Modern Marriage

Chapter 1: The Inventory

I used to think my life would feel like something.

Not in a tragic way. I wasn’t sitting around grieving the version of myself that was supposed to be remarkable. I just remember being younger and assuming that adulthood would arrive with a different weight to it, like I’d wake up one day inside a life that felt significant. Big city, maybe. Important work, definitely. The kind of story that reads well at dinner parties.

I blame movies.

Instead, I woke up on a Saturday in April with paint on my elbow that I didn’t remember applying, coffee brewing in the kitchen, and my husband’s leg thrown over mine like he’d claimed me in his sleep. Our cat, Remi, was sitting on my chest staring at me with the vacant intensity she reserves for late mornings, which is to say, late breakfasts.

I laid there and took inventory, like I did most mornings.

We lived in a small house on a tree-lined street that we have filled, slowly and deliberately, with things we actually love. Art on every wall, mismatched furniture that somehow works, plants that are mostly thriving, a basement we spent four months gutting and rebuilding into something that makes people walk downstairs and gasp.

That never failed to spike my ego.

Good coffee, a hybrid work schedule, a progressive husband who makes me laugh, listens to my rants, and fucks me right.

I used to fantasize about the extraordinary. I am now of the firm opinion that I have it.

This is not to say my life is without texture. I am not a woman who floats through her days in a pleasant haze. I think too much for that. Aiden calls it my processing mode; the place I go when I turn quiet and inward and he can almost see the machinery working behind my eyes. I’ve been known to spiral on geopolitical events at eleven o’clock at night, to argue with family at holidays about things that actually matter, to feel genuine, bone-deep rage about the architecture of systems designed to keep women small and compliant.

I contain multitudes and I’ve made peace with this. So has Aiden.

I grew up conservative, which in the Midwest isn’t a choice so much as a condition of birth. Church on Sundays, Republican parents, the whole infrastructure of a worldview handed to you before you were old enough to interrogate it.

I interrogated it thoroughly.

The first Trump presidency was the accelerant, but the questioning had started long before that. By the time I was twenty-three I had put organized religion down like a book I finally admitted I didn’t like, dusted my hands off, and moved forward.

I don’t miss it, despite religious fanatics attempting to project their own bullshit onto me whenever they feel that itch.

Even today they try to convince me that I’ll miss out on something without it. The potlucks, the worship, the sense of belonging to something larger than myself.

I’ve built that elsewhere.

That is the secret nobody shared with me growing up. Though I wouldn’t expect my family to recognize that as an option. Generations of indoctrination will do that. You can build your own church, your own religion, your own community. It can be full of art, sex, music, food, activism, or whatever else you feel passion for. Whatever lights a fire under your ass and keeps you from just going through the motions. Whatever brings you fulfillment and happiness as long as it doesn’t harm others.

That is essential.

Aiden went through his own version of the same unraveling, which is one of the reasons we work. We grew up together ideologically, not just romantically. We shed the same skin at roughly the same time, which meant we never had to convince each other of anything. We just evolved in the same direction. Which is rarer than people realize.

I came out to Aiden as bisexual early in our relationship. He was the first person I ever told. He was curious about how that worked from my perspective and went on as if everything was the same afterward, because it was. I asked if he ever thought about men in a sexual way and he was firm in his answer.

“I have never been attracted to a man. I don’t even notice other men,” he said confidently.

“What does that even mean?” I chuckled.

“I guess when other people point out how attractive a male celebrity is or something, I don’t examine it or put any effort in to agree with them,” he explained.

I found that so interesting. You just don’t find objectively attractive people…attractive? I knew that wasn’t what he meant, but it was his way of saying, “I am as straight as an arrow and I cannot be bent.”

Alrighty, understood.

My career, if you charted it, would look like a confused seismograph.

Bartending through most of college; the years that teach you more about human behavior than any psychology class ever could. A stint in nonprofit work that I loved so completely it almost broke me, because loving a job that doesn’t pay you enough to survive is its own particular grief. Then through a combination of timing and the particular luck of knowing someone already in the door, I ended up at an engineering firm.

I want to be precise about this because I’ve had to be precise about it with other people; I got in because of Aiden. I stayed, and became good, entirely on my own.

From day one I told every person in that office the same thing. I am not Aiden’s wife here. I am my own person. Some of them got it immediately. Some of them took longer. I made peace with that by outperforming half the engineers who actually had the credentials. The men who wrote me off were eventually fighting each other over having me on their teams.

I had no engineering background and made no attempt to pretend otherwise. I learned everything from scratch. I asked a lot of questions and made a lot of mistakes and absorbed everything I could from every person who was willing to tolerate my curiosity. Slowly, then all at once, I became the one with the answers.

Last year I walked into my boss’s office and made the case for a raise with the composure of someone who had rehearsed it forty times in the car. I got it. A real one. A raise that made me sit in the parking lot afterward and call my mom.

Aiden left the firm earlier this year. A larger firm poached him with an offer he couldn’t turn down and I told him to take it without hesitation, so of course he went. Our financial situation did something I never expected, it sky-rocketed. We still live in the small house on the tree-lined street that we bought cheaper than any other in a ten mile radius. We still drive the shitty cars we drove before, still spend our money on mid experiences and other people’s art and good food. The only significant purchase we made after our salary bump was finishing the basement.

The basement. It started as a concrete box with overhead lighting and a dehumidifier. We had a vision and zero professional help and a handful of open weekends. What it is now is something I genuinely struggle to describe without sounding like I’m bragging, so I’ll just describe it.

One half is a proper hangout space, but sicker. A vintage bar area with a collection of whiskey, a vinyl setup, shelves of games, neon lights lining the walls in vibrant colors, arcade games, an awesome retro mural I painted myself, and a hot pink pool table of course. The other half is the cozy side. We’d built a platform that raised the surrounding floor by a few feet, which made the center, a round conversation pit carpeted in a deep shaggy yellow rug, feel like it was actually sunk into the earth, even though it was just sitting on concrete like everything else. The illusion worked. You stepped down into it and something in your body decided you weren’t leaving. The curved seating wrapped around you on all sides, stuffed with cushions in colors that don’t go together on paper but absolutely do in a room with dim lighting and a speaker blasting rock classics.

Burnt orange, deep teal, vibrant yellows, hot pinks. A built-in sofa so comfortable it swallows grown men like a big hug. Throw pillows, blankets, a low thrifted table for drinks and snacks and, on certain evenings, rolling fatties.

Extra is the word. The whole space is extra, and I mean that as the highest possible praise. Aiden hung the neon and I tiled the bar top. We both stood back and looked at it when we were done and didn’t say anything because we couldn’t believe our dingy dungeon had transformed into our new favorite space. All by our own hands.

This morning, this Saturday, the paint on my elbow, the cat on my chest…I was about a month away from the night that would quietly divide my life into a before and an after.

I didn’t know that yet. I was just taking inventory.