'A couple is an idea'

a meditation on love for an auspicious day

A love story is something that two people create together. It’s a myth two people create together and then recommit to and are always sort of editing and reshaping and retelling. And it has a power. Stories have power.

Even that, though, the telling and retelling of that story, is something we give each other in a relationship and something that gives us a feeling of meaning and safety and contentment as individuals, but also, then, as that — you know, we are all individuals. A couple is an idea.

-Dan Savage on The Ezra Klein Show

John, my husband, and I have a stupidly romantic love story. One version of it involves a writing residency in an Italian castle, a chance meeting, an instant and undeniable connection, love notes masquerading as comments on one another’s book drafts, and a cross-country romance thereafter with hikes in the Marin Headlands and late nights at bars in Brooklyn. A proposal on a precipice in the New Mexican desert. Two beautiful children. A cozy home with a cherry blossom tree out front, right this very minute bursting with pink hope.

And that’s all true. And damn am I grateful for every last preposterous detail of it. I find it so surprising that I sometimes have to sort of look around and tell myself the story of my own life—You are a 43-year-old woman living in California. These are your daughters. This is your man. These are your friends. You have work that you love and can just go to the garden and grab some parsley and a lemon any old time.

But there are other stories interwoven with this story about me and John. There is the story of my resistance leading up to that proposal. I didn’t want to get married. It was deeply important to John. We fought passionately about it—in airports and on late night calls and over email. I printed out all the op-ed pieces I’d written decrying marriage and made him read them. He read them and persisted. I loved him so deeply. I resented his attachment to this institution so much. One morning, I woke up in my parents’ adobe home in Santa Fe, and I thought: I want to be someone who does uncomfortable things for the people I love. My body can be the answer. So I bought a mood ring at the Five & Dime on the Plaza and when we were at the top of our favorite hike, Tent Rocks, I proposed. I figured that if I felt like I was going to throw up, it would be my body’s way of saying no. I didn’t feel like I was going to throw up. I felt solid and proud—like I was loosening my grip on always knowing. Maybe we could make our own marriage in our own image, our own—as Dan Savage puts it—myth.

And mostly that’s been true.

Of course, the world projects its own stories onto a marriage—especially a heterosexual one like mine. On some fronts, we have taken on traditional gender roles; I do the majority of “kin work” with friends and neighbors, for example. On others, we counter the assumptions; he’s the Chief Cleaning Officer and I’m the Chief Financial Officer. Our family life these days feels like it’s lived out one week at a time—the eternal return of drop-offs, commutes, pick-ups, dinner; we finally succumbed to a spreadsheet to try to keep track of it all. We’re trying to stay awake past 9pm so we can actually talk to each other on weeknights.

But none of this is what I experience as the real, deep story of our relationship. And I imagine this is true of most long-term relationships like ours. The real, deep story is the silence we live inside—car rides where I reach my left hand over and he grabs it and we just look out the window and breathe together. It is the way we make fun of one another as a consistent and joy-filled release valve on all that drives us crazy—his plethora of preferences and love of collecting expensive tableware and chairs, my chronic thrift and grumpy resistance to any and all indulgences. It is the ways we’ve surprised one another over the years—I learned how to cook; he went to therapy. It is the way we can wake up from deep sleep and wordlessly coordinate cleaning up a monster puke and taking care of one of our kids. It is the pain of sometimes using words when we should have used time or time when we should have used words. It is our bodies, curled around one another in bed—the room always slightly too cold for my taste and too loud for his. It is his goofy nicknames for me and his back massages that I swear have put years onto my life. It is the poems I write him every year on his birthday and my tender care when he gets a running injury. It is stuckness and safety, collaboration and coordination, remembering again and again that we are not the same person. Not even close. And then curling around one another again.

I so believe what Dan Savage said, that a love story has to be written and re-written, over and over again if it is to survive. A couple is not just a commitment in terms of sexual fidelity and household labor, but a commitment to an evolving idea. Part of what I never liked about the idea of marriage was that it seemed static—a thing you promise on some overhyped day and then try to cling to for the next 50 years. Instead, I like seeing it as an emotional adventure, one that you hope pushes you to develop new muscles along the way, be uncomfortable, be so profoundly comforted, get more and more exquisitely honest about who you actually are and what you actually want, fall apart, come back together, delight and forgive and laugh your asses off at the absurdity that we only get this one life and here we are, writing it and revising it together.

Marriage can be a trap. It can also be a creative constraint that feels sort of perfect for this adult development project. That’s what I didn’t understand at 25 years old when I wrote those articles. Having agency about who you love and for how long is fundamental. Marriage, as it turned out, didn’t take that away from me and never will. What it gave me was a constantly evolving idea to live inside of, a person to push off of and fall into, a place to build a life of care and tension and growth and admiration and, yes, love—love so storied it feels like a library.