The Anatomy Of A Marriage

A personal manifesto.

We were sitting in our car, parked up in the carpark of Hampstead heath, both our children asleep in the back seat. There was no proposal, it was a discussion, which concluded with an agreement that yes, we would get married.

The pheromones that I procured upon having my second son were strong. When I looked ahead into my future I could only see him.

I do.

I was thirty nine. He was thirty three.

Marriage is him having ten different names for me, none of which are my real name

Marriage is his preternaturally long toes, skewed towards mine in bed every night, trying to touch my feet.

Marriage is me pulling my feet away.

Marriage is the noises. The noises. The clearing of the throat. The farting on the toilet amplified by the cistern to a stomach churning volume. Marriage is his complete lack of comprehension of how these noises are so deeply offensive to me. How they scrape at my psyche.

Marriage is the journey of my reaction to these noises. Sometimes I hear them so loudly. Sometimes I don’t hear them at all.

Marriage is being held to account over and over again.

Marriage is him walking past me as I soak my period blood stained pyjama bottoms in a large salad bowl from the kitchen. Dry tones. “I look forward to our next salad.”

Marriage is him saying. You’ve never silly anymore. You used to be silly.

Marriage is private amused glances above our children’s heads.

Marriage is trust.

Marriage with kids is a never ending relentless stream of discarded objects - socks, bowls, newspapers, towels. Hansel and Gretel but leading to a breakdown. Each lone sock a taunt at the mundanity of my future.

I wanted the party. Three different events. Ibiza wedding. Big warehouse party in London.

It was the registry office that took us by surprise. Flowers picked from the garden. Kids watching on. Clinging on to each other. Big ugly sobbing.

Marriage is an institution. Queen Elizabeth staring out at us from a portrait on the wall as we signed our certificates.

Marriage is embarrassing. I still can’t call him my husband.

Marriage is a hug every morning in the kitchen. Him resting his chin on the top of my head.

Marriage is his snoring. Creeping out of our room in the middle of the night to sleep in the spare bed.

Marriage is being ordered to go and do some exercise so that I’m less intense.

Marriage is small things magnified to gargantuan proportions. Crumbs on the sideboard. Toothpaste left out with the lid off. The sound of a fork hitting a tooth.

Marriage is his obsession with dental hygiene.

Marriage with kids is the Sisyphusean task of moving piles of clothes from downstairs to upstairs.

Marriage is him getting a pedicure on holiday while I read my book on the sofa.

Marriage is compromise.

Marriage with kids can feel limiting, defining and predictable in a way that induces real terror.

Marriage is admin meetings. Sitting opposite each other with our laptops. Giving out to each other for losing focus.

Marriage is scheduled sex.

Marriage is being a fully solvent adult woman asking permission to go on a night out.

Marriage is never being able to get over the way he chops vegetables, as if they’re wood.

He just turned forty. To me this milestone birthday signalled a threshold of sorts, a marker, beyond which the second half of our lives and marriage spread out before us. I had been so busy, that I forgot. This was it. He was it. I had chosen him. And the bond of marriage meant that we were stuck with each other for the rest of our lives.

Marriage is him saying, is it the mental load stuff again?

Marriage is the constant struggle to forsake resentment and embrace forgiveness.

Marriage is being constantly flattened down into routine. You have to pull at the lines of the neat shape of your life in order to not take each other for granted.

Marriage is the giving and receiving of space. Without time and space for each person away from the marriage, without ways to aerate it, it becomes heavy and sinks.

Marriage is falling in love many times with the same person.

Marriage is scrutability.

Marriage is him watching me, asking, where have you gone bub? darkness?

Marriage is respite from the self.

Marriage is remembering that I am not stuck.

Within a marriage “you can leave, but so can your partner; they could hurt you terribly, you could hurt them terribly, too. In this way—when and if it works—marriage militates against narcissism.” Devorah Baum

Marriage as a concept is 4,350 years old.

I tell him I am nervous before a football match. It is Winter. I am packing my bag. He takes off his gloves and puts them on my hands. Wear me on you. I’m in here, cheering you on.

Marriage is about learning how to change in close proximity to one another.

Marriage is the ability to expand and contract for each other like antagonist muscles - one slacked while the other pulls. Only then is the relationship able to move forwards.

Marriage is the state of existing with the knowledge that this thing you have created is fallible. At any point, it could all crumble.

Marriage is two roads running alongside each other, twisting and turning in different directions, but always coming back to run alongside each other again.

We have been running alongside each other for sixteen years. Seven of those married.

Marriage is the willingness to change the shape of your expectations to accommodate who they are becoming.

Marriage is him standing on the sidelines as I play football. Chatting with another woman’s husband.

Marriage, for me must be mutable; a shape shifting thing.

As long as we can be two wholly realised people in this relationship, then that marriage spreading out before us, is genuinely exciting to me.

As long as we can keep becoming, I still do.