For some time I'd realized that Sharon was something permanent in my life. The thought of marrying and raising a family scared me, not because it might encroach on my freedom--Sharon, I knew, would never let that happen--but because personal ties made me feel vulnerable. This fear was a hangover from my childhood, from the insecurity I'd experienced at the age of five or six, when my family began to disintigrate. The only way of not getting hurt, I'd always felt, was to avoid committing myself deeply in the first place. There was implicit insecurity in any relationship--the awareness that any emotional attachment carried the risk of heartache...Against this was the fact that Sharon made no secret of her strong desire to have a child. Although she never mentioned marriage, and despite her liberated California life-style, I knew that her Catholic upbringing made marriage important to her.
I proposed off the cuff, over dinner in a restaurant. The date we settled on--January 20, 1968--fell a few days before her twenty-fifth birthday.
...The wedding ceremony at the Chelsea Registry Office in the King's Road [in London] turned into a media event...