Keep Your Feet at a Side Angle

He was my swim instructor in Queens, New York in 1988. He is still teaching me.

A marriage is not really two adults trying to build a life together. It is two unhealed children trying hard to be grown-ups, whatever that means, building a life together anyway.

I understood this somewhere between the olive groves and the ruins of a castle in Les Baux-de-Provence.

My husband and I just came back from a few days in Provence, France. We had a magical time there. The place is truly beautiful, medieval towns made of stone and brick, cypress and fig trees everywhere, and the ubiquitous olive groves. Since it is May, lavender and yellow wildflowers are blooming. We ate farm to table food every day. Bright colorful vegetables drizzled with olive oil. Meat cooked simply with salt and pepper. Quiche made with eggs that were probably hatched that morning.

We clambered on the rocks of a centuries old castle, now in ruins.

And somewhere on those rocks, navigating a slippery slope together, I remembered something my husband has been teaching me for almost forty years.

Keep your feet at a side angle when going downhill.

I am still learning.

For many years both my husband and I were caretakers, of aging parents, of a daughter growing up, of a life that kept demanding more than we had. Now that I am 62 and he is 59, it is us again. Like we were when we first started dating in our twenties. Two people who chose each other before life got complicated.

Many couples who make it to almost forty years together have accumulated an archaeology of resentment along the way. We did too. Two humans living together for so long, navigating a shared life with all our unhealed wounds, that is not easy. It was never easy. We just kept going anyway.

Like many couples, we had drifted apart. Oh so slowly, over such a long period of time, that we did not even realize it was happening. Until one day you look at the person you have been with for so long and you ask yourself a question you never expected to ask — do I still want to be with this person?

That question is not a crisis. I know that now. That question is an invitation.

We decided two years ago that we wanted to rebuild. But it does not work like that, I have learned. Just because I decide I want something does not mean my nervous system automatically feels safe enough to receive it. The body has its own timeline. The heart has its own pace.

We are not here on earth to live a blissful life only. We are here to transform. And transformation happens slowly, over time, in the most ordinary moments, on a slippery rock in Provence, in a conversation that goes differently than it used to, in the surprise of feeling close to someone you have known for almost forty years as if for the first time.

What I am still learning is this.

I am still learning to listen. Really listen, not to respond, and not to fix, but to be present with another person’s experience without making it about my own.

I am still learning that the work of a marriage should never stop. That we should never stop growing, never stop learning, never stop choosing each other.

Because that is why we stopped, for a while. Not because we stopped loving each other. But because life got in the way. Parents who were sick. A teenager who needed everything we had. Financial pressures that made us small and scared and turned inward. We stopped choosing each other because we were too busy surviving.

And slowly, without either of us noticing, the distance grew.

What I know now, standing on the other side of that distance, is that a marriage does not stagnate because two people stop loving each other. It stagnates because two people stop choosing each other. Over and over again. In the small moments. In the ordinary weekday moments when nothing is magical and nobody is watching and Provence is very far away.

The choosing is the work. The choosing is always the work.

I walked through olive groves every morning in Provence, thinking about all of this. The ancient trees, the silver-green leaves, the particular quality of that southern light. My husband knew something I was wrestling with. He said nothing. He has learned, after forty years, that I have to find my own way to the edge.

He was right.

I am still learning that too. That love sometimes looks like silence. That presence is not always the same as words. That the person who taught me to keep my feet at a side angle on a slippery slope has also been teaching me, all along, how to stay.

I am still learning.

And I have decided that is not a failure.

That is the whole point.