By our tenth anniversary, almost everyone we knew had quietly decided that David and I were married in every way that counted. I understood why. We had built a life that looked, from the outside, exactly like the thing people meant when they said settled. There was the house with the blue shutters that we had painted ourselves one long weekend, arguing cheerfully over the exact shade of blue and then agreeing, in the end, that we both loved it. There was the joint checking account we had opened years ago because splitting every bill down the middle had started to feel absurd for two people who shared a bed and a bathroom and a future. There were the streaming passwords, the mingled book collections, the drawer in the kitchen full of takeout menus and spare keys and the small archaeology of a shared life. And there was the dog, Baxter, who had come home with me as a nervous rescue puppy a year before David and I moved in together and had, over time, become ours in the way that a dog becomes the property of whoever is warmest and most reliably present.
Our friends introduced him as my husband. It happened constantly, at dinner parties and barbecues and the weddings of people younger than us. This is Sarah and her husband David, someone would say, and David would smile and shake the hand offered to him and never, not once in ten years, correct them. And I never corrected them either. I told myself it was easier that way. I told myself that fixing the mistake would have required me to name the thing that David so carefully never named, and that naming it in front of other people would have been a kind of accusation, and that I loved him too much to make him feel accused at a party. So I let it stand. I let strangers and acquaintances and even some of our closer friends believe that we had already crossed a line David kept, gently and endlessly, refusing to cross.
There is a particular skill you develop, living that way, though I didn’t recognize it as a skill until much later. You become fluent in a kind of managed silence. At a wedding, when the officiant would say those words about the couple choosing each other, choosing each other again and again, I would feel David’s hand find mine and I would squeeze it and tell myself that we, too, chose each other, and that the choosing didn’t need a ceremony to be real. When a colleague of mine got engaged and I sat through the whole giddy story of the proposal, I would smile and coo in all the right places and drive home afterward feeling a small hollow ache I refused to name. I got very good at not naming things. I got very good at translating every disappointment into a virtue, telling myself that my patience made me generous, that my willingness to want less than I wanted made me easy to love, that the women who demanded rings and dates and paperwork were somehow less evolved than I was. I built a whole private philosophy out of my own settling, and I mistook it, for ten years, for wisdom.
