But it’s a beautiful thing to choose and to be chosen. It’s something our culture feels so disconnected from—the deep joy of making permanent decisions. ​ The reason we talk so much is that we have so much to talk about. We are very different people. ​ Within a lifelong commitment, I can free him from the burden of being perfect. Without the expectation of being the “perfect man,” he can be exactly what he is: A great man. (Crumbs and all.) That’s freeing. ​ But for me, I’m choosing to believe the commitment is the beginning. It’s where the story starts.

When I looked at that mouse with her broom, I wondered which one of us was wrong about who I was. ​ She was a woman who had spent two years nursing her mother and her best friend through cancer. They had both recently died and she had lost herself in caring for them, she said. She wanted a week to be herself. Not a teacher or a mother or a wife. This trip was the thing she was giving herself after their passing. ​ That I wanted someone to articulate that they loved me, that they saw me, was a personal failing and I tried to overcome it. ​ It turns out, if you want to save a species, you don’t spend your time staring at the bird you want to save. You look at the things it relies on to live instead. You ask if there is enough to eat and drink. You ask if there is a safe place to sleep. Is there enough here to survive? ​ Forgave each other for telling the same stories over and over again. ​ To keep becoming a woman is so much self-erasing work. ​ What I understood on the other side of my decision, on the gulf, was that there was no such thing as ruining yourself. There are ways to be wounded and ways to survive those wounds, but no one can survive denying their own needs. To be a crane-wife is unsustainable.

marriage is two people in love standing in the same bathroom

We know that people are marrying later in life, but that’s not the only shift. The whole relationship timeline is stretching.

“I think that’s how marriages end. Very slowly and then all at once. There are lots of little things that happen and then the flood comes, then the big things happen. The question is, can we stop the little things that take us further away from each other before it’s too late?” “At the risk of sounding unromantic, I think you have to look at a person and say, ‘Okay, is this a person who is going to make sense at all different phases of this journey? Because my life is going to change. I’m going to change. What’s important to me is going to change. Is this a person who can change with me so that we end up [moving] in the same direction? Or is this someone who makes sense for me at this chapter and may not in the future?’” “In the book, I urge people to just ‘hit send now,’ which means always call out those little things immediately in the moment, always address them right now. If you don’t do that, if you let the resentments grow, those raindrops become a flood and it’s too late to put everything back together again.” “It’s the same thing with love. I think you fall in love really fast, then fall out of love slowly. And if you want to keep your love alive, you have to be attentive to all the little things that go wrong along the way, and constantly course-correct. If you can do that, you’ll never set foot in my office.”