The Monotony of a Childless Marriage

It's not for better or for worse, it's just what it is

Chaos and delight are interruptions to monotony in a marriage¹ and children bring both.

In years one or five of our inability to carry a pregnancy to term, our family was navigating other chaotic or delightful experiences, and I didn’t feel the monotony so hard. Also, there was still hope.

Our last pregnancy loss was also our last attempt at hope. After that final loss, a corner had been turned, we both knew it. My health, our marriage, neither would be sacrificed on the altar of children. I expected hope to die with rage or resistance, but it surprised me by dying with resignation, slow and easy, dissipating. Gone almost before it had time to exist as anything real. Like my many pregnancies.

Once I heard someone use the phrase pregnant with hope and I thought that seemed about right. Hope is a thing swollen with seed, mostly water weight, somewhat substanceless, and yet still there. Still beautifully and mystically there. And when it drains from you, it gushes and goes red, nearly formless and then flushed down and away, disappearing. And you can barely talk about it because no one wants to hear about the absence of the thing, they only want to hear about the coming of the thing, even if the thing is still just the hope of it.

It has been six years since we carried that hope like seed and most of the time I don’t think of it. But sometimes I do.

Monotony in a marriage is difficult to describe. If you say it too loudly people think you hate your partner, are bored with them or of them. But if you don’t say it at all, it seeps in like smoke under a door, choking you slowly, putting you to sleep. You must find a way to say it without overstating it and find a way to say it mostly to one another as though it’s an escape room you will work together to find the clues out of or a puzzle you’re committing to finishing together.

We are on the same team and this is our team project.

Peter Blume, The Rock, 1944-1948

If you have children or if you are a busy sort of person who always has Mary Poppins bags on your person, teeming over with projects and people and Important Things to Do With Your Life, you may not understand this monotony of marriage.

You are taking kids to soccer and to the pediatrician, trying to figure out how to get them to do their chores or be nice to their siblings or be nice to you. If you have a partner in this, you are figuring this out together. You are so tired at night but so thankful for the quiet that you can’t figure out whether to sleep or read and if you decide to read, you fall asleep anyway. There is a kind of monotony in this too. But there is also endless, endless, endless possibility for delight.

There are crayon drawings tacked floor to ceiling and cookies to bake and first smiles and steps and words and wounds. There are inside jokes and knowing glances, smiles across their sweaty heads, shared delight. There are imaginary friends and real friends and girlfriends and boyfriends. There are new clothes for growing bodies and hand-me-downs you never want to get rid of. There are room redecorations and rooms emptying and then filling again. There are graduations and weddings and new jobs and grandchildren. Holidays are chaos and sometimes they are terrible but also they are still a little magical. The delight is exponential.

When you do not have children and will not have children (and will not answer those who ask about alternative means of having, obtaining, adopting, or otherwise getting of children), the delight is stopped up, like a cork in a champagne bottle, the end of celebration.

You have to find other things to celebrate and it is terribly difficult to find anything worth celebrating as much as children are worth celebrating. I don’t say that because I’m some kind of natalist but because I truly believe there is nothing more beautiful on the earth than a small human who is experiencing everything for the first time. One doesn’t have to be a parent or even want to be a parent to believe that.

A few months ago we were driving, I think, maybe we were sitting on the patio, it all blurs into each other these days, and we asked one another the question: “What three things make you feel most loved by me?”

There were the somewhat predictable answers, “When you scratch my back.” (me) “When we have sex.” (him) And there was a second answer for each of us, different than the other. But there was a shared third answer and it shouldn’t have surprised either of us.

“When we do projects together.”

We’ve renovated a house together. We’ve built gardens and decks. We’ve led groups together, packed and unpacked houses together. We’ve planned road trips together and gone on them together. We budget, go to therapy, watch shows, build friendships, all together. We sometimes play games together and sometimes get coffee together. We walk and used to kayak together. We eat poke bowls and pizzas together. We problem solve together.

We are very good together.

I know this to be true. I don’t know if I could be not-a-parent with anyone in the world except for with him.

Our first fight before we got married was not about whether we would have kids but when. The expectation was always there that it would never just be the two of us, there would alway be more, just someday. I know too many people who married someone because they felt something nice about the other and thought the other would make a good parent, but when the kids were gone eventually, they looked at this person they’d procreated with and thought, “Who is this person I’m yoked to for life? I barely even know them.”

Life without children means you have to know your partner in a way children can often times shield you from knowing them. Maybe your children don’t feel like a shield and you would give anything for twenty minutes of not having a small sweaty being between you both in bed, but if being a parent has become your whole personality, it’s hard for anyone to befriend that, even—maybe especially—your partner.

The other side of it though is without children, you are wildly exposed to this other, this person to whom you pledged your troth without even knowing the definition of the word. You are yoked to this person not as a fellow parent or grandparent, co-creator or co-provider. You are joined with this person as your only roommate, friend, lover, chore partner, problem solver, project teammate.

This person and no other will be the main object of your love and your wrath, the primary witness to your insecurity and grief, the one upon whom you practice your most unformed thoughts and share your most unshared secrets. This person must be astoundingly strong and terribly, terribly vulnerable, and if they cannot learn and relearn and relearn to be both, the marriage will fail.

If, however, it can bear up under all that, it will be a good marriage. But even good marriages can be monotonous ones.

There is a line from a Richard Wilbur poem that I think about near weekly, “The punctual r*pe of every blessèd day.” The cleverness of the poem is that it is about the most beautiful thing in the world, love, and the most mundane, laundry, because the two must always coexist and if they don’t, then love isn’t true.

It is in the monotony that love is proven true. This is what I have to remind myself on days that feel exactly like every day that has gone before, on days when I look at the stretch of life ahead of me—a life without children and grandchildren—and find it hard to envision if there is goodness and meaning in a life like that. Love and laundry, I tell myself. Just because it’s mundane doesn’t mean it isn’t true.

A few days ago I asked other serious couples what they do for fun and the answers were walks, games, coffee dates, projects, gardening, movies, spending time with friends kids, and I thought to myself, “That’s it. We’ve done it all. We’re doing all the things we can to interrupt this punctual r*pe.” I felt disheartened.

And then I remembered no one else in the world is married to the man I am married to. And just like the beauty of a small human discovering the world, I wondered, what if the most disruptive delight of my life is to merely keep discovering the world and behold him as he discovers it too?

It feels less magical when you’re in your forties and the world is at war and the political administration has you in a chokehold and when there are massive and painful griefs you’re carrying quietly, but two nights ago we sat with some of our best friends and ate blackberry-rhubarb pie and talked deep together, and last night I sat with a couple new friends and talked about a polarizing novel together, while most of our partners gathered at another house and talked tech and AI, and tonight I’m going to chat with a few friends about a book we read recently, and in a few weeks we’re sending out the first iteration of our idea of a snail mail club, and once a week I get to work in the Sun Gallery at my favorite indie bookstore making graphics and talking about books I love, and the other day I introduced him to a local and laughable tourist trap, and there is a dahlia about to burst in a pot in our backyard, and my favorite thing is when a carpenter bee flies around Rilke’s face and he follows it with his eyes, curious and alert, and when a friend’s kid sings about the earth and his knees in preschool graduation, and when another friend of mine talks about the little seed in her belly, the bloom of possibility, pregnant with hope.

It’s not all my magic, but it’s magic nonetheless. And I’m discovering it all with him.

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1. Money also offers interruption and if you’re lucky enough to have a lot of it, there are ten-thousand ways to divert yourself with delight. We are not in that position, so it’s lots of free or cheap things around these parts.