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Holly Goddard Jones and her husband on their wedding day

In my parents' traditional marriage, my mother has always been the one in our family to negotiate peace, to whisper softly in my father's ear or mine, teaching us how to understand one another. When I wanted permission as a child to join an activity for which parents needed to pay, I went to my mother first, and she would lay the case out to Dad. She was my lobbyist – but her allegiance was to my father.

It was through my mother that I knew my father's fears, his disappointments, his doubts. In her quiet way, my mother brokered the deal that would become my early marriage to Brandon. My father worried about my world. My mother worried about my father.

I tried in my essay to come to grips with the great and mysterious contradiction of my life: that Brandon and I were pressured into an early marriage for old-fashioned, hypocritical and even sexist reasons by a generation that still believes a piece of paper has the magical power to bind together two people, even if they decide they don't want to be together anymore – and yet, here we are. Still married, still happy.

I went through with it not because I shared our parents' values, or because I was ready for marriage – I was terrified on our wedding day and cried throughout the vows – but for the simple fact that I couldn't bear the thought of my father being disappointed in me.

Last week, I spent an evening for the first time in years with my best friend from high school who had been the maid of honour at our wedding. She told me how she had read the essay, and liked it. "But I was surprised," she said. "I didn't think you got married because your parents made you. I thought you got married because you were in love with each other."

I told her that I was very defensive in those days, that I was embarrassed about the rushed wedding and how people would perceive it, and to acknowledge even to my best friend that I had doubts or was motivated by something other than pure romance was too hard. But it's a shame, I'm thinking now, that over the years I've come to take the opposite tack, to insist that love did not, in fact, have much to do with it. Because it wasn't my father's piece of paper that kept Brandon and me together when we didn't have any money, or during that stretch of months when Brandon was out of work and I was holding down a job I hated, or each of the times I've been levelled inexplicably by depression. No, I think you'd have to call that love.

We're taught these days not to trust first love. The phrase itself suggests ephemerality; there will be seconds, thirds, a banquet of loves, with each course readying us for the right love, the one designed to last. Most of the couples I know met at university or graduate school and married in their late twenties or early thirties. It was almost certainly the right thing for them to do, waiting until they were adult, fully formed human beings. Our teen selves can feel like strangers to us, so why would we trust their judgment?

The first time I met Brandon, he wowed me by telling me the story of how he'd got the tattoo on his bicep, a cross with an alien face, and quoting me lyrics from Da Lench Mob's You and Your Heroes. Me? I was going for earnest detachment in a field jacket I'd picked up at an army surplus shop, my eyelids charcoaled and my hair dyed an unnatural red. You'd be forgiven for not seeing this as the foundation for a lifetime of happiness.

Those sweet, dumb kids flirting in a video shop went to university. They lived in a one-bedroom apartment with hand-me-down furniture, walked to the library together, brought cheap beer to parties.

I was very anxious in those years, terrified about the bill we wouldn't be able to pay, insecure about the friends I wasn't making because of my unusual status. I wondered if we were failures because we didn't have a house of our own. I pored obsessively over our wedding album with its bad photographs of rented finery – you could see the lines on the bridesmaids' dresses where old seams had been let out. We had got it all wrong, I thought: university and marriage. None of it looked from the outside the way it was supposed to look.

But on the inside, what we had was strangely right. Brandon pursued a second degree in architecture, and I switched from a marketing degree to English, with an emphasis on creative writing. I had big dreams but no practical plans. I wanted to be a published author; I wanted to tell stories. And Brandon, my husband, said: "Why not?" Oh, it was heady stuff, our licence to play house, to make as many impractical decisions as we chose to. A novelist and a designer? Why not? There is something to be said for growing up with the person you plan to grow old with.

The desk where I'm writing this faces a window looking out on our backyard and my husband's wood shop. While I tinker with sentences, he tinkers with wood and metal. We have debts and doubts, like every couple. And because I'm not the kind of person who believes in fate, I don't doubt that there might well have been other happy futures for each of us, had we parted at that critical juncture, and maybe there's some "parallel me" marvelling at her good luck at not having married the guy who she and her best friend used to call "the Get Reel bum".

It's a good thing she doesn't know how wrong she was.

The Next Time You See Me by Holly Goddard Jones (Corvus) is available to pre-order from Telegraph Books (0844 871 1514)