inseparable from long-standing systemic failures—most notably the degradation of watersheds and forests after decades of rampant extractive industry permits.

When not all lives are equally mourned or defended, these deaths become structural. When loss fails to interrupt power or profit, it teaches the system that such deaths are acceptable.

Rehearsing grief

This normalization of loss breeds a pervasive sorrow. We grieve not only for those who have died, but for the living too—who remain, at least for now, safe and well. This idea of rehearsing future loss is called anticipatory grief.

It is common after a mass tragedy. Dr. Chyntia Doney, an Associate Professor at Liberty University, notes that following the Oklahoma City Bombing, 42% of people feared their family would become terrorism victims. After 9/11, that fear spiked to 58%. This dread can trigger distress, anxiety, and physical symptoms.

The concept is not new. During World War II, psychiatrist Erich Lindemann observed relatives of soldiers experiencing this anticipatory grief, mentally rehearsing a loss that had not yet happened.

Modern psychology reframes this “rehearsal” using the concept of mental time travel—our ability to vividly relive the past and pre-live the future. 

A study by Christopher Jude McCarroll and Karen Yan highlights the role of our emotional process, where we simulate a specific, personal future in our minds, making a potential loss feel painfully real today.

This grief exists in a loop of time. We compare our present to a happy past, while also living inside the feared future where our loved one is gone.

But what does this psychological mechanism mean when it ceases to be theoretical and becomes the texture of a relationship? Can one build a happy marriage when grief has become a quiet undercurrent in our life together?

Love in precarious time

Of course, marriage has always contained the certainty of eventual loss. But now, instead of waiting at the end of a long life, loss interrupts life mid-construction. 

Marriage, for me, no longer centers on legacy like buying a home or raising children. In the shadow of collapse, it becomes a compact of solidarity. Our marriage “project” now leans to navigating scarcity, preparing for disasters, or simply managing mutual mental health in a toxic world. 

Psychology helps clarify why this form of marriage does not hollow love out, but reorients it. 

Sue Johnson, a clinical psychologist and one of the primary architects of emotionally focused therapy (EFT), approached love not as sentiment but as a measurable attachment system. She argued that secure bonds are not built through ease or uninterrupted happiness, but through repeated responsiveness under threat.

In her books—including Hold Me Tight and Love Sense—bonds strengthen when partners reliably turn toward each other in moments of fear.

This form of love feels familiar to me. It looks like texting him when the news grows unbearable. Asking which route he’ll take home. Checking the politics of his workplace, whether it remains a place where he can work without harm.

Luckily, my grief makes sense to him. He too knows that love, today, often arrives disguised as vigilance. He too understands that to imagine loss is not to weaken a marriage, but to insist on its value. When he mirrors that worry—checking that I’ve arrived safely, admitting his own fears—I feel held. 

Perhaps this is why we have always returned to Rumi’s philosophy: to love is already to accept loss; to grieve is to remain faithful to that acceptance:

Goodbyes are only for those who love with their eyes.
Because for those who love with
heart and soul there is no such thing
as separation.

Standing beside my partner within these conditions, life as a WNI (Indonesian Citizen) feels bearable. At times, it even feels worthy of gratitude.

In a country where death is increasingly structural, choosing each other daily becomes an act of quiet resistance but against systems that treat certain lives as expendable. If our marriage cannot promise forever, it will promise presence—again and again, especially when fear knocks first.