Eighteen Years of Choosing Each Other

On September 9th, 2008, I married Joanne.

Eighteen years later, I could write the usual anniversary post.

I could talk about finding my best friend, about eighteen wonderful years, about how I would do it all again without hesitation. I could find a photograph where we both look particularly happy, write something sentimental underneath it, and leave the difficult parts outside the frame.

None of those things would necessarily be lies.

They just would not be the whole truth.

Eighteen years is a long time.

Long enough for two people to change.

Long enough to get things right and get things spectacularly wrong.

Long enough to know exactly which habits will irritate the other person before you have even started doing them.

Long enough for arguments whose original subject neither of you can properly remember.

Long enough for illness, money problems, fear, exhaustion, disappointments, changed plans and all the ordinary pressures that do not appear in wedding photographs.

Marriage, at least ours, has never been eighteen uninterrupted years of happiness.

But I don't think that is what makes it worthwhile.

The photograph is not the marriage

Weddings are strange things when you look back on them from a distance.

There is a point where everything is clean.

Everyone has dressed for the occasion. People have travelled to be there. There are photographs and speeches and rings and promises. For a few hours, life allows itself to be organised around the idea that two people choosing each other is important enough for everybody else to stop what they are doing and witness it.

Then you go home.

And the marriage begins.

Not the ceremony.

The actual thing.

Shopping lists. Bills. Illness. Work. Family. Dogs. Cars that decide not to work at exactly the wrong time. Hospital appointments. Good meals. Bad moods. Holidays. Arguments. Private jokes that stopped making sense to anyone outside the relationship fifteen years ago.

You discover that love is capable of being both enormous and incredibly mundane.

Sometimes it is a declaration.

Much more often it is making sure the other person has eaten.

It is remembering something they forgot.

It is finding something they have misplaced while complaining that they always misplace it.

It is sitting together when there is nothing useful to say.

It is occasionally wanting to strangle one another and deciding that probably isn't the healthiest conflict-resolution strategy.

Eighteen years contains all of it.

There have been difficult years

I do not want to romanticise marriage by pretending that loving someone makes everything easy.

It does not.

Joanne and I have issues.

We have had bad periods. We have hurt each other. We have misunderstood each other. There have been arguments that should have been handled differently and moments when one or both of us were too angry, too tired, too frightened or too wrapped up in our own problems to see what the other person needed.

There have been times when life itself has put enormous pressure on us.

Health.

Money.

Work.

Family.

The accumulated exhaustion of things that have to be dealt with regardless of whether either of you has the energy left to deal with them.

Depression has been part of that too.

Mine does not politely remain an individual problem simply because it exists inside my head.

When I am struggling badly, I know I can become difficult to reach. I can become withdrawn, angry, hopeless, frustrated. Things that might normally be small can feel enormous. Things Joanne says in an attempt to reassure me sometimes fail completely to land, because knowing intellectually that something is good and being capable of feeling that goodness are not always the same thing for me.

That affects her.

Of course it does.

Marriage means that our difficulties rarely belong completely to only one of us.

But the same is true of the good things.

The good has always been bigger

That is what I keep coming back to when I think about eighteen years.

The difficult things are real.

I am not interested in pretending otherwise.

But when I look at the whole thing rather than whichever problem happens to be loudest today, the good has always been bigger.

There has been an extraordinary amount of laughter.

There have been ridiculous trips and stupid purchases and meals we still talk about years later.

There have been films watched together and games played and holidays and conventions and afternoons that did not seem important at the time but have somehow become part of the architecture of our lives.

There have been animals we loved.

People who became family.

Things we built together.

Things that went completely wrong and eventually became stories we could laugh about.

There is an entire language of references, expressions, looks and jokes that exists because we have spent eighteen years learning one another.

Some of the best moments of my life would simply not exist without Joanne in them.

That matters more than whether every day was good.

No life has every day good.

No relationship does either.

The question, for me, is what the difficult days are sitting inside.

And ours are sitting inside something much larger.

I know who I am without her

Or at least I know enough to know that I would not like that version as much.

That may be the thing I am most certain of after eighteen years.

My life would be worse without Joanne.

More than that:

I would be worse without Joanne.

Not because she has somehow fixed me.

She hasn't.

I remain extremely capable of being an idiot entirely under my own power.

She cannot cure my depression. She cannot make every fear disappear. She cannot force me to recognise my own achievements when my brain has decided they do not count.

And it would be horribly unfair to make any of those things her responsibility.

What she has done is affect who I became.

Eighteen years of another person changes you.

Their values rub against yours.

Their perspectives challenge yours.

They tell you when you are being unreasonable.

Sometimes you listen immediately.

Sometimes, regrettably, you discover several hours later that they were right all along.

You become responsible for things outside yourself.

You learn compromises you would never have chosen alone.

You discover weaknesses.

You also discover capacities you might never have needed to develop otherwise.

There are decisions I have made differently because Joanne was part of the equation.

There are things I have endured because the alternative would have hurt both of us.

There are good things I have experienced because she persuaded me to go somewhere, try something, keep something, sell something, buy something, meet somebody or simply leave the house when I would rather have disappeared into myself.

There are pieces of the person I am now that were formed specifically because I have spent eighteen years beside her.

Take her out of that history and I am still me.

But I am not this me.

And I think this version is better.

Love is not the absence of friction

When we are young, I think we are sometimes sold a peculiar idea of successful relationships.

You find the right person and things fit.

Perhaps not perfectly, but naturally.

The good relationship is the one where you do not fight too much, do not hurt each other, understand one another instinctively and move together toward the same future.

Eighteen years has taught me something messier.

Two people can love each other enormously and still occasionally be absolutely terrible at communicating.

You can know somebody better than anyone else in the world and still completely misunderstand what they mean.

You can want the same broad thing and violently disagree about how to get there.

You can be angry and still love them.

You can be hurt and still love them.

You can have moments where the relationship needs work without the relationship therefore being a failure.

The absence of difficulty is not proof of love.

What matters much more is what happens around the difficulty.

Do you eventually come back?

Do you keep trying to understand?

Do you repair what can be repaired?

Do you learn anything?

Do you still want to tell that person the stupid thing that happened ten minutes ago?

Do you still instinctively look for them when something wonderful or terrible happens?

After eighteen years, I still do.

Choosing each other

I have been writing a lot lately about choice.

That is probably inevitable given what A Funeral for the Living became.

At the heart of those books are people who do not have certainty.

They do not know whether things will work.

They do not receive guarantees.

They choose people anyway.

Food gets shared before anyone knows whether there will be enough tomorrow.

Doors get opened before anyone knows what will come through them.

People make room for one another before they know whether doing so is safe.

Nobody gets to see the ending first.

I suppose marriage works like that too.

On September 9th, 2008, Joanne and I made an enormous promise about a future neither of us had actually seen.

That is an absurd thing when you think about it.

We did not know what eighteen years would contain.

We did not know who we would be at forty-five.

We did not know what our health would look like, what our finances would look like, where we would live, what we would lose, what we would gain or which plans would survive contact with reality.

We just chose.

Then, after the wedding, we had to keep choosing.

Not ceremonially.

Usually without noticing.

Again and again, in much smaller ways.

Sometimes badly.

Sometimes after an argument.

Sometimes when one of us was frightened.

Sometimes when everything was easy and choosing required no effort at all.

And sometimes when it did.

That is the part I think matters.

Eighteen years later

I wish everything were easier right now.

I wish I were in a better place mentally.

I wish there were fewer uncertainties hanging over us.

There are things about our lives I would change if I could.

There are things about myself I am trying to change because I should.

But when I look at Joanne, I do not look at eighteen perfect years.

I look at eighteen real ones.

There were difficult days.

There will be more.

There were arguments.

There will probably be more of those too. We are extremely talented people.

But there were also thousands upon thousands of ordinary moments where my life was better because she was in it.

And those moments win.

It isn't particularly close.

So on September 9th, I don't want to celebrate some polished version of marriage where two people found each other eighteen years ago and everything after that was happily ever after.

I want to celebrate what actually happened.

We found each other.

We married.

Life happened to us.

Sometimes we handled it well.

Sometimes we didn't.

Sometimes one of us carried more.

Sometimes the other did.

Sometimes we laughed until something hurt.

Sometimes we hurt each other and had to work out what came next.

We changed.

We stayed.

We kept choosing.

And after eighteen years, I know something I could not possibly have known when I made that first choice in 2008.

I know what a substantial part of my life looks like with Joanne in it.

It is imperfect.

Difficult sometimes.

Ridiculous remarkably often.

And better.

Much, much better.

I know things would be worse without her.

I know I would be worse without her.

So happy anniversary, Joanne.

Eighteen years.

Not perfect.

Not finished.

Still choosing each other.

I think that's considerably more worth celebrating than perfect ever could have been.