marriage

I never expected for marriage to change the way we felt about each other. After ten years of fighting and compromising, and falling in like and love, dealing with all manner of drama and success and failure, we had seen and heard it all. Marrying him was a simple, powerfully straightforward choice; getting married had seemed more like a formality than any significant transformation.

We’re all familiar with the narrative that weddings are celebrations of happinesses found, of love triumphant over obstacles, of commitments made tangible with words stated out loud, with ink on paper. And I think they are. Save for a largely irrational obsession with certain silly details, I loved the way that day made me feel, most of all the words that were said, that gave voice to what we had created with our presence in each other’s lives. It all feels pretty miraculous that two people can be together in this way. It still baffles me how it all worked out.

But I didn’t know that our wedding would also awaken such sadness, though it was a joyful sort of sadness, a melancholy nonetheless, that covered me for days. Two days after we made it official, after I had finally slept more than four hours and after the buzz of being around a hundred of our most consequential people on the planet had finally faded, I woke up with a sudden sense of time passing by too fast, confused at where the last ten years had gone. 

Marriage, it seems, is not for the faint of heart, or those like myself, who are prone to have existential crises when one’s sympathetic nervous system goes into overdrive. I felt the tears hot and messy in the midst of my confusion over what was happening; it was a while before I could process my thoughts. As it turns out, I am the type of person who cries when sad, angry, happy, or confused. Something, somewhere, somehow felt shifted, but I couldn’t figure out what it was. The obvious answer was the fact that we had just gotten married, but it wasn’t the being married that evoked my melancholy. It was, after much thinking about it, more that we were no longer waiting for it all to start, that this was it and we had to make it count, right now. What is it that you do when the thing you’d been waiting for finally arrives. I hadn’t really given it much thought, and it was all dawning upon me with the weight of all my fears, dreams, and jumbled emotions.

I realized I had been waiting around in some capacity for as long as I could remember, willing the time to pass, waiting to graduate and get a job, waiting to get into med school, waiting to finish med school, waiting to be in the same city, waiting to get engaged, waiting to get married. Eventually all the anticipation builds to a resolution, and then one is faced with the vast unknown of what happens next. Mostly I tend to replace it with the next thing to anticipate – where are we going to move for residency? When am I going to finally make it as an attending? There are always more goals to chase, more accomplishments to covet. But for better or worse, we are in large part already who we are meant to be. 

Perhaps ambitions change as people grow older simply because the tradeoff between the present and the future becomes less consequential. Our dreams become more realistic, more practical, at the risk of becoming more mundane. There is a fine line though, between complacency and the constant dissatisfaction of ever growing ambitions. We are told to live in the present; though who really knows what that means or how to operationalize that concept. What is the appropriate balance of work and fun and family and friends and saving and spending and sleeping and being awake. How do we balance these things in a marriage and in a life. In the midst of all of our stunning happiness, embracing this melancholy of time and what we do with it, seems a worthwhile if slightly uncomfortable project for the start of a new marriage. There is of course no right answer, but we’ll try.

It’s been just over a week since my last exam of the year, packing in a fury and bounding home to Ohio in a storm of lost gates, missed flights and weather delays. Old friends, wedding festivities, and a generosity of ice cream helpings later, I finally feel myself emerging from the cloud of exhaustion and excitement that was this year.

The quiet (and unexpectedly cool evenings) of suburban Cleveland have been a much welcome interlude – on Saturday I’m making the cross country trek to see Mark in the bay for a few days before we both fly back east to move into our new apartment in New York. I’m moving across the street and he’s moving across the country, but it feels less like the big moving-in-together this time around and more like a reshuffling of belongings – mine from the dorm filled with things that did not belong to me in a shared space that I feel like I’ve been borrowing, and his – from spaces never fully occupied with suitcases never fully unpacked. Mark proudly declares to our friends that it’s because he prefers to live like a minimalist. He could never be bothered to make a space livable, though he does not complain when I do it for the both of us.

Though I admit I’ve always been the self-designated appointer of spaces, I had not expected to be as affected by the space around me as I have been this past year – constantly lamenting the feeling of being a stranger in my own home, feeling anxious at the sight of couches, cushions, forks and knives long since left behind by doctors-in-training past. So much so that I could barely bear to spend any time in my own apartment, opting instead to occupy corners of neighborhood coffee shops, the aromas of overpriced espresso lingering in my hair and clothes.

By January, I had decided enough was enough. I had been woken up by enough loud conversations and mysterious music playing at odd hours to decide I was too old for shared spaces. Mark and I made the trek downtown to officially domestically partner up and prove that our application for the school’s couples housing was legitimate.

In exchange for 35 dollars and a few vague questions answered through a sheet of plexiglass, we received a very official looking piece of paper, that upon close reading, ended up meaning mostly nothing.

In May, Mark left his job in San Francisco, and I started looking for furniture in earnest.

There have been differences to consider since our last reshuffling, three summers ago when we moved into an airy and bright, if small 4^th floor walkup above Newbury St. 

Boston was the first place we lived together, and Sunday mornings we tumbled down the old brownstone steps, past the ground floor Italian restaurant (with a penchant for setting off the building fire alarm) onto rarely silent sidewalks. The early runs along the Charles that started and ended at those old double doors will always hold special sentiment. In Boston, where we each struggled and strived to find our places in the world of enterprise and fortune, there was striving to find how our lives would fit together. When I wasn’t working late, and when the green line functioned at its predictable slow clip, Mark would get back in time for dinner. The trader joes up the block served as private pantry, at the ready for replenishing whatever ingredient had run low. On any given Tuesday evening Mark would come home with a bottle of gerolsteiner under one arm and a bunch of bananas under the other.

But more often than not, I ate a dinner of cold sushi from Douzo at my desk, staring at a massive color coded mess of numbers. Then walked home to find Mark also still on a conference call with someone in California. We’d crawl into bed after banishing outlook for a few precious hours, watch an episode of Downton Abbey (which I forced Mark to like, or if he hated it he did a good job of hiding) before falling asleep, dreaming of PowerPoint.   

Gratefully, it has been a while since my last PowerPoint dream, this year of physiology and biochemistry and so, so much medicine buffering current and previous lives.

This current life if only for a week – of pause and leisurely book reading (!) and day dreaming and if I’m honest – a healthy amount of fretting (as I always do with time on my hands) sails by suggesting it just might last forever – until the suitcases get repacked, borrowed spaces returned, and its time to be off again.