Lover

photo credit: Serena Grace Photography

It’s the slow, steady rhythm of the percussions—that reminds me of a heartbeat—that draws me in every time. It’s deliberate but gentle, swaying but steady, syncopated yet soothing. Taylor Swift’s album, Lover, has been steadily streaming in my earbuds this past year, but it’s this title track that hits a particular chord. In it, she sings about mundane things, like keeping the Christmas lights up on their home until January (don’t we all?), that make up the life she wants to spend with her lover. But it’s the chorus that really gets me. “Can I go where you go? Can we always be this close? Forever and ever… Take me out, take me home. You’re my, my, my… lover.” The requests are so simple, yet suppose a trust and comfort, a security, but also a vulnerability in revealing one’s most tender self. Within the bridge, the “lover” is belted with such girlish glee, I imagine her with arms flung wide open in pure delight. It is young, contented love at its best.

It takes me back to the night during our Freshman year in college when Wayne and I got caught in the rain while delivering my research paper across campus (straight out of a vintage movie, I tell you—complete with the antiquated method of turning in a physical assignment in person)… to the first time he brought me back to his hometown of Sacramento, and we took a long, meandering walk in the evening around the greenbelt levy, only to be eaten alive by mosquitoes and thought it was well worth it… to our drawn-out goodbyes that had a way of stretching into the night.

As I listen and mouth the lyrics, I can’t help but feel a pang in realizing: I relate to this song… as a memory. Sometime along these 12 ½ years and churning out three kids, our marriage grew up and out of the honeymoon phase. These days, my requests to my lover are more, “Can you take the kids where you go? Can you leave me all alone?” (Forever and ever.)

In all seriousness, though, can I just say… marriage is hard. And pandemic life hasn’t made it any easier.

During these last 11 months, my moods have sometimes swung like a wrecking ball. Being home all day, every day with young children—without the buffer of everyday interruptions and interactions to grease the wheel of constant home-life—has turned me into a lunatic. (I know I’m not alone!) Sometimes I want to cry, though I can’t even pinpoint exactly the reason. Other times, it’s a simmering anger. Most of the time, it’s just a general melancholy with bouts of grumpiness. And all of this has naturally taken its toll on our relationship. In these last 11 months, we have fought over a waterslide, a wrong McDonald’s order, how we structure our family devotional time, and most recently, how Wayne agreed with me TOO much. (Yes, I know, but you don’t know the details, okay?)

Though I’ve always felt and known our differences acutely, I haven’t felt our differences so… frequently as I have during this pandemic that has acted as a crucible for probably all of us to some extent, burning away the dross, revealing the core of who we are. And who we are—Wayne and I—has never felt so diametrically opposed.

A few months ago, I came across the poem “Epiphany” by Ted Hughes from his collection, Birthday Letters, about a man who encounters a boy on the street, selling a fox. The man actually contemplates buying the fox, ruminates over how to care for it, how his wife might react, what the fox would bring to his family… In the end, he lets the fox go, but not without looking back at that fork in his life, wondering “what if.” And it seems like such an ordinary, innocuous story, until the end:

“If I had grasped that whatever comes with a fox

Is what tests a marriage and proves it a marriage—

I would not have failed the test. Would you have failed it?

But I failed. Our marriage had failed.”

That ending was a sucker-punch, and I literally gasped and cried at the last line—not because this is true for us in its entirety, but I can still relate to it on so many levels. How many times have we brought home our own “foxes”—becoming parents; bringing home another baby and yet another; making the transition to a one-income household; making the transition to a one-income household with me as the one at home, a woman with so much ambition and extroverted energy that sometimes I feel like I’m dying inside while I care for my children, even as my heart simultaneously overflows; quarantining together during a pandemic?? And each time, these trials test and (we hope) prove our marriage. I cried because I understand that tension, the strain, the trying so hard and still the regret of how opposite two people can be. There is no judgment when I read this poem, no “whoa, that will never be us” rosy invincibility of our younger selves—only empathy and heartbreak, because I understand the precariousness of a marriage meant to last forever.

On the day of our wedding, we had only an idea of what our vows meant. They were words that sounded honorable and right, and so with earnestness and sincerity and stars in our eyes, we uttered these champagne promises, not knowing the full weight they actually carried.

What did I know of commitment? Of forever? Of a covenant not yet tested? What do I know now, except that commitment is weighty, and forever is much longer than 12 ½ years.

And what do we do when the champagne has flattened? When the glitter has rubbed off? When your husband is giving off some serious roommate vibes with his overgrown, shaggy hair? When your wife is circling the cage, snarling and eyeing you with contempt because you didn’t break down the boxes for recycling?

Standing at the alter those 12 ½ years ago, bolstered by youthful invincibility, “forever” was an opportunity, never an oppression. It was young, contented love at its best. But did we know anything about love?

Maybe… we did have an inkling. As a belated gesture towards Valentine’s Day this year (a day that usually passes with zero fanfare around here), Wayne left a video on my computer desktop for me to find. In it he sings “Water Under the Bridge” by Jars of Clay, recalling that this was the same song he had played for me all those years ago when he asked me to marry him. It’s not your usual doe-eyed song of sweethearts, but even as two people who were about to embark on Forever, we knew, at least a sliver, of the effort it would take to get there. And now, it means so much more.

“I do not love you the way I did when we met.
There are secrets and arguments I haven't finished yet.
But it's only that grace has outlived our regret that we're still here.

So maybe we can stay, till the last drop of water flows under the bridge,
We can stay, till the last drop of water flows under the bridge.”

I cried then, too. And I realized that I chose a man who not only fought for me when we were young, contented lovers, but is still fighting for me, clad in all my surliness and the same hoodie sweatshirt I’ve been wearing for a year. And that, I should think, far outweighs all our very real differences that remain, that will probably be there forever.

Someone once told me, before I was married, that we often want to find someone we can go skiing with. We want the excitement, the adventure! But who we should actually marry is the person who, if all the lifts suddenly closed, we could spend the rest of the day with in the lodge. Well……. isn’t it funny that the lifts may currently be open but everything else is closed! And we have been spending days upon days (11 months’ worth of days!) together in this lodge.

A year into our marriage, I had the giddy wisdom to write that marriage was a reflection of God’s love for us and it was a way to hone us, to make us more like Him… and that’s still true 12 ½ years later as we continually lay aside our own rights (even if through gritted teeth) and reach over with grace, just as Jesus did for us on the cross. It will be true 12 ½ years more, if we make it that far, and another 12 ½ years and another. We don’t do it perfectly. Sometimes the hand I offer to Wayne during prayer is like a dead fish, but we fall on our knees together anyway, because if we make it, it is by God’s grace. If we make it, it is because of the grace we, in turn, give to one another. It is what tests a marriage and proves a marriage.

“And the years roll by, and you hold my hand, while the shadows stretch over the land.
Crumble and fall in my arms, and we'll struggle to hold on.
Waters they rise and they carry our hopes and dreams away, baby we can stay, stay.”

So here we are. Twelve and a half years into our marriage, 11 months and counting into lodge-life. Our marriage continues to be tested and refined by fire (if only because I keep setting everything aflame). But we’re still here. Still hopeful, when we can muster it. Still working. Just maybe less naïve than before. And our song, were I to adapt Taylor Swift’s “Lover” to meet us where we are today—less buoyant, though by the grace of God, intact and drawing from a growing depth—is: “I will go where you go… We will keep working to be this close… forever and ever.” It doesn’t have the same ring, but it’s a good place to be. I’m waiting for Taylor, maybe in 10 years, to start writing about seasoned, old-people love, tired love… tenacious love.