I noticed the socks shortly after Brandon and I moved in together. They were everywhere, in every room, sometimes in pairs and sometimes alone, always folded over onto themselves like sad worms that had collapsed of exhaustion. They puzzled me, these socks. Why would a person so often remove their socks, and in so many different places? How could you forget about them, leaving them in piles for someone else to find when, in most cases, you had to literally step over them to exit the room? Why did so many of them have holes and worn patches? Why did I have to suddenly think so much about another person’s socks?

He couldn’t explain it to me. I emailed a married friend, accusingly: You did not warn me about the socks. There are so many socks.

Her reply, a day later: Ah, the socks. I thought it best to let you find out for yourself.

barefoot because he left all the socks lying around the apartment, probably (film/2016)

I have been married to my husband for seven years, which is the same length of time I existed on this planet before he did. I did not know he was so much younger until long after we started talking. I had figured I was older than he was, mostly because he still lived in Ann Arbor, but I had pegged him at roughly 27, or two years younger than me at the time. (There was no reason for this assumption, other than that he seemed mature.) I was 30 by the time I learned that he was 23, which — there is no eloquent way to say this — completely freaked me out. Seven years is a lot, particularly when you are a woman in a society that lusts for youth, and especially in the context of 30 versus 23. Those are entirely different life stages, with different priorities and hobbies and earning potential and, I don’t know, food preferences? Comfort with/proximity to things like children and homeowners insurance, maybe?

It was not that I owned a home or knew that I wanted children, you understand, but that age-wise, it would make sense if I did.

In retrospect none of this should have surprised me, because I have only ever loved men who are younger than me. My first love was a high school freshman when I was a sophomore, which means nothing in real life but constituted a chasm back then. Nobody cared, least of all him, but it was always there in the back of my mind as something awkward. He was a hockey player who dwarfed me physically, but I still felt somehow bigger than him, solely by virtue of the eight months (not even a full year!) between us.

It was a similar (if more dysfunctional) story with my college boyfriend, though that had more to do with him than with our one- (or two?) year age difference. (He is now a far-right conspiracy theorist who lives in Hawaii and works for a company that makes CBD products. I am not sure if this is a job or a hobby.) A year after I graduated, I moved to New York for a guy who trailed me by five months. We celebrated his birthday a month after I arrived in the city, and I marked the next one alone, nursing my first real broken heart.

None of this really means anything but it bothered me anyway. I had always hoped to end up with someone older than me, even if just by a week or two — someone who would go through everything before I did, even if we never went through exactly the same things. I have always had anxiety about aging, and I believed there would be comfort in loving someone who would do it first and then reassure me that it wasn’t a big deal. This stuck with me even after I fell in love with someone (slightly) older, only to have the relationship end in a train wreck that derailed my entire life. There is a reason that warning flags are measured in shades of red and not calendar pages, but the habit was hard to shake. Even today the idea offers me security, somehow.

This is all idiotic, of course. I know that now.

My grandmother lived to the age of 91, but she told me she never felt older than about 30. “Age,” she often said, “is nothing but a number.” From her, this wasn’t a cliche — just a simple explanation of the reality of her life, and one that I never truly understood until I met Brandon.

making guacamole (I did not know how to make guacamole until I was like 28). (film/2013)

His 23 was my 30 (or 32, or maybe 35, or maybe 74). At 23, I was a disaster — blacking out all over Manhattan, crying at my desk, flailing around, entirely unsure of what I wanted to do or where I wanted to live or who I wanted to be. In some ways, I like that version of me the best (she was more capable and functional than I’m making it sound here and also far less heavy than me, in every sense of the word), but she ran on high octane and so in other ways, even the thought of her exhausts me.

But by 30, I had a job in the field I wanted, in a place I had found by myself, where I was carefully rebuilding myself and my life in a little yellow house with my books and my pets. At 23, Brandon had already hit the same milestones, mostly because he had skipped the flailing and so did not have to deal with the rebuilding. (There are other factors here, of course — mostly trauma vs. the absence of trauma — but still. He had it together in ways that continued to elude me.) When we met in person, he drove his brand-new car down to North Carolina and parked it behind my mine; a 1997 RAV4 I had been driving since college. This seems, somehow, an apt summary of the entire dynamic.

Also, this: When I opened the door he stood on the porch, so nervous he was visibly trembling. It would be the first and last time I was steadier than him.

I had no memory of this photo and the perfection of it — of what it represents, of what it foretells — leaves me a bit breathless (film/2013)

We were friends before we were a couple, so my messy little pieces — the traumas and the chaotic family dynamics and the difficulties with relationships — did not surprise him, but he was still confused when they hit him full force. He hadn’t hurt me, so why was I unleashing it on him? He hadn’t done anything to warrant the deluge, so why was it constantly assailing him? I tried to explain myself even as I pushed him away, even as he stood across from me in a hotel room in Rome screaming, “You’re breaking my fucking heart.” But honestly, I did not know how to explain it. I wanted him more than anything and I wanted, more than anything, for him to leave me so I could retreat back into my wounded place, crowing about how I’d been right all along.

I had always missed the point there, which was that there would have been no one but me to crow it to, and lord knows I never wanted to end up that alone with myself.

I still don’t know how to describe any of this for other people, really. You can’t understand it unless you also find it hard to believe that people love you or could love you, or that you deserve, in the first place, people who might love you at all.

It is, I guess, kind of like this:

Imagine those seconds right before you cry, when your chest is tight and the pressure is building behind your eyes and in your throat. It hurts, a lot, but there is also a rich anticipation in knowing that you are just seconds away from releasing it all. Imagine that feeling, but without the release. Imagine that it lasts for days and days, and that it comes with a little voice that whispers that you are not good enough you can never do this you are not deserving of love this is pointless he will leave you anyway they all leave you anyway might as well get out now while you can. Imagine that the only way to feel a little tiny bit better is to lash out at the person you most care about. Imagine that this happens all the time.

It is sort of like that.

You have experienced this your whole life. It is a key player in every relationship you have ever had. But you still can’t stop it. You know what it is and (sort of) why it happens. You can predict when it is coming. You know it is stupid. But you cannot make it stop. Deep breaths do not help. Reassurances do not work. Distraction is impossible. The only way to end it is to unleash it on the person you love.

I cannot even begin to imagine what it is like to be on the receiving end of this — to be a pure and good person who gives love easily and has not done anything wrong but still takes blow after blow after blow. But maybe that is because I cannot imagine being a pure and good person who gives love easily and has not done anything wrong.

We went through this cycle a lot in the first year of our relationship, even in those first months where the love was so heady that we walked around in a daze, drunk on each other. Throughout it all, Brandon never wavered. Not once. He knew within weeks that he wanted to marry me, and he never changed his mind. After some preposterous amount of time — a month? Three weeks? — he told me that he loved me unconditionally, and I don’t think I really understood what that meant (ever, in my life) until, probably, this year. I still do not understand how he does it. I still do not understand what I did to deserve him.

Because I wavered all the time. Wavering was the only thing I did consistently. One afternoon I was in my car, driving down a dappled tree-lined street and crying after days of yet another conflict of my own invention, letting the voice berate and defeat me. Of course this is impossible you are so stupid to have ever thought it could be possible why do you even bother. Then a song came on the radio.

And when you’re needing your space/to do some navigating/I’ll be here patiently waiting/to see what you find
’cause even the stars, they burn/some even fall to the earth/we’ve got a lot to learn/but god knows we’re worth it
I won’t give up on us/even if the skies get rough/I’m giving you all my love/I’m still looking up

And I saw it in my mind, clear as a photograph. I wore a white dress and he wore a tuxedo and we danced together in a spotlight, laughing, ringed by our friends and family. I fumbled for my phone, the song still playing. He picked up (he always picked up) and I described it to him, still crying.

There was a pause. And then: “Oh, Kate. I love you. And it will be OK.”

It was not a magical happy ending. I am positive that I panicked a thousand more times. But deep down, I did not waver again.

I have asked him so many times how he was able to do it. How he could hold on when he didn’t understand it fully. How he could endure it with no guarantee that it would end well for him. Why it was worth it. Why I was worth it. (Was I even worth it?) He always shrugs. “I just really liked you,” he says. I always want a more detailed explanation but this is always all he has to say about it. And now I think maybe that’s because it is the only answer. He loved me, yes. But he also always liked me.

All marriages are hard, I think, but ours is hard mostly because of me. This is not me beating myself up, but an admission that life has been, generally, very hard for me, for a fairly long time, and when life is a struggle for the person you married, your marriage absorbs the strife. Our union has been wrung dry this year. We have fought and screamed. I have shut down and suffered by myself even as he stands outside the door, aching to come in but willing to wait until I am ready to let him. This season of my life would have always been impossible — the circle of people I can depend on grows ever smaller — but is made infinitely more difficult by the responsibilities of parenting young children. There is very little time for physical rest or emotional contemplation. We are overwhelmed and overloaded. There are moments of joy, but the days are largely a struggle.

And yet I am more in love with him than I have ever been. I can say this declaratively: He will never leave me. This probably sounds obvious (he married me), and maybe that is a simple concept for most people, but for someone who does not believe they are worthy of love and has been left by so many people who should have never left, it is a breathtakingly vulnerable statement that I say with zero (or at least, very little) vulnerability.

He told me 10 years ago that he would never leave me, and now I know it is true.

I have bared my heart to this man. I have walked him through the traumas of my life in ways I never had before, mostly because I was not capable of it before him. I thought that I understood the depth of my own dysfunction, but I really had barely scratched the surface. The scars go so much deeper than I knew, and I have plundered them while he watched, unflinching. I have been hurt to the core of my soul — I truly cannot explain to you how deep the hurt in me goes; I literally do not have words for it — and he stands there at the very bottom of that chasm, a quiet and steadfast beam of light. He fills my heart, even — maybe especially — when I make that hard for him.

I am susceptible to nostalgia, so I spend a fair amount of time romanticizing my past lives and pondering the things I will never experience by virtue of having chosen this life. (I do not want a life other than this life, but the possibilities are endless and so they must be explored.) I used to think a lot about how committing yourself to one person means, necessarily, depriving yourself of so many others. It means forgoing, forever, those breathless days of early love, when your body is a song and life feels like one long early morning; a forever fresh start where anything could happen, and every option is lined with gold. Everyone who gets married makes this trade, and I assume we all think about that, but I have never heard anyone else talk about it. I go on and on in my mind.

Or I used to. I do not really do it anymore.

Seven years into my marriage, here is the greatest thing I have learned: It is very easy to fall in love. (I am objectively bad at it, and I still managed to do it multiple times.) It is far more profound to stay that way — to wake up each day and decide, consciously or unconsciously, to stick it out, again and again and again.

Seven years into my marriage, I am wholly uninterested in your butterflies, or the way his text messages make you swoon or how the swish of her hair flips your heart over. It isn’t that those feelings aren’t wonderful (they are, in fact, the most wonderful), but that they are wonderfully common. And seven years into my marriage, I am far more intrigued by the rare. Tell me about the gritty balance of long-term commitment — of moving someone else’s wet laundry to the dryer and sweeping someone else’s hair off the sink and gritting your teeth while you wipe up the same dried coffee stain every morning and picking up the damn socks, why are there so many fucking socks and then turning around, annoyed, only to have your breath taken away by the sheer handsomeness of that same hairy, laundry-forgetting, inexplicable sock-discarding someone.

Love gets harder as you go, yes. But it also gets better.

I do not know for sure how you can tell if you’ve made the right choice. In a universe with infinite possibilities, I’m not positive that you can ever know. But I think it’s a good sign if you the person you’ve chosen only loves you more after you show them your ugly parts. And after more than a year where I feel like all I am is ugly parts, Brandon still loves me. There is nothing I cannot tell this man. There is nothing I could do that would make him not love me. I keep repeating this because it is unfathomable for me. I am, on the one hand, so sad that it took me this long to accept that kind of love. I am, on the other hand, so glad that it only took me this long.

When first marriages fall apart, it’s usually before the eighth year. This is known as the seven-year itch, where boredom and resentment crack open the edges of commitment and the lure of the what if seeps deep into the foundation. At one point this may have loomed, ominously, over my head, but I am too far removed from it now to spare it a glance.

I stand now on the opposite shore. I am here. I am in.

I am in love, and I am loved.

I still do not understand how I found him or why he stays. As much as I have grown and as much as I may grow, I may not ever really understand that. But I accept it now.

I love him. He loves me. It is simple but it runs deep as the ocean. He sowed a garden in my heart, and it blooms and it blooms and it blooms.

Lucky seven. Lucky me.

lucky seven