One Partner, Three Different Marriages.
Converations from a long relationship.
David has started bringing me my vitamins and supplements now. He checks to make sure I have something to wash them down. He opens his palm and they tumble into my hand. He bought my multi-vitamins and creatine in gummy form, because I can’t swallow the big horse pills he takes. The creatine is supposed to stave of dementia. Had he not purchased them, I'm quite sure I wouldn’t have ordered them for myself. Or gone to the trouble of trying to choke down the big pills. I would’ve gone without. He knows that.
He also sets cold cans of sparkling water on my nightstand each night. I move under the covers and read a bit on my Kindle, while he settles the house, takes his supplements and vitamins, straightens and puts things away. He puts the last of the dishes in the dishwasher and turns it on. By the time, I wake up, he has put all the clean dishes away on the shelves in the kitchen.
I wake up and he has set the mood for everyone for the day. There is a calmness when I first hit the kitchen. David will undoubtedly have been up for hours. He probably has already worked out in his gym in the back yard, or rode his stationary bike. And he most likely went to the sauna before my ADHD drugs settled in and woke me up. On the TV in the living room, there is a video of a babbling brook in the middle of a leafy forest that is playing on Youtube. He likes these nature scenes. Or sometimes it’s a a person writing quietly in a notebook, and occassionally stopping to look out the window over a snowy fjord. Or the London bookshop, with the snowy eaves and the holiday lights, is another fave. I rolled my eyes when he started putting these weirdly quiet videos on the TV while we worked, but I have grown to have my favorites. The little things matter.
The house is clean. The dining room table, which is often deeply infiltrated with Desi’s art projects and slime-making projects, has been cleared and the supplies re-organized into her art cart, a little moveable shelf system that has everything from water color pens to paint brushes. The day begins quietly and with a clean slate he has created for us.
I have been noticing lately how David cares for me, and our family. For the kids, the things he does are bigger. He plans a hike for Edie and Lucy up Kilimanjaro this year, guides adult children through airports on the phone in the middle of the night, plans a multi-family camping trip to Kernsville, California, advises them about college, their cars, and how to manage paperwork. Yesterday, David re-applied for my passport, because he knew with my ADHD, I would probably miss the deadline. Or push it too far, and we’d have to deal with the ordeal of getting a new passport after it expired. I’m sure he did it as much for him as for me. Still, he knew me. He saw me. And responded.
A lot of what David and I do for each other is small, but vital. Tiny kindnesses. I can’t remember the last time he bought me a huge bouquet of roses. My engagement ring has been sitting in a lock box for years. Neither of us have pulled it out to have it fixed, so the smaller diamonds on the sides won’t pop out. I wasn’t even in the state for Father’s Day this year, so he didn’t even get a great dinner. Last year, a teenage friend of our children remembered our wedding anniversary while both of us forgot about it.
A teenager remembered, but not us. LOL.
Last night, I did a couple giant loads of wash and spent the evening folding and putting clothes away, while we watched Owen Wilson’s Stick. I made bags for good will and piles for garbage. He thanked me, which struck me as sweet, and unnecessary. It also made me remember that when I do a chore, every little check mark on the to-do list eases the burden for both of us. And because he does as much as I do, if not more (honestly), there is no resentment, no worries about invisible labor and who does what.
This marriage has been 20 years in the making.
I tell my adult girls all the time: Choosing a partner is pretty much the most important decision you will ever make. But if I’m being truly honest with myself, I know that even when we choose well, there is no guarantee. Luck plays a huge role. Life throws things at us that we can’t see coming. Shitty diagnoses, kid problems, addictions, old traumas, natural disasters, in-law problems, death, career issues, unemployment, elder care, moving, unhappinesses, and dissatisfactions that you can’t solve or find the point of origin. Even relationships where there is great love and attraction can fall into a kind of abyss from the wear and tear of daily life. The Modern Love column in the New York Times is riddled with good people in good marriages that simply fall off cliffs for no particular reason. We love each other, but we aren’t in love with each other.
I’ve heard people say - and I think it’s true - that long marriages are made up of multiple marriages. Epochs, if you will. And this feels right. David and I, I think, have had three different marriages so far.
Marriage Number One: Hot sex and having a baby with a stranger. (2004-2005)
Our first marriage was as short as it was intense. He had just gotten divorced. I was good being single and childless. But there was that attraction: Constant hot, soul-bending sex. Nights out in New York City. Back stage at his shows. Dinners out with friends. That thrill when you see that person again after not seeing them for two whole excrutiating hours. Weekends where we never left the house. We met each other’s people. Got pregnant with Lucy. Cooked together in the kitchen. Traveled together for the first times. So much excitement and expectation. The kind of happiness that is delirious and unreal and so welcome, but not based on any kind of permanence.
David, back then, jumped on a plane for almost any reason and headed off to Moscow, London, Paris, Sydney or Siberia. He drank hard, partied after the curtain closed on his shows. There was that time David went out all night while my parents visited and was so hung over the next day, he couldn’t get out of bed. My parents were barely speaking to me anyway, angered by my sudden pregancy. I spent the day making excuses for David’s “flu” and fending off their side eyes.
Was this guy going to be marriage material? What did it mean to be marriage material? Would I be marriage material? I mean, I hadn’t even been married at this point. None of my relationships had ended well. I was either left in dramatic, public form by my partner, or I would get angry and resentful for not getting what I needed, and kind of fade away from the relationship. I was pushing 40 and had only marginal success at this. I got tired of men quickly. Wouldn’t I tire of him, too?
Marriage Number Two: The kids (and life) are going to kill us. (2005 - 2020)
We had two kids, Lucy and Edie, back-to-back. Nearly Irish twins. My body changed and became unrecognizeable to me in both how I looked and how I felt. I was for the first time, alien in my own skin. I breastfed for years while I slipped into perimenopause, merging two major life-impacting processes. At some point, I stopped remembering what it was like to have agency over my own body. I remember David putting his hand on my breast. At the same time, Edie reached up did the same. We fell out laughing. But the confusion was real.
The kids were so full-on. Even as David left on his bike everyday to work in Manhattan, my life got freakishly small. It took Herculean efforts to get out the door, with mittens, hats, clothes changes, meltdowns and bathroom trips. Sometimes even moving from the elevator to the front door was about dragging exhausted kids, or picking up their clothes in the hallway after they disrobed the length of it while walking. I ghostwrote books from home. I got part-time help. I took jobs that paid us, but weren’t sexy or artistic. David chose shows he thought would make money. David and I did things for “the family.”
Once, David went out of town for a week. Lucy was close to David. When he returned, she saw him walk through the door. It dawned on her that he had been gone all that time. I handed her to David. She SCREAMED in in his face. He changed how he worked, after that. He traveled for shorter periods. This choice changed his work life, and it saved our family and possibly our marriage. He put us first and we all noticed and were better for it.
Sex changed during marriage #2. Drastically. No more languising in bed, eating breakfast sandwiches, and then going back to bed for more sex. No, we were being surveilled by tiny voyeurs who were always concerned about our whereabouts. Sex was a thing we did in between laundry and post-dinner dishes. Sex was often on the bathroom floor while the girls watched Pink Panther in the living room. I learned about what sex can mean for men. How it is a conduit for connection and intimacy. How David needed the physical to be connected, even though I was touched out almost all the time. We had to negotiate and figure it out. It wasn’t easy. But something about that kept us in the fight for survival.
Once I was laying on the couch, touched-out by the kids. David was sacked out in a nearby chair, exhausted. We held hands across the divide.
Okay, lets have sex, he mumbled in his half-asleep voice.
I’m ready I said, barely conscious.
We both fell asleep. LOL.
During this marriage, David had super-successful shows and shows that never took off. There was money in and money out. Times of prosperity. Times of scarcity. The 2008 financial crisis dried up the well. We almost lost the apartment. Entertainment is one of the first industries to go under when people are worried about spending. It was only through David’s teancity and refinancing the mortgage that we’d hang onto the apartment and get through.
We had sick parents, dying parents, parent obligations. We moved to Vegas because David was producing a show there. The West, the Mojave, the lore, the mountain biking, the small town inside a big international city, the 290 days a year of sun, it all welcomed us. We found the unrelenting space to make, build, and craft a unique life. We stayed.
We fostered a bunch of kids and ended up adopting two of them, Raffi and Desi, now 14 and 9. They had lots of issues and our parenting had to change. We spent our date nights talking parenting strategies and re-thinking how we handled nuanced and complicated situations with our newest kids, how to take care of healthy kids alongside unhealthy, traumatized kids, and how to bring everyone together as if we were a blended family. Because in so many ways, we were.
By the time we got to the pandemic, we opened a food pantry on our front lawn and welcomed the most struggling people of Vegas into our front yard and our home. It was perspective-changing. I had to come to terms with things I’d learned about poverty and how we all contribute to keeping other people down. Later, I won a James Bear award for an essay I wrote about food at the intersection of meth addiction, got a book deal, hunkered down and spent a year and a half writing, while David took the reins of day-to-day family life.
David also changed. He had a heart attack. We started thinking about the last third of our lives. What we wanted from it, from each other, for our family. We got intentional. What do we want the last third of our lives to be? What dreams do we have? David started lifting weights. He focused on longevity and his health. He changed up his career. We spent more time nurturing our relationship. We started working from home, which has further made us partners, co-creators, collaborators, and idea-generators. He continues to be the problem solver to my problem maker. LOL.
Marriage Number Three: Best friends with Benefits. (2020-2025)
It was only last year that I finally figured out, nineteen years in, what David needed from me when he was upset, stressed out, angry with me. In the past, I got defensive. I wanted to be right. Really, I was afraid that if I fucked up, he might leave me. It took me almost two decades to figure out that what he needed was for me to show compassion and empathy for how he was feeling. Why could I do that for other people and not the person I loved the most?
I worked on it. I keep working on it. For his part, David is better about articulating out loud what he needs. It is remarkable to me that after years together we are still learning how to please each other. There is something cool about having been together for so long and knowing there is more to discover.
David and I never called each other best friends, even though he has been mine for the past twenty years. Edie would say: You can’t be my best friend, because you’re my mom. This made sense to me. But I’m here to tell you that in my third marriage with David, I’ve befriended my husband, while also feeling a certain kind of renaissance about our relationship.
Marriage, culturally, is under some stress and review these days. It is not for everyone, honestly. There are heterosexual women opting out of marriage altogether because - and there is research to back this up - younger straight women tend to be happier alone, rather than in relationships with straight men. This often due to the unequal division of labor in the home, which is a real issue, and one that came to a head during the pandemic. How did I know that David would share the shit jobs? I didn’t. He didn’t know that about me either. We got lucky.
I also get why last summer was about the divorce book. Women left marriages that did not fulfill them. They left because taking care of themselves was easier than taking care of themselves plus a needy, clueless man. Add children, and well, I get it. Good for them. Marriage is at its best when it raises all boats.
Then, there is our government, trying to roll back protections for gay marriage, making it harder for LGBTQ+ people to enjoy the benefits and protections of long stable marriages. And there’s the puzzling and burgeoning trad wives phenomena, where women go all in on child raising, large families, big domestic responsibilities like homesteading and homecooking, while embracing the conservative values of obedience and sublimation to their partners. These marriages are inherently performative for content, which bastardizes what is innately beautiful about marriage - that its best parts, its most real parts, are the most quiet, and seen only by the people in it. Marriage is, at its best, a closed door conversation.
When David brings me vitamins, I think about his Dad and the way he dotes on his second wife, Trish. Brings her yogurt in the morning. Makes her tea in the afternoon. It’s as if a genetic relationship torch has been passed. I don’t know if we will have a fourth marriage, but I am here for it. If there is one more in us, or if this one just continues on, wonderful. I’m grateful we made it this far. I’m grateful we got lucky. I’m grateful we didn’t give up when it was hard. I’m grateful we made choices that helped us stay together, not drive us apart. I look at his ass in jeans, moving around the kitchen, and still feel a quiver inside. Still want to reach out and touch him, in the same ways I did twenty years ago.
It’s a marvel, really.
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END NOTES:
Next week: I thought we should discuss penises next week. Erectile dysfunction, how women feel about viagra, how men feel about taking Viagra, what is ex like on viagra as compared to not on viagra, adaptations that can help with sex, re-imaginging sex as functioning dissipates, etc. I want to hear it all. Please come at me with your experiences in DMs or emails. I will keep you anonymous, unless you want your newsletter tagged. And thanks in advance!
Paying subs: Just wanted to say thanks to all the people who are subscribers. And also to the paying subs, thank you so much! I’m not paywalling my essays here, because I don’t want to exclude anyone who can’t pay. But if you can and want to support this work financially, it does help us support the family and I am soooo grateful.
Another way to contribute is to comment: We have a lively comment section and I often get an idea for the following week’s essay from the things you are writing there. So, thank you to the people commenting and responding to other people’s comments. If I miss responding to your comment, know I’m on it, but I miss some occasionally. It’s not you, it’s me. :) Thanks for being patient. Everyone is welcome to DM or email me anytime if you prefer privacy.
Photography: Anise, Lucy (our oldest) and Edie, (third) spent a week at Lucy’s place in Salt Lake City, and Anise brought her DSLR. These three have been friends since Anise and Lucy were in pre-k, and their mom, Julie, is one of my best friends in the world. Edie will live with them this year for her first year going to college in NYC.
Both Julie and Anise have an amazing photographic eye and are extremely talented artists, writers and creatives. Anise’s dad is a film maker and the genes are real. I loved seeing all the photos from the shoot. And we have also gone nearly twenty years in each other’s lives. This, too, is an accomplishment. And a gift.
Thank you, as always, for reading. xo Kim
A very interesting read. I have been married for 62 years (yes, really) and there have been so many small changes over the years that ended up in big changes, just so much growing up we needed to do. We were 21 and 22 when we married and, worse, both graduate students so under constant pressure. It's a wonder that we made it through that first year. Indeed, I have said recently that the only reason we didn't split (for me) was that it would have proved my mother right and anything was better than that!
We had two kids 13 years apart, both did PhDs at different points, and a move from NYC to London, albeit early on. I think we have had more than 3 marriages in your sense and the best is right now, definitely best friends and definitely 'benefits'. Life has become so easy together, it's hard for me to remember when it was difficult.
And I fully agree that luck plays a huge part.
Thank you for this post. Very stimulating.
For those of us with longer marriages, I can absolutely see why you break it down into "sections".