We All Live Here

by Jojo Moyes

Here are the things I have learned in my fifteen years of marriage: it’s okay if you don’t feel filled with adoration every day. We are all going to get grumpy over the discarded socks, the missed annual car inspection, the fact that you haven’t had sex for six weeks. As the great Esther Perel says,

love is a process. It is a verb. All marriages have peaks and troughs, and over those years you gain a greater perspective and realize that it is just part of the ebb and flow of your own, special, unique romantic life. Marriage can contain multitudes of emotions in one single day. You can wake up to the man snoring beside you and think you want to put a pillow over his head, and by eleven o’clock that same morning, you’re wishing the cleaner would leave early so that you could grab him and lose a delicious hour in bed together. You can feel fondness, irritation, lust, gratitude all in the same half-hour. The trick is to understand this process, this ebb and flow, and not be panicked

by your own emotions. Because as long as you’re both in this together, a team, you know deep in your bones that this is just part of the glorious business of being human. Dan is my team, and we’re in this together, and ...

‘Keep going. No feeling is final.’ Something along those lines. And I always think of that, when things are a bit rough. No feeling is final. The shitty times don’t last forever. Even if they feel like it.”

This is life at this age, she muses, a million goodbyes, and you never know which are the final ones. You just absorb them, like little shocks, trusting with each one that you’ll be able to keep moving forward.

Life is long and complicated, Lila, and we all make mistakes. What matters is what we do beyond them. But if you’re going to hold up your mother and your father as villains of the piece it will be misguided and it is ultimately you who will suffer.”

Have you never made a mistake?” Lila thinks about Jensen, about the awful discarded chapter. Jane seems to note her flicker of uncertainty. “Well, I hope, if you have, that you were forgiven. I hope the person understood that you’re only human. You can hang on to anger and bitterness your whole life. But all you really do is prolong your own pain. Just think about it. Put that burden down. For you and your daughters.”

Lila sits at the head of the table and just enjoys it all, eating the food that has been cooked for her and watching the invisible threads reattach the different sides of her family, at first fragile, but then swiftly growing in strength, like an enormous silken web. Sometimes she thinks about her mother, and wonders what she would have made of it all. She’s pretty sure it would be something along the lines of “Isn’t it the most fun, Lils? Aren’t we all just ridiculously modern?”