Foreverland: On the Divine Tedium of Marriage

by Heather Havrilesky

Who wants to admit that in marriage, as in Monopoly, you don’t know how it will end, but you can never, ever quit?

We could look up at the small circle of blue sky and remember how it felt to relax, to take in the moment, to appreciate what we had. We were at the center, and everything was good. We were in love.

The baby starts making those sputtering sounds that babies make when the atmosphere shifts in ways that displease them. Their nervous systems are trampolines, too.

But as my kids grew bigger, I was also trying to manage how much I loved and worried about them. I was reckoning with how much I depended on Bill—for love, for help, for everything. And maybe I was trying to avoid overinvesting in another flawed human. Maybe our interdependence felt threatening to me, at some level.

And I felt overinvested anyway. I cared too much. There was no way to avoid it. I was trying not to feel fragile in the face of that investment.

Two people grow old together, but maybe only one of them survives. Two people hope to survive together. The world narrows to one boat on the ocean. I had to cancel the party.