I Married the Right Answer

He remembered I don’t eat cilantro. He drove forty minutes in a snowstorm for a bakery I haven’t thought about in fifteen years. And I have never been lonelier.

When my husband and I went to Lisbon for our anniversary, I think it was our fifth, but the years have started running together like wet paint. He flagged the waiter down before we’d even ordered and asked him to pull the cilantro off every single dish. I didn’t even hate cilantro that much. I mean, I could eat it if it was hidden in salsa. But he’d remembered that I’d once, half-asleep on a couch somewhere, mumbled that it tasted like soap. He remembered it. I barely remembered telling him. I remember a candle on the table was guttering in the draft from the kitchen door, and I watched the flame instead of watching him, because watching him was unbearable.

He also adjusted the rental seat for me before I got in. He carried the heavier backpack through Alfama even after I’d offered twice, which annoyed me because I wanted to carry my own stuff. When I got a blister from the cobblestones, he stopped in the middle of the street and put a bandage on my heel with focused tenderness, and a woman walking past smiled at him in a way I didn’t want to look at too closely.

I hated him for it. Right there, with his hands still on my heel, I hated him so completely that I had to turn my face toward the river.

Not because he was doing anything wrong. Because he was doing everything right. That’s the part I can’t get past.

For most of my twenties I had this quiet internal rubric running in the background. I didn’t call it that. I didn’t write it down. I just kept score. But it was there, humming along like a fridge I couldn’t unplug. A man reveals himself in the small things, I told myself. My mother said some version of it. My grandmother probably said some version of it before her.

The small things. Does he ask how you take your coffee, or does he just guess and get it wrong? Does he notice when you’re cold, or does he let you shiver? Does he introduce you to his friends by name, or does he let you drift at the edge of his life like a guest who wandered in off the street? Does he remember the thing you told him once about the salad, the thing you barely remember telling him?

I am embarrassed by how precisely I tracked these. I could read a guy’s whole future in the way he held a menu. Within an hour of a first dinner I could usually tell if a man was going to make it past the six-month mark. I had diagrams I could have drawn you on a bar napkin at some godawful hour if you’d handed me a pen and asked.

My mother married a man who failed every single test. Spectacularly. With the kind of consistency that wasn’t even cruelty, just a constitutional blindness, as if other people were a language he’d never bothered to learn. My father once drove us six hours to a lake house my mother had been talking about for months, and when we got there, it wasn’t the right lake. He figured it out pulling into the driveway. He sat for a second, looked over at her, and said, kind of helpless, “This isn’t it, is it.” She said no. He said, “Alright.” And then he started poking at his phone, trying to find the right one while she cried softly in the passenger seat. He tried. God, he really tried.

He never learned her coffee order. He once introduced her to his boss as “my wife, what’s her name” in a moment of genuine panicked blankness. He ate his steak well done. He left his socks on the bathroom floor every single day.

I did pity her, from the safe well-read distance of a daughter who knew better. I pitied her, sure. I judged her too. On the long drives home from her house, I would stare out the window and swear I would never. Never.

I would not be a woman whose husband couldn’t find the right lake.

So I found a man who could find any lake, anywhere, with the right restaurant booked and a backup booked for the backup. A man who introduced me to his friends with this weird loving specificity, full names and context and how we met, like he was pitching me at a conference. He had a spreadsheet for our anniversary trips.

We got married in a barn. There were twinkle lights. His wedding vows included “I will always remember that you don’t eat spicy food,” which is not, when you think about it, what you want to hear at your own wedding, but I had, in some quiet unspoken way, asked for exactly that.

He is a good man. He is a careful man. He has never forgotten a single thing I have told him. He notices when I’m cold. He drove forty minutes in a snowstorm to a bakery I mentioned once in college and brought back two of everything on the menu because he couldn’t decide which one I’d meant.

And I have been lonely in our marriage in a way I don’t really have words for.

He doesn’t withhold. He provides. I watch a man remove cilantro from a plate and hear, underneath the gesture, the faint sound of someone turning in an assignment. It’s the sound of a test being passed. Once you can hear that sound, you can’t unhear it. Once you know you’re being given exactly what you asked for, the gift starts to feel like a mirror. And you just stand there, in your good marriage, in your barn with the twinkle lights, staring at your own face.

My mother died last spring. Pancreatic. Quick, in the merciful way these things sometimes go when you don’t get the chance to say the proper goodbye. My father sat by her bed for the last few days and didn’t talk much. He held her hand and looked out the window at the hospice parking lot, and there was a pickup truck out there with its lights on that nobody came to claim the whole time we were there. The headlights made this little orange smear on the wet asphalt. I kept watching it instead of watching him, because looking at him felt like staring into a wound. He was a man who had failed every test I had ever built. And he was, in that moment, the most destroyed person I had ever seen in my life.

He didn’t know her coffee order. He still didn’t know it.

I stood in the doorway of her room and I thought — so hard my head almost rang — he loved her. Whatever the word points at, whatever love actually is when you strip away the gloss, he had it.

And then: my husband loves me. Does he love me the way my father loved my mother? I don’t know. I’ve spent a decade of our life together auditing his love like a forensic accountant, and I can’t tell you. He passes every test I set. I keep setting new ones, then harder ones, then weirder ones, like I’m trying to build a test that can’t be passed. I don’t know why I keep doing that.

Maybe because the alternative, marrying a man who fails the tests, who drives to the wrong lake, who introduces you as “my wife,” feels like stepping off a curb into traffic. I won’t. Even now, even knowing what I know, I won’t.

I stood there in that doorway and I understood, finally, that the women before me hadn’t failed to escape the test. They’d recognized the test as the trap. They’d married men whose failures were so obvious, so unfixable, that the only possible response was to love them past the evidence. Or not even past the evidence. In the absence of it.

My husband passes every test. He still passes them. He’s out there right now, somewhere, removing cilantro from plates and writing vows about spicy food. And I lie next to him in the dark and maybe I’ve built a marriage so well-audited that no actual love can live inside it. Or maybe love needs a crack in the floor to grow through, and I poured the foundation myself.

I’m sitting on the edge of the bed in the dark writing this in my head, and he’s asleep next to me with his mouth slightly open, and he looks like a person I owe something to and I can’t figure out what.

I’m not going to end this cleanly. I want to, but I can’t.

I’m picking at a thread on the sheet.

Maybe the tests were never about him. Maybe they were about me. I married the right answer because I was so afraid of the wrong one that I never stopped to look at the question. My mother knew the question. She asked it every single time my father drove to the wrong lake. He answered it, even when he didn’t know he was answering.

I’m not a woman who has figured this out. I’m a woman lying next to a man who has never once failed me, picking at a thread on the sheet, listening to him breathe, and wondering why none of it feels like enough, and hating myself a little for asking.

—

This post was previously published on medium.com.

Love relationships? We promise to have a good one with your inbox.

Subcribe to get 3x weekly dating and relationship advice.

Did you know? We have 8 publications on Medium. Join us there!

***

–

Photo credit: Brooke Cagle on Unsplash