By marriage I don’t mean the legal contract that usually starts with a white dress and a shiny ceremony. By marriage I mean if there’s a leak in the sink, you both have to deal with it, same as one’s insomnia or depression, same as late bills and debt, or the thrill of spending a bit of savings. I believe what I call marriage exists whether you’re officially married or not. I call it marriage, here, but I just mean the closeness of people who get hit the same ways, at the same time, by the constant waves of the world, and look at their bare, naked selves, under a light that is sometimes poetic and soft, and sometimes raw. When I say raw I mean someone else knows all your shadows, and there’s no distance or careful filter to disguise them, and you know the other person the same way, darkness and all, and you love the other person and their beauty, but at times you don’t like the other person, and you make a conscious decision to accept them and by that I mean you decide to accept it all.

There are things about my husband nobody else knows and it makes me happy that I get to know them. Specially the tiniest of things, the weird little things. I like confirming with him and being reassured no one else knows. He is full of disarming gestures, a myriad of them, so he disarms me, all the time. I can be bursting with anger and he’ll do unknowingly something disarming, and I’ll feel myself melting, right away. It’s a superpower of his, that he doesn’t know he has, over me. I could list all the many disarming gestures and describe the weird little hidden things, but I won’t, because it’s delicious, to me, to be the only one who knows. It took time to know him the way I know him. What I call a marriage doesn’t immediately start with love, it’s built in all its depth over time. After years of being together, there’s a separate language for the two of us, noises that have meaning without being words, inside jokes never fully told and immediately understood (I’ll write here, just for him: cook, where’s my lunch, where’s my dinner? and you’ll be puzzled but he’ll know what I mean). The language of married people has many shortcuts, much is communicated by a word or a phrase or a look with no context, the context is unnecessary and unspoken, is part of your memory and your muscle memory but you need a history together, first.

Intimacy has clear boundaries and is for the people inside, not to be shared with the people outside of it. Maybe that’s why we all see others’ public relationships and marriages as smooth. We get the Instagram version of a marriage and get the glowing tributes to the spouse and nobody says openly how difficult it all can be. I don’t think we’re supposed to talk about it, because it would betray intimacy, and intimacy can only be built, from person to person, but can’t be shared the way we share something like a post, in a blog.

You marry more than the person you marry: you marry all the years they were alive before they met you, their memories, their family history, the shadow of old generations. You marry entire oceans of time. You marry a brain chemistry that can be a great or a lousy match for your own brain chemistry. You marry the things subconsciously learned through childhood, the beautiful things and the ugly things. You marry the way the world has knocked the other person and the ways they learned to navigate the punches so they could survive. And they marry you, and marry your own long crooked history, too.

If we’re complicated humans, with complicated stories and families, it’s safe to assume we have complicated marriages as well. I’m sure that there are many people out there who are perfectly healthy and balanced and marry other people who are also perfectly healthy and balanced and are perfectly matched in every way, so perhaps their marriages are on the inside just as smooth as they look on the outside. I believe, however, that it’s okay to have a marriage that’s not entirely smooth.

My favorite love story is the “Before” movie trilogy (Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, Before Midnight). It captures the magic of connecting, which is the core of love. The first two movies are about love but not about marriage (most romantic movies are about love, and not marriage, which is more prickly and less rosy). The first two movies are about the moments when you sink into another person like into a dream, and then the romance of dreaming about those moments, refusing to let them go. A single night in Vienna, a couple of hours through the streets of Paris, even filled as they are with great long conversations, are not big enough units of time, and the shadow of the conflicts between these two people is easily overwhelmed by the miracle of their connection; a connection between two who start to know each other, but don’t have time to know each other well (darkness and all). I like that the storytellers were brave enough to show us not only the love, but the marriage, in the third movie. Jesse and Celine are both healthy and balanced people who seem indeed perfectly matched for each other and yet, don’t have a perfect, smooth marriage. Love can exist just as a dream. Marriage is weighted down by reality. It’s heavier than love, more solid and substantial.

When I was in High School I was very shy and very much in love with a classmate I never had the courage to approach, who always had other girlfriends, and to whom I was a sort of silent shadowy presence just out of the corner of his eye. It was all very pathetic (for me) and very intense nonetheless. My feelings were real but the anchor for the feelings was invented. That love was a city I imagined with precision and detail, made of air, not a single solid brick in it, not a solitary person walking those streets, except for me. I never got to really know him, so I loved the dream of him, a set of detailed fantasies about him. I have no clue if the dream was similar to the real person but I don’t think they had that much in common in the end. And yet, the feelings were powerful and caused me pain and kept me awake. Love can also be a solitary journey, that involves the other person just as an image, like a landscape or a painting or a piece of music, a person seems full of poetry for a moment, or a group of moments, and it can be enough to sustain a distant, dream-like love, and even a violent, intense love.

Marriage can be painful too, it also keeps me awake, sometimes, but I can’t wave it away or daydream an easier dream because its embroiled with all my days and nights, my weeks and months, my plans and memory, past, present, future, space, brain and heart. It’s a city, a world, made of real stones and skin and blood and bones.

My husband and I are not a perfect match. I’ll give you one example. I’m an introvert. I’m no longer as shy as I used to be, but I crave my loneliness, and often need spaces where I can be left alone. I find restoration and a necessary peace in those spaces and I can’t really be well or function, without them. My husband could not be more of an extrovert if he tried. He craves other people and other people’s company and attention, and he can’t really be well, or function, without them. Nothing has meaning unless he can share it, so he often walks into the room where I am to read me the thing he is reading or make me watch the T.V. show he is watching. I love that about him, I love that he needs to share things with me, but I don’t like having to choose between my need to be left alone and his need to be paid attention to, so we irritate each other, and constantly misread each other’s intentions. Even as I write this, I’ve stopped multiple times so my husband could tell me about the similarities between Irish and Caribbean cultures, the meaning of a great punk song’s lyrics, the cruel reception Justin Timberlake got during the S.A.R.S. rock concert in the early 2000’s (accompanied by a photo of a very sad looking Justin on stage) and how Keith Richards intervened to scold the crowd, at some point. I want nothing but to keep on writing and he wants nothing but to keep on sharing more stories with me. I hear him talk and my eyes go back to the page and the keyboard trying to finish a thought left hanging, so he has to double check I’m not tuning him out and makes me repeat what he just said, and sometimes I was listening and sometimes I wasn’t and I fail the test. I would be better matched with someone who was less of an extrovert, someone who could enjoy quiet spaces from time to time, the way I do, to replenish ourselves and organize our thoughts and return to each other renewed and restored. He would be better matched with someone who was less of an introvert, someone who didn’t need to be left alone sometimes and didn’t make him feel those times like an interruption, and someone who didn’t retreat back into her head so he didn’t have to test if she listened. So what do you do? What if this extroverted man had also a way of being that never made you feel self-conscious, or judged, and you got to be, perhaps for the first time with a romantic partner, entirely yourself? What if the way he sees the world was not moved by material things and a public image but the simple ordinary beauty of it all, and came home to tell you about a scene on the sidewalk, the behavior of a pigeon, or a child, the sudden blooming of a tree, or a great random conversation with a random person in the store where he works? What if he was a disarming combination of toughness and childlike awe? What if he was always himself, never concerned with a manufactured image or a display of status or the performance of success? What if he was kind, and consistently loved by those who know him, and universally liked by corner store clerks and neighbors and casual acquaintances, and what if he was universally liked by casual acquaintances not the way we are usually liked, exchanging pleasantries and politeness with each other, but getting free servings of food from the places where he buys lunch and getting organic, genuine exchanges and laughter from all the people in our building? What if he had soft, delicious skin, and delicious lips? And could cook delicious, spicy meals? What if he could always make you laugh?

I’m still giving you the Instagram version of our harmonies and disharmonies. We have deeper conflicts, bigger storms, that are protected by the walls of intimacy and can’t be shared in a blog. I like that our love has fought through the storms and is still breathing. Our love hasn’t been easy. But if I had to choose a word for love I wouldn’t want “easy”, I’d rather choose “strong”, and I’d choose “joyful”, too. Laughter can sustain love much better than a placid lack of conflict, if you ask me.

We’ve been married for more than 10 years (no children, one cat). I’m certain that marriage can be a deep expression of love. I’m also certain that love and marriage can exist independently. I find even, that sometimes, you need to reshape the boundaries of marriage, shake and move what marriage means, so love can be saved in the end. I believe love is often made better by marriage (not the legal contract which can be there, or not,  but the intimacy, the shared secret language and inside jokes, and the decision to accept the full, weighty reality of another imperfect human being). But love at times can be strained by marriage, and even killed by marriage, and may need from time to time a space to breath. You can reshape the boundaries of marriage, put things in pause for a while, let it constrain and then expand again. If love dies, it just dies, and there’s nothing left to do after that. It’s love, not marriage, that needs to be fought for, and saved.

And if this love, which has been like a fire burning the side of a mountain, becomes one day a single ember resisting the wind, and then the ember dies, and love dies, we’ll be brave and honest enough to step away, from our love, and our marriage. We choose each other freely, still, because we don’t want a future without each other, yet. Love keeps on breathing and burning and, among a myriad of other gestures, my husband can still disarm me with his smile.