THE FEELING: 10,000 Years

Today is my 10th wedding anniversary, somehow

Pals,

Today, I’ve been married to Simon for ten years. (Which means it’s been ten years plus ten weeks since I met him.)

I don’t feel close to that reality. We just met. I’ve always known him. (My experience of Strawberry was and is the same: “Oh! It’s you!”)

We got married at the Drake Devonshire, a hotel in Prince Edward County, with just our parents and Rev Steve. We had no photographer, and both our moms, who have both since died, took clandestine pictures. My dad gave a short speech at dinner that meant more to me than any other string of words ever has. I regret not having my whole family there, and my friends, but there was urgency. I wore Band of Outsiders and carried hydrangeas and was very sure, but also very aware that I had floated out of the slipstream of my regular life. How could I not be? Ten weeks! But I was sure.

The prescribed anniversary gift for ten years is diamonds, but, I have diamond earrings that I don’t wear because one of my piercings closed, and I have diamond rings that I don’t wear because I don’t really see a woman’s marital status as public information (I do see a man’s marital status as public information… jk jk) and also because my hands and my general self-as-habitat resists jewelry. The real anniversary gift will be the new house we’re looking for. (Is real estate the least romantic thing to buy, or the most romantic of all?)

Even with all its impositions and limitations, marriage should still make you feel free, first: it is the ultimate “strong opinion, loosely held.” It’s an exaltant experience, to be so part of something major and legal and firm, and to be allowed (expected!) to play and experiment and make it all up every day.

I’ve written a lot of silly, dreamy shit about Simon in this space over the last ten years, part of my ongoing and interconnected effort to understand him, to be honest, to take the win, and to put forth the idea, a little bit, that you can pick the bar off the floor and fling in into outer space, and that’s where you set it.

It’s not like Simon (or me) is a more resolved or complete person than anyone else. I mean, we are in the dirt. We work actively and avidly on resolving the inevitable riots of childhood traumas and neurodivergences, and differences of personality, demographics, socialized gender roles, and who got enough sleep the night before, and who did not (me). (A tip: If a couples therapist says “I don’t know, you guys seem great!” get a better couples therapist.) The fact that we still have a laugh every day is the result of very good luck, a shared value system, and plain, dogged mutual relentlessness. But everything I’ve ever written about Simon has been a pencil study, trying to get at how much I like him, love him, care for him, and seek to know him.

My favorite little anecdote about my relationship is when my friend, a Best, was offering wise counsel in the very early days, about keeping my expectations in check, that this new guy wouldn’t be as smart as X and as funny as Y and as kind as Z… And not to slice and dice the attributes of boyfriends past and husbands present but Simon is really the most interesting, strangest, and wildest person I’ve ever known. He’s so capable and so childlike. A “Big Motor” and a slice of sweet-potato pie. A total girl’s guy, and a former pro athlete-cum-finance prick. A bleeding, melting heart, but also infuriatingly, dementedly stoic. Who is this person? is not a question I had anticipated asking myself, so often, ten years in.

I see myself in this relationship in a specific way, and I see how marriage has rearranged me, but I’ve been editing my book and have no more breath or thought for my own experience. Like, see you next year! But I do have some quasi-advice, based entirely on Simon’s Marvel-sized universe of actions, which I will offer here:

1. Anticipate. Very, very often I will be halfway through asking Simon for something that would be very nice, or will have just barely formulated a thought about something I need or want, only to have it materialize in front of me. He gets a lot of Smirk Power from this. This has been a Key Learning about being the youngest of three who married an oldest of five.

2. Observe. I now have two copies of Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World because I mentioned it when we were “dating” (lol, we didn’t date) and he bought it to find out a little bit about this particular nerd world I was part of (academia, books, words) which is totally different from the particular nerd world that he was part of (finance, stock market, math) and while I like all kinds of effort, this effort extended in an uncomfortable and mentally taxing direction is so specific to Simon and I think pretty rare?

3. Invent. Some of this has shifted over the last couple of years, as Simon’s work changed and grew, and as I returned to work as a writer and strategist post-Strawberry, and then became an author, and then very much a corporate employee in advertising. (My freelance rates recently went from like “high-ish” to “You’ll have to send me to Sardinia with an entourage for me to justify doing anything other than working my actual job and writing my actual book.” Call me!) We are both really tired, right now. But!!! I feel like Simon’s creative energy — he is so sharp, so fast and so funny — contributes an essential quality to a relationship and family and household atmosphere that is alive and aglow. (Sometimes it is too bright and too loud for my own nervous system.) While I have created the tone and the vibe according to my own specifications — I am the theory of our mob — Simon is the engine and the execution, the MC and the jester and the manual labor: the practice. And practice is everything.

To 10,000 more.

xx

Kate