I want to be fair to myself here, because for a long time I wasn’t. I had brought up marriage before, more than once over the years, but never the way he later described it. Never as an ultimatum, never with a folder of venue brochures or a Pinterest board of dresses or one of those speeches about forever that people imagine women deliver in kitchens. It was always smaller than that. It came up the way natural things come up between two people who have been together a long time, in the ordinary settled moments when our life felt solid enough to make the question seem not just reasonable but obvious. We would be lying in bed on a Sunday morning, or driving home from his parents’ house, or standing in the kitchen doing dishes, and I would say something light, something like, do you ever think about making this official, and I would watch him do the thing he always did.
Because David had a gift for it, the sliding. He never said no. That was the trick of it, the thing that kept me hoping for ten years. If he had ever once said no, plainly, I think I would have understood much sooner what I was dealing with. Instead he would deflect. He would make a joke about how much weddings cost, about how we could put a down payment on a boat for what people spent on one afternoon of chicken or fish. Or he would get almost tender about it, would pull me close and say that we were already more committed than half the married couples we knew, which was probably even true, and which felt, in the moment, like a compliment rather than an evasion. Or he would kiss my forehead, that maddening forehead kiss, and ask me softly why I cared so much about labels, as if wanting to marry the person I had built my entire adult life around were a small vanity I should be a little embarrassed about. And I would let it go. Every single time, I would let it go, because the alternative was to push, and pushing felt like the opposite of the easy, generous love I thought we had.
