"Oh, here is the rest of my life."
Everyone told us—and told us and told us—marriage is hard work, and compromise, and more work. Abandon all hope, ye who enter. Well, it’s not true.
“They say the first year of marriage is the hardest,” Dylan said the other night, “but they don’t usually say there’s going to be a global fucking pandemic.”
“I was just thinking that,” I said. “I’ve actually been thinking about that for a while, but I didn’t want to say anything and jinx it, but at this point that doesn’t really seem like it matters. I mean, talk about putting a relationship to the test.”
Dylan and I were friends for a long time before we ever started dating; we met in 2013 or so, in the way that people sometimes run into each other on the Internet, and stayed in touch for years on and off, as other friendships waxed and waned, as we fell out of touch with people we’d known far longer than each other. In 2017, it occurred to me that I should take a vacation before I burned out from covering the unrelenting chaos of a new administration’s first year in the White House, and Dylan offered his couch as a place to lay low for a week and think about things that weren’t the Hatch Act.
We had been talking more regularly for a few months at that point. At some point our conversations had started including good morning and good night, and I don’t remember when that was, but I do remember that was when I thought to myself, Uh oh. You don’t say good night to someone unless you’re planning on sticking around in the morning, so to speak.
“This is the summer the 17-year cicadas are meant to hatch,” Dylan said, as part of his mutually unaware yearning couch vacation pitch. “We can drive out to the summer camp I used to go to and see them.” Then he called a counselor at the camp to make sure they were open to visitors and texted me back, a few days later, “So it turns out the cicadas were last year and they won’t be back for another 16 years… but there’s still a lot to do here! If you still want to come!”
I did. I spent a week on Dylan’s couch, in an apartment he shared with a roommate and two cats I was very allergic to, and I didn’t say anything about it until several months later, because I would have done a lot worse than take three kinds of allergy medication every day and sit studiously not touching my face (good practice, as it turned out) to spend a week watching him stumble around hungover and walking in the woods and sitting on his porch chain-smoking as the sun went down. A pretty good marker of how much I like someone tends to be how much I am willing to mortgage my own dignity to spend time with them and how little I regret it.
That was the end of May and the beginning of June. By November, we had come out to each other as trans. We’ve both written more about that here — I ended up cutting more than 1,500 words from my half of the draft for that piece, constrained by the brief and the knowledge that I could have written easily three times as much about how complicated it is to stumble into one fundamental truth — that you want to spend the rest of your life with someone — and then realize that something else you thought was fundamental about yourself isn’t at all. Something you thought you’d never have to deal with comes up anyway. Someday comes knocking.
I had been aware I probably wasn’t cis for maybe five years before we started dating, but I’d never examined it more closely than that. […] I was convinced that, under the right circumstances, it wouldn’t matter — and I was right, but not in the way I expected. When Dylan and I started dating, I was so comfortable and happy with who I was around him that I thought I could ignore the parts of myself that I’d shoved into a closet years before. Of course that wasn’t how it worked: In fact, the happier I was with the rest of my life, the more difficult I found it to ignore those neglected parts.
I avoided examining my gender too closely before I met Dylan in large part, I think, because I knew what I would find, and I knew that finding it would destroy my ability to trust myself, and I knew I would probably not survive that alone. I had spent so much time and work keeping that ability from being totally crushed, building it back up from almost nothing, that it came to stand for everything else I would lose by admitting that I was not a woman: my understanding of myself; my understanding of the way I related to other people, and specifically the way I related to my friends; my relationship with my parents (who still, three years later, refuse to address me by name or discuss me with the neighbors who watched me grow up). I was afraid that my gender was a promise I owed it to everyone else to keep.
The idea of doing anything to compromise my hard-won ability to take my own word for things felt like an act of profound self-harm, like a blow I could not possibly recover from, a risk I could not possibly take, and in many ways that was correct. It took me more than a year to be able to trust myself again, more than a year before I felt anything like alright again. I spent that year reacting like a wounded animal, a terrified feral bundle of instincts and reflexes in the aftermath of catastrophe. I spent it learning how to be a person again, and what kind of person I was, and what kind of person I wanted to be. Sometimes my entire life seems like a long cycle of building myself anew just in time for the tide to come rushing in again. I don’t know if it matters whether or not I’d choose to do it again; in the end, I had no choice.
While transitioning is hard for us it… actually needn’t be. There should be no fear involved, no terrifying social and bodily risk; so “these dudes are really brave” shouldn’t be the basis of your admiration, either. Jumping out of a burning building into shark-infested waters isn’t brave: we do it to save our lives.
This is the best description of that particular feeling that I’ve ever read. It’s not unlike the way I felt a day after I flew back to New York and crawled back into my own bed, yearningly but less itchily, when I woke up and saw that Dylan had texted me. I still have the message saved on my phone. I won’t be quoting it. For one thing, I can’t be objective about whether it’s actually romantic (as texts go) or not. I read it, and I thought, This is too good to possibly be true, but you want it so badly, and here it is — why not enjoy it while it lasts? And then, later on, I would reread it and think, to borrow a quote:
You both find the exact same things worth remembering. […] You have the same rhythm. Click. You just know each other. All of a sudden you see reading in bed and waffles on Sunday and laughing at nothing and his mouth on yours. And it’s so far beyond fine that you know you can never go back to fine. That fast. You think: Oh, here is the rest of my life. It’s finally arrived.
We are absurd people, as I’ve mentioned before, largely because our lives are fairly absurd. We met, and we had already known each other all our lives, and then we came out (and came out, and came out, over and over again), and began the work of transition, and then a hundred other wildly improbable things happened, and now we are here. Somewhere in there, we got married. I’m glad we had the party when we did: As of Thursday, when Gov. Mike DeWine (R-OH) extended the state’s lockdown to May 1, he also mandated that wedding receptions must adhere to social distancing guidelines and may include no more than 10 people, which sounds like the setup to a Mamma Mia! sequel (Mamma Mia! Young And Sweet, And In Quarantine). Relatedly, if you enjoy watching extremely funny people talking about their extremely nightmarish weddings, you should watch Ronny Chieng’s Netflix special.
At our wedding, which was not a nightmare at all, Emma Jean — a very dear friend of mine — said to me, “You’re so happy. It’s so good. I don’t worry about you anymore.” I’m lucky to have such good friends and Dylan, who is so good that he is hard to describe (if you know him at all, you know what I mean). I am particularly lucky that I spent large parts of that endless lost year sitting at home, relearning how to distinguish the inside of my brain from the outside, and that Dylan and I have perhaps spent our entire relationship practicing to be cooped up with only each other’s company for weeks on end. I can still remember how it felt in those early days, when it felt like I had learned to walk on air, as long as I didn’t think about it too much or look down. You close your eyes and take a leap of faith.
Right now, all you have to do is put one foot in front of the other, and all you have to think about is the next step. That’s the best anyone can do right now: work at hope and trust yourself. It is never too late to discover that you are capable, in whatever sense, of more than you know — and you always are. The next periodical cicadas, from brood 10, will be here next year; that’s not so long to wait. We plan to be here to see them.
—R.
Then she added, “I mean, I’m still a Jewish mother, I still worry if you’re eating enough and wearing a sweater when you need to.”