I don’t mean what other people mean when they speak of a home, because I don’t regard a home as a . . . well, as a place, a building . . . a house . . . of wood, bricks, stone. I think of a home as being a thing that two people have between them in which each can . . . well, nest.

TENNESSEE WILLIAMS, The Night of the Iguana

Our wedding was in January 2009, shortly after Beyoncé released the song “Single Ladies,” which felt like a personal gift not just to humanity but specifically to my wedding reception. The groomsmen wore their sunglasses indoors for the evening reception in addition to, regrettably, the bulk of our formal wedding photos. They also popped their collars and requested Kanye West songs from the DJ while the more seasoned adults requested hits by Neil Diamond. In both cases, the DJ was asked to play “something we can actually dance to.”

In more important current events, Barack Obama had just become president, and less than a month after taking office he ordered an additional seventeen thousand troops deployed to Afghanistan. The U.S. had been at war for eight years by the time Mike finished his training, and we moved to Yuma that summer. And when we got there, many of the families we met had gone through two, three, and sometimes four or more deployments, each between six and twelve months. They had tallied personal sacrifice in years of detachment and family separation, so they wore deployments like badges of honor, like chevrons of legitimacy, considering each a terrible yet often mandatory tryout to becoming an insider in the military community. By the time Mike and I arrived, it felt like we were already behind.

To be honest, I didn’t even realize how personal war could be until we moved to Yuma and lived in a neighborhood where at any given time several houses were decorated in American flags and an enormous banner hung across the garage that read “Welcome Home Daddy!” I’m embarrassed to admit that now—how naive I was. But I learned quickly. And once you see the cost, you want to do your part to bear the burden, just as when you go over to someone else’s house for dinner, the first thing you ask is if there’s anything you can help with in the kitchen. Often the host says no, but it’s important that you volunteer. It’s important that you try. It says something about your character to be eager to contribute.

Shortly after Mike and I got married, Mike’s mom brought to our attention an obscure verse in the Old Testament: Deuteronomy 24:5. It says, “If a man has recently married, he must not be sent to war or have any other duty laid on him. For one year he is to be free to stay at home and bring happiness to the wife he has married” (NIV). Mike’s mom committed to pray this over Mike and me.

Of course I wanted a year with Mike, and I believe he wanted it too, but he was also a Marine who was eager to help in the kitchen, so to speak. He wanted to experience the war of his generation, to be a helpful volunteer. In the meantime, he was happy to go on date nights with me and pick up milk on the way home from work. But quietly, not even secretly, he was desperate to deploy. At every opportunity, he raised his hand. It’s a habit he maintains to this day. And we both understand why: This is what he was trained to do—to serve his country in the midst of conflict. And until he deployed, everything else seemed like rehearsal, like busywork, like being an understudy for a role that everyone else was already playing.

We got our first year together, which might be another way of saying that Mike’s mom is very good at praying. I know a lot of people talk about their first year of marriage as very challenging, but for us it really wasn’t. For us, it was a year of consistent, seemingly mundane discoveries that each felt like a revelation.

For example, I learned that I was not, in fact, as clean as I originally supposed. Because unlike my spouse, I firmly believed in the necessity of a junk drawer. Where else would a person keep the pens that don’t work and batteries that may or may not be used? Additionally, I learned with astonishment that there’s such a thing as preventative maintenance on a car, that some people don’t just drive their cars until they break down and then weep openly on the side of the road. Some people actually keep track of things like oil changes and pay stubs and the exact year they’re due for a tetanus shot.

The learning curve of our first year of marriage was modest, I think, because every other part of our lives so easily overlapped. Mike and I processed our new careers at the same time, growing in knowledge and responsibility. Connection was easy for us then. We had no kids yet, no big hindrances to spending enormous amounts of time together. So that’s what we did. If marriage is a matter of concentric circles, during that first year we nearly eclipsed each other with how much we shared. And I suppose that’s what made it seem sort of easy, as if two becoming one were the most natural thing in the world.

Five months after my own wedding, I flew back to Colorado to be a bridesmaid in my friend Arica’s wedding. In the bridal suite I reported back to my friends that marriage was great and simple. I dispensed empty platitudes such as “As long as you both love Jesus, it all works out!” and “Communication really is key!” It’s not that this advice is wrong, necessarily. It’s just that it hadn’t been personally tested in my life yet.

Some people say that marriage is really hard. Others say it’s really easy. I think you don’t know what marriage is until you’ve lived through both gears, the easy and the hard.

And for us the hard eventually came. After the first year, on the very week of our first anniversary, Mike was selected to support a training exercise in Camp Pendleton, a base about three and a half hours away from Yuma. He moved there for five months, and in the same week he returned home, the phone rang again. This time he was put on a small team being deployed to Afghanistan. It was called a transition team, a small group of Marines that would embed with the Afghans and live among them outside the walls of an American base—or in military terms, “outside the wire”—teaching and equipping them to be a self-sufficient military in their own right.

Mike was thrilled, obviously.

I was hysterical.

In the first year, we had a full twelve months together. Over the course of the next fifteen months, Mike and I lived together for a total of two weeks.

But here’s the mercy in it all: We got exactly what was prayed for.

When Mike would call home from Afghanistan, it was always from an unknown number. The home screen of my cell phone would flash a series of zeros and ones, and I would fumble my hands to unlock his voice. Each time he led with “Hey, baby.” Three syllables spoken so warmly and evenly that they almost rhymed.

Sometimes the connection would be crystal clear. But more often it was very bad, a heavily delayed discussion shouted down two ends of an echoing tunnel. Mike was deployed to a patrol base with unreliable power and limited Internet, so the phone and e-mails were our only options—no FaceTime or Skype. When he would call home once a week or so, our conversation would spontaneously drop at least twice. At the beginning of the deployment I supposed that this was because a bomb went off or combatants infiltrated the base. But it was never that dire. Deployment is cartoonishly frightening in the beginning simply because it’s so foreign. Your imagination goes wild in the pockets of what you don’t know. Soon, though, I learned that calls dropped not by exception, but as a general rule. Interruptions were ordinary: midsentence, midbreath, right at the good part of the story.

For months I carried my phone in my hand as if it were an extension of my body. I answered it in public bathrooms and on restaurant loading docks, carried it with me on runs and set it faceup on the table at dinner with friends. Sometimes I would check it halfway through a shower, wiping soap out of my eyes and shaking water from my fingertips, just to make sure it was on and I hadn’t missed a phone call. We e-mailed fairly regularly, too, but there was something about his voice, the warmth and tone and timbre, that made communication more personal, that proved I was connected to him in real time. Especially in the beginning, answering the phone seemed like an act of fidelity, as though being available for every call were the single sacrament of our marriage, as if I were honoring him by not moving on with life in his absence.

I remember the first time I missed one of Mike’s phone calls. When I saw the notification on the cell phone screen, my heart sank and tears sprang to my eyes. I felt guilty, like a failure. “What if he doesn’t call again?” I asked myself.

But then he would call again. Eventually he called enough times in weekly succession that it formed an expectation that he was just fine and would continue to be. The habit created the illusion of safety and control. So over time the cloud of impending doom felt less oppressive, as if through the routine of carrying on I convinced myself that I actually could. The indicator of this shift is when you’re able to miss a phone call without feeling like it’s the end of the world. Or maybe it’s when you answer the phone but are distracted still, more in tune with the life in front of you than with the one on the phone. The new normal, I found, was in being disconnected from one another, but no longer bothered by it.

On the other end of the phone was a husband who was also distracted, but in a different way. Mike always sounded so very far away, not just because he was physically, but because he was mentally and emotionally, too. The Marine never spoke harshly on the phone, was never brusque or aggressive, but I could occasionally catch a faint trace of those characteristics in his voice, the residue of a persona he embodied only in uniform and at war. I found traces of his deployment life in his deployment voice, a man caught between the roles of warrior and husband, inadvertently bringing the lingering scent of one into the other.

In the beginning, I expected Mike to remain completely engaged as a husband and friend. I wanted him to corroborate my life as he had always done, to bear witness to every detail—even if only in my retelling. I wanted to talk as if we had time to spare, to discuss my job and my workouts and my recent discovery of Veronica Mars on Netflix. Most of all, I wanted to navigate the razor-sharp emotionality of deployment with the only person I assumed could understand.

But Mike was preoccupied, which meant he wasn’t returning my love in the particular ways I wanted him to. His emotional capacity was redirected for a time. As it turns out, a man engages with his wife quite differently and with a little more reserve when he’s living outside the wire in a combat zone than when he’s sitting on the couch, having a bowl of ice cream. It was as if he had to dim the lights on the domestic side of his brain for a little while, to go into energy-save mode when it came to keeping up with how I felt about my most recent haircut or when the dog last had her nails clipped. And this came as a surprise to me, because Mike is so stubbornly meticulous, so thorough and engaged, especially in our relationship. Reluctantly, though, I learned that a warrior must occasionally detach from his allies to become more vigilant toward his enemies. He must become strategically impenetrable to friends, to family, even to a wife with the access key of a wedding band, so that all of his attention can be spent, you know, living dangerously and staying alive.

I suppose this phenomenon occurs everywhere, in all of us, including those outside the military. It happens when an executive works long hours or a student retreats to private corners of a library, when a writer writes in solitude or an athlete trains in the privacy of his own ambition. In order to create, to defend, to innovate, each of us must occasionally retreat to a singular place that is only ours. Sometimes important work requires a door that locks behind us. And this is tricky if all your stability is rooted in one human person. Because if home is where the heart is, what happens when your heart is distracted, deployed, or detached?

Each of us lived a little more privately from the other in that year, mystified by where we overlapped. Mike couldn’t or wouldn’t say much about what he was doing. And by comparison, anything I had to say felt silly or small. E-mails and phone calls became more about checking in than actual connection, as if we were playing a game of Marco Polo, routinely volleying the same pointless questions back and forth—“How was your day?” “How are you doing?” “Did you sleep last night?”—hoping the sound of our echoing voices would somehow bring us closer together even though the answers remained the same.

Fine. Okay.

Talk soon.

Love you.

Bye.

Mike was distracted, yes, by the whole business of deployment. But I was distracted too, by the business of trying to find a new, endurable normal without him. So the phone calls became shorter and further between. It was a matter of busyness, sure, but the real reason was that after a while each conversation felt like a small failure in connection, like we didn’t really know how to talk to each other anymore—how to dig beneath the surface and land at the matters of the heart.

Of course, physical distance isn’t a requirement for relational distance. One or both of you can be in the same place, the same house, even in the same room and be consumed by something else—say, the task of parenting or working from home or taking a class online. You can sit right next to each other and be absorbed by your phone, reading the news or scrolling through social media or texting with friends. Sure, you’re together, but he’s following a sport you don’t care about while you’re giggling at an inside joke you’re cultivating with someone else. Time together can mean sitting in front of a television or doing chores alongside each other—being productive simultaneously without ever being present. At least for me, one of the great surprises of marriage is that it is so easy to become estranged from someone you love, even when they are within arm’s reach. It’s as if we drift by default.

My first encounter with this accidental drifting was during the deployment. Suddenly we were distant from each other in more than geography, and we didn’t know what to do about it except to call home, to answer the phone, to keep showing up for each other in the ways we could through a season that was barren of easy or frequent conversation.

And if I’m honest with you, during this time I felt helpless and lonely and emotionally abandoned. I wondered if this temporary estrangement would cling to us like a disease; if it would become permanent, chronic, terminal; if it would ruin everything. Our grip on each other was slipping, and I wasn’t at all sure that things would ever be the same. I worried that if a combat deployment didn’t cost the life of my husband, it might very well cost the life of my marriage. And my most desperate prayer to God was that he would somehow preserve our unity, that he would step in as the stability between us. Because if home is where the heart is, our hearts had to be entrusted to a better, more permanent place than each other.

In our wedding ceremony, Mike and I took Communion. My hands shook as I held the piece of bread and sipped from the brass cup of wine. To be honest, my deepest thoughts of the moment were not of religious piety but of concern that I would pour the entire cup of red liquid down the front of my wedding dress. For this reason, I thought—for the first time ever—that perhaps Communion should be served with a long plastic straw. Mike slipped his arm around my lower back, steadying me, and together we bowed our heads to pray in remembrance and recognition of Jesus’ sacrifice.

It matters to me—especially now—that the very first thing we did after saying our vows was redirect our attention to a better, more beautiful banner of love. I like to think that this act of Communion was the first step of an early habit, that the place our marriage began is the same place it will return to over and over again, as an altar, a lighthouse, a home of record: there, holding the bread and the wine, whispering the only words we could muster—“Thank you. Thank you. Thank you”—as we took in the magnitude of the sacrificial love of God with quivering lips and clammy palms and the sound of a piano playing in the background.

I like to think that if we return to this place over and over again, if we stop enough times and bear witness to how Jesus loved us, it will become the central point of stability in our lives. And maybe then the nature of our commitment will be shaped by what we have witnessed with regularity: forgiveness and restoration, wholeness on the other side of brokenness, the daring hope that nothing is beyond the redemptive power of the Cross.

I love how Timothy Keller frames this kind of commitment:

In any relationship, there will be frightening spells in which your feelings of love seem to dry up. And when that happens you must remember that the essence of a marriage is that it is a covenant, a commitment, a promise of future love. So what do you do? You do the acts of love, despite your lack of feeling. You may not feel tender, sympathetic, and eager to please, but in your actions you must be tender, understanding, forgiving, and helpful. And, if you do that, as time goes on you will not only get through the dry spells, but they will become less frequent and deep, and you will become more constant in your feelings. This is what can happen if you decide to love.[9]

I’ve found that it’s easy to make marriage a sequence of reactions, to summarize it based on how strong the compulsion is to “be tender, sympathetic, and eager to please.” In fact, I’ve found my default setting is to be more a consumer of love than a dispenser of it, to set my husband as the standard for good behavior and echo his best attempts. If you are nice to me, I’ll be nice to you. Honor me. I’ll honor you.

But you first.

You first.

You first.

Yet there is a better standard of steadfast love: Jesus, the one who promises, “I will go first.” And he did. Though we were sinful, Christ absorbed punishment on our behalf. Though we failed, he forgave. This is the ultimate standard of faithfulness: the absolute, unconditional love of God.

One of the mercies, then, of long-distance relationship or any hard season of marriage might be the way it drains the consumerism out of us, how it draws out the contingencies and impurities we accidentally let slip between vows of “for better or for worse.” It teaches us about the decision to love in the absence of feeling like it. Here, in gaps of geography and connection, we learn the grit of loving and serving even when we can’t see the return on investment yet.

As for Mike and me, when we didn’t know where else to begin, we defaulted to tiny steps of faithfulness. Mike called home even when the conversations were uninspired, and I kept answering the phone. I sent him expensive care packages of beef jerky that he promptly gave away to other guys who liked it more. He ordered me four-inch platform heels when I mentioned offhand that I could use a pair of “reasonable black work shoes.”

And in between the cracks of our insufficient tries were prayers that banked on the hope that God, in his own mysterious sufficiency, could hold us together far better than we knew how to do ourselves.