A Fifth Grade Marriage

Some bits and bobs before I'm gone a few weeks

Nate and I head to Scotland in a few days for what will be our tenth anniversary trip and our first vacation that isn’t a staycation since Santa Fe in 2019. I cannot believe either of these things are true stories. Ten years was the length of Nate’s previous marriage and is not even half as long as most of our friends (the ones who haven’t already gotten divorced) have been married.

Ten years is fifth grade. Our marriage is about to enter middle school. We are still brilliantly naive (Nate less so than I for obvious reasons, though I might argue that being the child of divorced parents and then marrying in your mid-thirties is enough to whack the naivety out of you…) and also starting to get some acne and awkward limbs.

I’ve written before about how the lack of children in a marriage (especially a convivial one) means one must go elsewhere to find friction and we are not especially good at finding friction elsewhere. In 2023, I wrote:

Nate and I have been having conversations around the lack of two things in our life together: tension and delight. This may not be the same for another childless couple, but there is a particular kind of tension that children introduce to a marriage and a particular kind of delight that they also bring. Absent children, it can be easy to get into a rut of doing the same old same old all the time. You realize one day that you can’t remember the last fight you had or the last time you laughed so hard you could cry.

This is all still true, this perennial struggle to find both tension and delight. I don’t know a parent who struggles to find either, and find them in spades (their struggles are otherwise). Children bring both and even when they are grown, they continue to bring them, exponentially so.

Nate and I do hard things. We’ve done more hard things than I think a lot of people have done. I don’t say that to compare, just to remind myself that our struggle is not a fear of doing hard things.

Yet, we are also both soft things, we are (generally) soft with one another and soft with others. We say strong things, but say them in soft ways, and so there is a softness to our way of life. The edges are blurred, not so sharp as they might be for others.

But these two—the softness and hardness—means we lack the just-right-ness of tension and delight. The middle of the road challenges. The make us sweat but not make us cry challenges. Too many traumatic things have made us not want to try regular old challenging things. And even if we want to try them, we struggle to stick with them, because trauma can make us resilient but it can also make us scared.

Ten years, though, oof. Ten years may just be a fifth grade marriage but we want ours to get an A all the way through. Right now we agree it’s a middling B, B-. We can’t improve unless we know, though, so this is us knowing. This is us knowing.

Anyway, I started all that just to tell you that we’re going away and Sayable will be quiet for the next few weeks.

If you’re joining us for the summer off social media, there is still time to sign up for that, just make sure you sign up before May 25th!

Today’s post was going to be a Link Love post but I’ve been eyeball deep in novel writing/research + Scotland prep + summer off social media prep, so I just haven’t been reading and saving much in the way of links to interesting things. I’d rather save what I’ve got for another few weeks than just give you a few breadcrumbs, so I hope that’s okay.

Although I did read this piece on why you might give up on Instagram which I thought I’d share for those of you who are on the fence about the summer social media experiment. Maybe this will be just the little push you need.

Join us!

PS. A bunch of people have asked if they have to be writers/creators in order to join. You do not! I will be asking everyone to attempt to do some work on a creative project throughout the summer, but that could be a garden, an organization project, or whatever.

Inside the Garden at Takao Hasegawa Sadanobu Japanese Edo period (1615–1868)