Every now and then, at brunches with other couples, baby showers, weddings, endless cocktail parties for your company, I would have looked at you, myself, and the other wives, each woman coiffed and preening, and wondered about the women we could have been had we chosen ourselves over you and your brethren. The women we could have been had we decided to pursue our untapped talents instead of helping you pursue your greatness. The women we could have been had we been raised to believe we were more than negative space, waiting to fill into and be filled by men. The women we could have been had we chosen the path of our creation versus the path designated. I would have mulled these thoughts, and you would have caught me, alerted by the pensive, frozen smile on my face. You would have placed your hand on the small of my back, reminding me that I am yours, and asked, “You okay, baby?” I would have replied, “Of course, my love.”

Lately I’ve had to call on words for little shots of strength. Some use tequila; I use poems short enough to memorize. Their lines float around in my head, counteracting the insidious words t…

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

“The friends that I keep close make me the best version of myself, but I’ve never found that consistently in a romantic relationship. I’m growing to understand that romance and love are not rational (thank you, therapy?). Historically, I’ve looked at romantic relationships as a test of what I have to offer. Do you like me? What are the qualities about me that you like? You’re having fun, right? What I’m getting at is this — I know I’m a good friend. I can evaluate friendships rationally, articulately. But with relationships or dating there’s this factor of capital-F Feelings added to the picture. They’re weird and messy. The butterflies-in-your-chest feeling is foreign, like anxiety rather than attraction. I’m not comfortable with capital-F Feelings yet. Because most of my past relationships have been maybe not in the absence of Feelings, but not formed on them alone. So I’m working through these things.”

We stop in front of a vacant store front for a long kiss and so I can wish a positive happy week since we have separate evenings planned.

“An airport after security and before boarding is, at least to me, the last place where every verb is only in the future tense.” “The veil feels thin between who I have settled into being and all the other people I could have been.” “Maybe it is possible to want the things you have”

“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.”