When necessary, redefine perfection.
One night not long after my SportsCenter epiphany, life handed me a test. Looking back, it was more of a pop quiz with one question: So, you think you can go with the flow? Kristen and I were visiting our friends Andy and his wife, Mary, who live next door to us. Andy and I are polar opposites. He is muscular, laid-back, and has a nose stolen from a Roman statue, while I am skinny, neurotic, and have a nose that sometimes whistles when I make out. But we’ve been close friends since kindergarten, when we both witnessed a girl eat a handful of pumpkin seeds during a pumpkin-carving project and immediately throw them back up. We were the only kids who cheered; everybody else freaked out. In high school, I wrote poems about mathematics and dreamed up marching band configurations while Andy played team sports and made new friends. That’s when he met Mary, and they’ve been together ever since, more than half of their lives.
Kristen and Mary were both pregnant when we all decided to build houses right next to each other, in a new subdivision situated on what used to be a vast piece of cropland. (I had driven plows through a patch of soil not far from where our houses now stand, so I have to laugh when my neighbors refer to their riding lawn mowers as “tractors.”) The developer planted some scrawny saplings along each street, which ought to look pretty nice in about fifty years. But for now, the absence of real trees only draws attention to the homogeneity of our neighborhood. Everything looks the same from the outside—two-story houses with tan vinyl siding or brick facades and cedar fences. It’s all very cookie-cutter. Andy and Mary went with siding, Kristen and I chose brick, and our floor plans differ somewhat. But in terms of looks, that’s where dissimilarity ends. Our floors, countertops, kitchen cabinets, and bathrooms all look identical, which makes it easy for me to feel comfortable when I’m in their house.
Unlike certain other of my living arrangements, moving next door to Andy and Mary proved to be a great idea. We were guaranteed a good neighbor, for one thing, but living side by side also made it fantastically easy to visit them.
It was Andy’s birthday and Mary had planned a quiet little get-together for him that evening. Just his parents, his family, and our family celebrating the occasion over ice cream and an impressive homemade layer cake with chocolate frosting in the middle.
Mary was handing me my plate when Kristen took a bite and cried out, “Oh my God, this cake is amazing!” Andy nodded, his frosting-smeared mouth too full to say anything, while his parents agreed: “It’s really good, Mary.”
“You made this, Mary?” Kristen asked. “Dave, try some.”
I took a bite and rolled my eyes. “This is what all other cakes should strive to be.”
Mary had spent a good portion of the day making the cake and Andy’s favorite dinner, pork tenderloin, but according to Andy she didn’t let that interfere with her normal routine of cleaning the house, playing with their kids, and working out.
Kristen chuckled from across the room. “Poor Dave. He never gets pork tenderloin and cake on his birthday. Not unless we go to his parents’ house. Sorry, hon.” Everyone laughed but me. I chewed my lip, trying not to compare Andy’s typical day with mine—the housework he wasn’t obligated to help with, the amazing meals he got to eat, the buttons sewn back onto his shirts for free. Kristen winked at me, and rather than playing along, I helped myself to another serving of Mary’s cake. I might have found Kristen’s little joke amusing had we not eaten cold cereal for lunch that day.
Kristen and I returned home to our day’s messes—the dishes piled high in the sink, the random books and magazines sitting on the couch next to a flashlight and an empty box, the kids’ toys scattered across every room. Good lord. Kristen took the kids upstairs for bed while I straightened up a bit. Mary had sent us home with cake, and I was searching our dirty, crowded refrigerator for someplace to put it when Kristen came downstairs and asked me why I was being so crabby.
I didn’t want to get involved in an argument, so I lied, saying that I wasn’t being crabby at all, I was just looking for a goddamn place to set the cake down in our disgusting pit of a refrigerator. “That’s all.”
“Come on, Dave,” she said. “Use your words.”
Fine. I removed some cartons of leftover Thai food to make room for our miracle cake and shut the door. Let’s have some words.
“You know what, Kristen? A few weeks ago, I thought that I had come to terms with my expectations for you as a homemaker. I thought I had all that shit figured out—it’s not your job to do that stuff, it’s everyone’s responsibility to pitch in. So I’ve been helping with the laundry and I’ve been feeling okay. Then, tonight, we go next door and I see every one of my expectations for you being realized at every turn with someone else. Mary’s cooking up pork and baking a cake and vacuuming and God knows what else they’re up to over there. I thought I had this shit under control two weeks ago, but apparently, I don’t. I don’t. I’m admitting it right now, and it’s ugly, and it’s not fair to you, and it makes me feel like a real asshole, but there it is.”
She could have stormed out. She could have agreed and called me an asshole. Instead, she nodded the way she does when I’m telling her something she already knows.
“So, you want me to be just like Mary?”
Do I? I paused, wondering. Part of me wanted to say yes, but another part of me wanted to be happy with what we had. Kristen and I weren’t complete failures when it came to running a household. It wasn’t as if our house was filthy, it just wasn’t always “company-ready,” as my mom would say. Our house was always clean enough—no more, no less. Same with meals. Kristen made sure the kids ate healthy foods for meals and snacks, and when she wasn’t at work she kept them on a loose but reliable schedule: breakfast, lunch, and dinner served at the usual times, with snacks in between. But we never ate together as a family. Most nights, I had no idea when I’d be home from work. Plus, Kristen and I found that we could enjoy our dinners in peace if we waited until after the kids were asleep. One of us would usually start cooking something simple—pasta, tacos, that sort of thing—at around eight thirty. But that was purely for my sake. Kristen made it clear that she would have been perfectly content to eat olives right out of the can for dinner, but I insisted on hot food, served on a plate. “Like real people,” I told her.
Because she wasn’t in the habit of planning meals, Kristen rarely took care of the grocery shopping. We’d start making tacos and realize halfway into the process that we had no cheese or taco shells, and so I’d find myself driving to the grocery store at nine or later—when it seems very few decent people are out shopping. I’d return from the store, we’d finally eat dinner, and then she would turn on her computer and work until she couldn’t stay awake any longer. Reports had to be written, invoices had to be submitted, questions from her husband like “Aren’t you going to do the dishes?” had to be graciously ignored. She allocated little bandwidth to domestic greatness because bandwidth was scarce and necessarily limited to domestic functionalism. It was perfectly understandable, but I had been raised to expect that a home would be managed better than that.
“You know that being a homemaker isn’t my highest priority,” Kristen told me, reaching into the refrigerator and plucking a smidgen of frosting from the miracle cake. “For some women, like Mary, it is. And God bless them for it, because it is a lot of work. But I’ve got you to put up with—that takes most of my energy right there.”
“I don’t want you to suddenly turn into Mary,” I said. “But I expected that you would naturally be like her, and it’s still messing me up.”
“I get that, but let’s face it: You’re saying Mary’s perfect, right?”
I hesitated to comment, although there was plenty of evidence to support Kristen’s statement. For as long as I’ve known Mary, she has seemed perfect. In high school she graduated third in our class, was a fantastic swimmer, remembered birthdays, and was nice to everybody. In college, she was a perfect straight-A student, still remembered birthdays, and was still nice to everybody. After college, she couldn’t wait to start her life with Andy—she was excited to be his perfect wife. Now, as an adult with children of her own, Mary is the perfect stay-at-home mom. She keeps their house immaculate and every time I’m there it smells like whatever new, fabulous meal she’s been preparing from scratch.
Mary does more than take care of her own family. In addition to her own kids, she also takes care of ours and a few others from around the neighborhood. Yet she never looks tired or frazzled. When we pick up our kids in the afternoon, Mary hands us an activity sheet that chronicles their day: what the kids ate for morning snack, what they ate for lunch, what they ate for afternoon snack, how long they napped, when they had diaper changes and trips to the potty. Everything’s on the sheet, including what they did for fun: We read books and played dress-up all morning. At noon, the weather was nice so we went on a picnic at the park. Afterward, we sang songs, made alphabet letters out of bread dough, and rode bikes.
Things always run according to plan in Andy and Mary’s house. Meals, for instance, are served promptly at seven thirty, noon, and six o’clock, and they all eat together. On Mary’s pristine kitchen countertop, next to the tidy stacks of incoming and outgoing mail, lies her meticulous family schedule.
Tuesday 1:00 P.M.—Clothes shopping for kids *Note: sale at Carter’s, bring coupons
Tuesday 2:00 P.M.—Drive home *Note: be home by 2:50 to defrost meat
Tuesday 3:00 P.M.—Defrost meat / Clean toy room
If you were to exit through Andy and Mary’s front door, turn right, and walk a hundred feet to our house, you’d find just the opposite. We’re not the sort of people who have a schedule or even a to-do list, but if we were, you might find it scrawled across a takeout napkin, and it would include such things as Fish cell phone out of garbage disposal. Figure out where the car seats went. Pay water bill, ask city to turn water back on.
“I’m saying Mary’s an ideal homemaker,” I said. “But I’m not asking you to become a domestic goddess—that’s not my point. My point is that I don’t want to expect that from you anymore. I’m trying to change myself here, not you. Tonight was just a setback.”
“Whatever,” Kristen said, leaning in for a kiss. “It’s fine. Good night.”
She yawned and headed upstairs for bed, while I stayed in the kitchen and helped myself to yet another piece of Mary’s cake.
The next morning, I awoke to Kristen kissing me on the forehead, telling me she had to go to work. “The kids are ready to go to Mary’s. Can you take them?”
I nodded into my pillow, blinded by the sunlight streaming in through our bedroom windows.
“Thanks,” she said. “I love you.”
“Love you, too.” Okay—last night was a setback. That’s all. Time to get back on track.
I navigated through the usual morning chaos with the kids—more cereal please; not that kind of cereal; more water please; I meant juice; look, my pants are on my head; my shoes were in Mommy’s purse so can I wear my rain boots—and at eight thirty, we headed next door.
“Is Kristen working early this morning?” Mary asked as she helped me to remove the kids’ shoes and jackets.
“Yeah, and I did not sleep well last night.”
“How come?”
I hugged the kids and they ran off into Mary’s toy room, which was clean and organized and filled wall-to-wall with books and games and crafts. The house already smelled like pot roast, and Mary—who looks so much like Kristen that they’re sometimes mistaken for sisters—looked as fresh and relaxed as ever.
“Who knows,” I said.
Mary laughed and asked if it was because I’d eaten so much cake the night before, and then she abruptly marched into the kitchen, saying: “Wait here a second. I have something for you guys.”
I stood in the foyer while she continued talking to me from the kitchen, and I noticed how few decorations they had in their entryway compared with the rest of their house. There were pictures and mementos scattered throughout the other rooms, and the one that stood out was a hand-painted rendition of a poem that Andy’s sister had written for them as a wedding gift. The words escape me, but the gist was that their love shades the path of their life, like trees growing over a road. Something like that. It was heartfelt and affecting, and when Kristen and I weren’t getting along, any thought of that poem aggravated me. There were some trees painted in the background and the entire work was framed and displayed above their formal living room love seat.
The closest thing we had to a handmade emblem of our love was a torn sticker on Kristen’s rearview mirror. It read PRINCESS, KRISTEN. When we were dating I had printed this on a label maker at work. The original sticker read THE PERFECTLY IMPERFECT PRINCESS, KRISTEN. I’d created it in response to a label she had given to me after I’d gotten emotional talking about how happy I was to be with her. YOU ARE SUCH A GIRL, it read. My first response read YOU ARE SUCH A BITCH. I tossed that in the trash. Too risky. Then I made the princess label. When I gave it to her, she tore off the part she liked best and stuck it on her mirror. No frame. No trees. Just pure label-maker romance.
In Andy and Mary’s family room there were frames and shadowboxes almost everywhere the eye landed. Inside each one was a picture of them being a super couple: relaxing on the beach in Hawaii; smiling at each other on their wedding day; laughing with their heads comically and gender-swappingly misplaced into the circular facial cutouts of a male bodybuilder and a platinum-blond calendar girl painted on a sheet of plywood.
Kristen and I didn’t do shadowboxes, and for years there were no pictures displayed of us or even the kids. Our bare walls said a lot about who we were as a couple and as a family, just as Andy and Mary’s prominently displayed family portraits spoke volumes about them. That’s not to say that we didn’t have any photos of good times. We had a couple of candid shots taken at arm’s length in a Salt Lake City parking garage, stashed in a drawer. I sometimes found them when I was looking for a coaster. We also had wedding pictures, but I had never gotten around to picking them up from the photographer’s studio.
Mary returned, handing me a Tupperware container. “I made some more of that salsa that Kristen likes,” she said. “This batch isn’t as tomato-y as the other one, just so she knows. But Andy tried some last night and he loved it.” For a moment I felt envy rising, and I noticed a pattern emerging. Things are fine at home, then I come here and get a soul-crushing glimpse of perfection. We may have to move.
I thanked her, and she said with all the sincerity in the world, “It’s no problem. Hope she likes it.” I returned home with the salsa and texted Kristen:
Mary made u salsa. I’ll put it in the fridge.
She didn’t respond, so I sent another one:
Didn’t give us chips to go with it tho—guess she’s not perfect.
That got a response:
She’s probably making the chips by hand.
I spent the following week trying not to think too much about the disparity in Kristen’s and Mary’s priorities. But comparison is a compulsively playable game, and a dangerous one. The more I compared Kristen’s résumé as a homemaker to Mary’s, the more I started to compare my overall relationship with Kristen to that of Andy and Mary—an exercise that was sure to sow disappointment.
It’s worth mentioning that I sometimes get stuck on strange and unfamiliar words—or rather, strange and unfamiliar words get stuck on me. In passing, I’ll hear someone in my office say the word fiduciary, and before I have a chance to look it up in a dictionary, I’ll have heard it six or seven more times throughout the day. In the elevator, on the radio, in line at the deli: Fiduciary! There it is again! I’m always left wondering, Have people been saying this word all along? How have I not noticed this before? Then, as swiftly as it came into my life, the word will vanish—sometimes for years. When it rains, it pours, I guess. It doesn’t seem to matter if it’s raining unfamiliar words or unpleasant reminders of personal circumstances.
The following Saturday, Kristen was trying to get caught up on work. When she told me she had been craving a peanut-butter-cup milk shake all day, I offered to run out and get one for her. She thanked me by setting her files aside and pulling me close for a long, cozy hug. Rubbing my hand in circles across her back, I smiled, thinking this was a small but certain indication that we were back on track. Look at me fulfilling her needs. Look at us being sweet and romantic together.
But then I made the mistake of calling Andy to see if he wanted to come with me.
“I can’t right now, buddy,” he said cheerfully. “Mary and I are reading the new Harry Potter to each other.”
“Pardon me?”
He clarified that the book wasn’t brand-new, it was just new to them. They hadn’t read that one yet. But that was hardly the point.
“You read to each other?”
“Sure. That way, neither of us gets left out when we get a new book. And we just like to do this once in a while.”
Oh, fuck me.
I got off the phone as quickly as possible, and Kristen asked me what was wrong. Apparently, the fact that I had rolled my eyes when I hung up had given me away. At first, I offered Kristen ten million guesses as to what was going on next door, but when she wouldn’t play along, I simply gave her the answer:
“Harry fucking Potter, Kristen. They are sitting on their fucking couch, under a fucking blanket, reading Harry fucking Potter to each other.”
Kristen did her best to stifle a laugh and asked why this posed such a problem for me. The problem, of course, was who were they to be in such a happy marriage that they would actually sit and read books to each other?
“Yeah, that’s pretty unconscionable,” she said. “How dare they?”
My logic was clearly lost on her, so I resorted to acting even more childishly. “Whatever, Kristen. Hey, tonight let’s turn the clock back to the eighteen hundreds like Andy and Mary do, so we can read books to each other like shithead pioneers. Maybe if we did that then we’d actually look like a couple in love, like they do, and then we could stuff it down everyone’s throats.”
“Dave, knock it off. They’re just doing what works for them. They’re not stuffing anything down anyone’s throats. My God, you’re so jealous.” She shook her head.
I didn’t want to admit that Kristen was right. I knew that acknowledging my jealousy would mean acknowledging that I had a number of unfulfilled expectations. I didn’t want to have to deal with more unfulfilled expectations; I just wanted to buy a milk shake. But I was jealous. Insanely jealous. By some fluke, Andy and Mary had been enjoying the marriage I had always wanted and expected. Mary taking care of the household. Andy reading to her under a blanket. The two of them finding time between balancing their checkbooks, maintaining their landscaping, and ironing their curtains to fall more and more in love with each other every day. Their marriage appeared to be blissful, stable, romantic. Not chaotic, not painful or confusing like ours had been, but perfect. To me, theirs was what a successful marriage looked like, and I couldn’t help but notice that it looked a lot like the marriage my parents had.
My mom and dad didn’t argue with each other. They were comfortable in their roles, just as Andy and Mary were. They ate and slept and shopped at regular hours, just like Andy and Mary. And they were constantly showering each other with affection, just like Andy and Mary. Every evening growing up, my brother and I would come downstairs on a homework break or in search of ice cream, and we’d find my parents giggling and hugging and carrying on like honeymooners. We’d observe this, watching their private moment, and then we’d squeeze in between them, absorbing all of their love like little freckled sponges.
My marriage was supposed to look like that. It wasn’t supposed to involve cereal for lunch and other letdowns. It was supposed to be constant affection, not once-in-a-while, thanks-for-buying-me-a-shake affection. Andy and Mary had no business being so functional. They had no business being so matchy-matchy. They had no business being so happy.
“That’s the problem,” I told Kristen. “We don’t read to each other. We don’t hug or hold hands or swat each other with dish towels. We don’t hang family pictures, because we don’t have any. We spent five years arguing and totally disconnected. Five years! Andy and Mary are living in a perfect marriage, and we aren’t.”
“Dave, our marriage is perfect,” she said. “If you could stop looking at what it was supposed to be and start looking at what it actually is, then you might see that.” She waited a moment for my brain to catch up to her words, and then she smiled the way she smiles when she’s done talking about something and wants to move on. “Now, go get my shake.”
Two weeks later, I was standing on our front porch with a ladder and two boxes of Christmas decorations. The late autumn wind was more or less steady, with some gusts every now and then to remind me that it was below freezing outside. “Can you hurry? How long is this going to take you?” Kristen asked from the warmth of our foyer. I had about ninety minutes until nightfall.
“Not long.”
Rather than opening my eyes to our version of perfect, as Kristen suggested, for the past two weeks I had been trying a different tack: seeking opportunities to lead us directly into what I considered to be a utopian marriage. We are going to be happy and functional, damn it. I’ll see to that personally.
Something about hanging Christmas decorations had always given me a sense that I was the head of a functional family. I think that’s because a nicely decorated house is no accident. The decorations must be purchased in advance and stored year-round. Ladders are involved, as are special plastic clips and extension cords. All of which denote a certain degree of having one’s shit together. It’s easy to find satisfaction in the job, too. The sun goes down, the lights come on, and suddenly it’s the holidays. Add a quiet snowfall, and you’ve got something resembling a Norman Rockwell portrait.
I schlepped my ladder over behind the bushes in front of our living room window and propped it up against the brick facade of our house. From the boxes on the porch, I removed two long strands of garland and Christmas lights, stretched them out across the yard, and plugged them in to check if the bulbs worked. Which they didn’t. Oh, for Christ’s sake. I looked next door. Andy and Mary were standing in their driveway, keeping warm in matching knitted caps, which I assumed Mary had picked out for the two of them. Their porch and garage were lit up with hundreds of tiny lights, and the fat spruce in the corner of their yard had been decorated to look like a Christmas tree. Mary was cheerfully helping Andy put up their decorations and laughing at something he had said.
“Hi, Dave,” she called.
“Hey, buddies. I guess I have to go to the store to get more lights. Do you need anything?”
“You know you’re almost out of daylight, right?” Andy asked, positioning his wooden reindeer between some bushes.
“Yeah, but I can finish this in time.” Fuckface. “You know, I think Kristen and I will probably get started on the inside decorations this week.”
“Just think,” Andy said as his reindeer’s nose lit up. “We’ve already put up our Christmas tree, decorated inside, and we’re almost done with all the outside lights! But we’ll let you know if we need anything from the store.”
Mary laughed, hard, the way she might have laughed had I just tripped and fallen face-first into the crotch of their snowman. Then she gave Andy a playful hug, cuing him to back off a little bit. “You’ll be fine, Dave, just ignore him.” It was a nice thing for her to say, and it made me furious.
Fuck this. Maybe they are better than us. Comically better. Painfully, obviously, woefully better than us.
Then I turned my thoughts to Kristen. Why isn’t she outside helping me? Why can’t she buy us matching hats? My internal grousing was interrupted by one of our kids screaming inside, then a loud thud, and then more screaming. Through the front window I watched Kristen gather Parker up from the floor as she sent Emily, crying, to sit in time-out. I looked back at Andy’s house. As I stared into the bright red nose of that cocksucking, smug little reindeer, it was easy to imagine their children inside, calmly reading books or practicing long division in a fragrant cloud of homemade gingerbread. Or perhaps from behind a frosted windowpane they’d sip eggnog and delight in watching the doofus next door tripping over himself.
Kristen opened the door and the screams of our children’s tantrums echoed off nearby houses. “How’s it going out here, Dave?” she asked. She didn’t mean for me to give her an update on my progress, she meant, It’s a zoo in here, I need your help, pick up the pace.
I shrugged.
“It’s going shitty, isn’t it?” She rolled her eyes and slammed the door.
Perfect.
Two months later, at the end of January, our Christmas decorations were still up. Andy and Mary had been the first on the block to take theirs down, on New Year’s Day, and one by one the neighbors followed. Wreaths were removed from doors, illuminated plastic candy canes were plucked from snow-covered lawns, lights were pulled from rooftops and returned carefully to their boxes. But over at the Finch house garland clung to the porch posts, a wooden nutcracker cheerfully greeted visitors at the door with all the relevance of a month-late sympathy card, and sprays of holly hung by large red bows from our garage lanterns. I hadn’t gotten around to taking it all down. Or shaving, for that matter, or visiting my customers. I had finally taken Kristen’s advice and was trying to shift my worldview—not to align precisely with hers, but enough to meet somewhere in the middle. If our perfect was in fact all around me, then I wanted to be able to access it. Since December, all of my mental energy had been invested in understanding how I might accomplish that.
The challenge lay in overcoming conventional logic: only perfect is perfect, so any other marital circumstances would be—by definition—imperfect. The only solution I could conceive of was to redefine perfection. At first that meant erasing any value I had previously assigned to the word in relation to marriage. Constant bliss—gone. Traditional division of labor—outta there. Easy, painless, matchy-matchy—see ya. This exercise wasn’t exactly easy. The only reason I was able to shed my longstanding definitions of perfection was that I had absolutely no other choice. Reality was going to stick around for a while, whether I liked it or not. I realized that if I was going to appreciate the gifts of my marriage and stop coveting my neighbor’s life, then redefining perfection would be the only path to get me there.
Taking a closer look at the meaning of perfect provoked a number of questions, such as How did we end up here? and Wasn’t our relationship indeed perfect back when we were dating? It was easy to see that reality and my intentions diverged the moment Kristen and I said “I do.” When we were dating, everything felt perfect, yes, but then again I hadn’t expected Kristen to come over and do my laundry, cook all my meals, and dust underneath my bed. A girlfriend didn’t do those things, per my definition. Kristen never led me to believe that she was Susie Homemaker, yet I had assumed that a wholesale shift in her priorities would come with time, marriage, and kids. Besides, I couldn’t get over how lucky I was to be with her. I was not at all focused on what I thought she should be doing. I was simply focused on making myself better for her.
More interesting still were the insights about myself that resulted from a month and a half of feverish journaling. For one, I quickly realized that I had no business holding Kristen to any standard of homemaking because I had clearly failed to deliver any sense of normalcy myself. It’s safe to assume that Kristen didn’t spend her childhood dreaming of someday marrying a guy who would tote around a personal instruction manual reminding himself not to melt down when her family reunion goes thirty minutes longer than the invitations indicated. Kristen is no June Cleaver, I wrote. But then, I’m no Ward. So if she’s not June, and I’m not Ward, how can I expect us to be all Ward-and-June-Cleaver like my parents or Andy and Mary? If anything, we’re like a heterosexual adaptation of The Odd Couple. (There you have it, folks—the single most imbecilic personal breakthrough in recorded history.)
While my neighborhood was busy putting the Christmas season to rest I had finally made some progress. Andy sent me text messages asking me to keep the lights up another three weeks because he had bet money on the middle of February. Whatever. I didn’t mind being judged by the neighborhood. If I was going to be the asshole with the gauche decorated house and the enlightened path to a joyful marriage, so be it. I wasn’t trying to get laid by the neighbors.
Undefining perfection seemed like a supreme victory in my quest to learn how to go with the flow. But having discarded all troublesome preconceptions about marriage, I found myself eager to redefine it. I mentioned this to Kristen one evening, and as usual, she encouraged me not to try so hard. “You’ll find perfection if you’re not looking for it.”
Later that night, Kristen suggested that we should treat ourselves to an overnight stay in Chicago without the kids. It would be our first night alone together in over three years, and before she could finish asking if I was interested, I told her to book it. The next day, we made arrangements for a babysitter; a few days after that, we were checking into our hotel with only one suitcase, which we’d packed with pajamas, a change of clothes, and a couple bottles of wine.
With the entire glowing and twinkling city at our fingertips, Kristen and I wound up under the covers in our pajamas, watching television. And it felt so . . . perfect. So us.
I asked Kristen what she thought Andy and Mary would be doing had they been the ones vacationing in the city that evening.
“Who cares?” she said, handing me her empty wineglass for a refill. A few minutes later, she asked, “Did you figure out what makes me perfect yet?”
“Not yet,” I said. “But I know you are, somehow.”
“Even though I’m totally not the homemaker you thought I’d be?”
“Yeah, even though. I’m sorry that I expected that from you, and I’m sorry that it took me so long to get here.” That felt good to say.
“I don’t blame you,” Kristen said. “Heck, I’d love to have a wife like Mary.”
Then she asked me if I knew why I was perfect for her, and I drew a blank. “Is it because you have to tell me how to function like a normal person?” I asked. What girl doesn’t love that?
“No. It’s because I know you’d do anything for me, you get me, and you make me laugh, which makes me happy.”
She nestled up against me and I looked down at the tip of her cute nose hovering above my chest. I settled back and my mind wandered off to a moment earlier in the evening, when Kristen had instinctively placed her pillow on the window side of the bed because she knows I’m afraid of heights and being close to a twentieth-story window would bother me. Then I thought of all the times she was patient and guided me when I needed help, whether I knew it or not: Just relax and enjoy this with me. Stop looking, and you’ll find our version of perfect. Please come talk to me, whatever’s on your mind. I thought of all the difficult tests we’d survived and how she had never left me, how she remained loyal and supportive and willing to love me. Then I looked to our future and easily imagined us doing whatever love might call us to do for each other, no questions asked, time after time. To be for each other that one person who makes the other’s life the best and brightest it could possibly be. Then Kristen burped and started laughing, and there it was: our perfect was revealing itself to me, moment by imperfect moment.