Sailing The Marriage Ship

Unpacking the picnic hamper of mid-life marriage.

“It was a million tiny little things that, when you added them all up, they meant we were supposed to be together, and I knew it. I knew it the first time I touched her. It was like coming home, only to no home I’d ever known. I was just taking her hand to help her out of a car and I knew it. It was like magic.” – Sam Baldwin, Sleepless in Seattle

I thought I’d write about marriage this week, in particular mid-life, long term relationships that are also bundled like a picnic hamper along with other responsibilities, like children and housework and investments and what to make for dinner. I’ve personally been married to a remarkable man named Isaac for thirteen years. In fact, it’s quite astonishing that we’ve been together this long, seeing as it was only a month long courtship before we simultaneously agreed to an engagement. I told him I loved him a week after we met, and in late November, began planning a January wedding. A day felt like a week, a month like a year. Now thirteen years have passed, and I’m quite sure we’ve lived several lifetimes together in the interim.

Why did we move so quickly? It’s astounding to think that both of us were so utterly sure of each other. I couldn’t not tell him I loved him on the grass in Washington Square Park in late August with the jazz in the background and the air so warm and soft. I couldn’t not suggest we put a ring on our fingers when it felt like I might lose him to entropy over wood fired pizza in the East Village. I couldn’t not marry him when everything in me knew this was my person and that we’d waited lifetimes to be reunited. I’d spent so many hours studying Nora Ephron movies and Meg Ryan’s face at the top of the Empire State Building and carefully crafting collages of the life I knew I was destined for, in my upstairs teenage bedroom with the wisteria vines. There was nothing left to do but say yes.

It would have felt like a train wreck to walk away from someone so clearly meant for me. Certain friends had their concerns, but then they weren’t invited to the wedding. The beginning of our relationship was like a bonfire, built from the spark we’d ignited on our first date (a “business meeting” about his manuscript in a book cafe on Crosby Street), and fed by truckloads of good kindling. The bonfire devoured anything that wasn’t meant for us, and illuminated everything that was. It was as if our union suddenly lit an entirely new world, and we were sovereign within it. Anything and everything was possible. Time had no bearing. Space bent gracefully around us as we painted our life into existence. It was easy. A springtime. The juice of the plum. The sun.

Thirteen years, two children, three mortgages, six years of infertility and many mornings later, we find ourselves looking down the barrel of the other side of marriage.