The Lovers
There’s an undefinable quality to love. It’s hard to put into words, because words build walls around feelings, words make something concrete, and love is a slippery amorphous ever-changing thing.
Sometimes while I’m writing, in between push notifications about genocide or mass shootings, I’ll get a notification that some shiny, wealthy, celebrity couple has called it quits. Celebrity divorce announcements are beautifully curated, aspirational even — everyone is going to remain friends, committed co-parents, and they ask for privacy as they navigate this new adventure. Though I don’t identify as a person who really cares that much about who celebrities are dating, I invariably end up spending between 5 minutes to six hours after one of these announcements looking through the instagram feeds of the individuals in question to see if I can deduce when the trouble began.
Through this internet sleuthing, I’ve discovered something interesting that probably no one else has ever thought of before: the things people put on social media are not actually indicative of the truth of their actual lives. There are hundreds of examples of couples who have written flowery romantic Valentine’s Day posts only to announce their “amicable” split just a few weeks later. It’s almost as if public declarations of love have nothing to do with love itself. It’s almost as if social media encourages everyone to market themselves as a brand, and any good brand is consistent, on message, and creates an expectation the consumer can rely on. We’ve traded authenticity for control of our image.
Posting on social media reminds me of the night before the first day of school when I was a child. Full of hope, I’d pick out an outfit that would represent me as an entirely new person to the kids I’d known my whole life. I’d remind myself to be mysterious, to not get too excited, to not laugh in that stupid way, to be carefree and somehow also aloof. These were all qualities that did not come naturally to me, but it didn’t matter. Personas are not about authenticity, personas are about who you wish you were. Inevitably, I’d fail. By the end of the first week of school, I’d just be me again. But I didn’t have social media to help me curate, moderate, and grow my brand. I shudder to think who I’d be if I’d had those tools.
I’m as guilty as anyone of a cringe relationship post. In one particular failure of self-awareness in September of 2022 (coinciding with my ten year wedding anniversary), I made three instagram posts in a row celebrating my husband for his wit, talent, and gorgeous good looks. My husband barely opens instagram, and when he does, he’s there to look at videos of people building cabinets. So, who is that post for? Maybe it’s for me, a kind of gratitude list, a way to remind myself of the good things in my life. Maybe it’s for all the boys I’ve loved before, or frankly, all the girls my husband loved before — a kind of look at me winning shitpost. Maybe it’s archival, a record for my children so they’ll see that their father and I were young once. Or maybe it’s for the void — a way to declare that I exist, that my relationship exists, that in spite of the uncertainty of the world around me, there is something good here, something to celebrate or at the very least make note of.
I met Zack in October of 2009 working on a one-season wonder of a show called RUBICON on AMC. It was my first TV job, and I was nervous which makes me incredibly extra. I was also twenty-four in a room full of adults. I lived in a one bedroom furnished studio in Marina del Rey with a Murphy bed that folded up into a queen-sized mirror when I wasn’t using it. The only window was a sliding glass door with vertical blinds. The complex was filled with child actors in town for screen tests, and the divorced dads of LA’s west side. It was a cursed place.
Every day I’d show up to work feeling terrified that someone would realize I was a child in a grown-up disguise. I wore khakis and high heels, buttoned-down shirts. I thought I looked like an adult, but I was still following a prep school dress code. Zack, on the other hand, was thirty and had a landline. Every time he pitched, I was impressed. He was unlike anyone I’d ever met — quiet almost one hundred percent of the time, introverted, but extremely funny. He knew how to pick his moment to speak, and when he did, it would either be brilliant or hilarious, and often both. I spoke constantly, nervously, occasionally saying something worthwhile but most of the time I just took up nervous space.
There’s an undefinable quality to love. It’s hard to put into words, because words build walls around feelings, words make something concrete, and love is a slippery amorphous ever-changing thing. Plus, writing anything about my husband after dragging anyone who posts about their partner publicly seems hypocritical, so I’ll try to stick to the facts.
Zack and I started dating in late November of 2009, and at Thanksgiving, I went home to my parents. I would text with Zack, sending him flirty little messages, hoping that even while we were apart, we could be in constant contact, because, I was sure, we were falling in love. Zack would respond hours after I’d sent a text with something short that seemed to end the conversation. Once he texted: “I’m turning my phone off for a few hours.” Frustrated, I consulted my brother who told me, in no uncertain terms, “He’s just not that into you.”
But he was into me, I knew it. This wasn’t like the other times I had constructed entire relationships that didn’t exist in my imagination. When Zack and I were together, the electricity between us was clear. I saw the way he looked at me when I played with our boss’s baby — like he could picture our children on Christmas morning, like he was already making jokes under his breath at an overlong ballet recital. I stuck it out, in spite of my brother’s warning. My fortitude paid off, and the thing between us crystallized and grew. He was an introvert, Gen X. He loved me, he just didn’t like texting.
The Lovers card is about duality and choice. In older versions of the deck, the choice is often simplified to Madonna or whore, mother versus lover. There is plenty of Garden of Eden imagery — a tempting Eve, luring Adam to taste forbidden fruit. But a modern interpretation explores duality, a marriage of opposites. Sometimes this card is about loving someone else, often it’s about loving yourself. Loving yourself and loving another person, day in and day out, is honestly one of the most difficult things a person can do. Love involves a constant maintenance routine that includes forgiveness, grace, and compromise.
To me, The Lovers is about real, authentic partnership, the kind that doesn’t make the most aspirational instagram post. True partnership is about fetching a seltzer for your partner because her feet hurt. True partnership is knowing exactly where your partner likes to be scratched on the top of his head.
The night before Zack and I left Los Angeles to fly to New York to get married, we made a video to watch in the distant future. In it, I am doing a voice. It’s subtle, but it’s there. I’m trying to look cool. There is still something unknowable about the man beside me, about what our future holds. Even though we are about to pledge our life to one another, I am still concerned that if I am authentically me, he won’t stay. The first time I unearthed this video it rocked me. I was a child, making a decision to partner with someone for a lifetime, and I didn’t know who the fuck I was. I was about to pledge my life to a man I was doing a cool voice in front of.
Now when I watch this video I find it sweet. These two strangers are about to embark on a lifelong journey to get to know one another. They will start out as two drinkers, one who pretends she likes basketball, another who pretends he enjoys karaoke. Eventually, they’ll both quit drinking, she’ll admit that sports are boring, and he’ll admit that karaoke makes him want to die. Over the next decade, they’ll have two children, which will sometimes be completely magical. Other days, especially rainy or lazy days, everyone will end the day in a foul mood, and these two lovers will have to apologize to their kids and to each other for various moody grumblings and impatience.
Over the years, these Lovers will learn how to argue. At first, she will be histrionic, overdramatic, making sweeping statements about “You never” and “I always.” He will be crushed by these statements for days after she’s forgotten she ever said them. He will bottle his emotions for as long as he can until they slip out at an inopportune moment. When he finally says something about a thing that’s been bothering him, it’ll have been bothering him for a year. It will feel impossible to fix. They will both write flowery instagram posts about the other person, in ways that either feel compulsory or competitive.
Eventually they’ll learn. She will stop picking fights in order to feel the pleasure of making up. She will start asking for the things she needs. He will try to be more communicative. He will recognize when she is being dramatic, or when it feels to her like the world is ending because her period is coming. He won’t take it so personally. She will stop being such a bitch.
They will parent together. Sometimes it will feel like a slog, and each of them will realize they’ve got a running tally in their head of all that I do for this family. They will learn to stop keeping this list. They will learn that this list helps no one. There will be days when they collapse into bed exhausted and over it, and days when they lie together watching hours of videos of the children they just tucked in.
She will begin as an atheist, she’ll become a witch. He’ll begin as an introvert, but one day after a dinner with friends, he’ll tell her, “You asked me a question and then instead of letting me answer it, you just started talking.” Yes, he’s an introvert, but mostly he just doesn’t want to fight for air time. They’ll continue to write, but she’ll start collaging, he’ll become a tree steward, a carpenter, a designer, a muralist. Sometimes she’ll sidle up to him and say something like, “Isn’t this fun? You get to live with your favorite little buddy.” Sometimes they’ll fuck off to the movies in the middle of the day. Sometimes he’ll give her a present that is so romantic, so thoughtful, so curious about her that she can hardly believe he is real.
And they’ll fight and make up and get cranky and quit drinking and people will die and children will be born and they’ll get tattoos and their bodies will age and their children will grow and one weekend will feel endless and then five years will go by. The secret, I think, is getting comfortable with change. Everything changes constantly and forever. Partnership is less about grand gestures and public declarations and much more about small choices, to have a sense of humor, to say you’re sorry, to let things go, to acknowledge metamorphosis and let it happen. Curiosity is the only tool that must stay sharp. If we stay curious about each other, and about ourselves, if we not only weather but celebrate change, we have a chance, I think, at creating harmony from contradiction.
And one day, a Valentine’s Day will come and go with no over-the-top declarations, no public bragging or exaggeration. Instead, she’ll give him a book about trees, and he’ll give her a framed photo he took the same year they met, of a piece of graffiti in a bathroom stall that reads, “I love your work.” He’s better at romance than she is. Lucky her.
Recommendations
Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage by Stephanie Coontz. This is a fascinating book about the history of the institution of marriage.
Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good written and gathered by adrienne maree brown. I'm reading this right now, and it's mind shifting. An exploration of the powerful and transformational nature of pleasure. A reminder that the personal is political, and that pleasure can be a powerful form of resistance.
Splinters: Another Kind of Love Story by Leslie Jamison. This is a memoir about divorce, but it's so much more than that. This is a memoir about self love, about choosing yourself, about the difficult identity-shaking radical transformation of motherhood. It's also a book about being hopeful and remaining open to the possibility of love even in the wake of heartbreak. Leslie Jamison is one of my favorite writers, and I cannot recommend her work highly enough.