My wife Kathy and I were at a retreat recently. A woman I’d just met came up to me between sessions.
“It’s amazing watching you watch Kathy talk,” she said. “Your face lights up. You hang on every word like it’s the most interesting thing in the world.”
“Because it is,” I said.
People ask what our secret is. We’ve been together fifteen years, got married thirteen years ago this week, and our relationship keeps expanding instead of flattening. They want a technique—rituals, scheduled date nights, a rule about phones at dinner.
The real answer is stranger than that.
I’m not the man she married. She’s not the woman I married. The Kathy at that retreat is someone I’m still getting to know.
The story we’re sold about marriage is a tidy one. You meet someone, you marry them, and you spend the rest of your life with them.
We didn’t. We got a series of different relationships, all with the same face across the table. I’ve loved several versions of Kathy. I expect to love a few more.
Couples brace for the dramatic things—the affair or the blowout fight. But those are usually symptoms, not causes. The real trouble sets in earlier, and you barely notice it. Some freeze: two people stuck at the moment they met, still the same people they were a decade ago. Others drift: one keeps becoming someone new, the other stays put, until the gap is too wide to cross.
We almost froze. Around year seven, our relationship went quiet—not unhappy, just stagnant. We’d learned each other’s shape and stopped looking past it.
What changed is that each of us began to grow on our own. I healed what needed healing. I found wants and edges I hadn’t had before, a self that was wider than the one she married. She was doing the same, a few feet away. And the marriage grew exactly as much as we did.
We also kept telling each other who we were becoming. Not the how-was-your-day, fine-how-was-yours exchange that two people can run on autopilot for years. The want that wasn’t there last year, the fear that showed up uninvited, the version of myself I can feel forming before it fully arrives. I say it out loud—often badly, often too early—so she isn’t left to discover it by collision.
And we stay with the person who’s changing—curious, leaning toward the change instead of bracing against it. The question isn’t Do I approve of this change? It’s Who are you becoming, and how do I stay on your side of it?
Most days this is unglamorous. It’s me, mid-coffee, saying something half-formed about what I want now that I didn’t a year ago—and not knowing how it’ll land. It’s her telling me she’s done with a thing I didn’t know she’d been carrying—and me not rushing to fix it.
I keep introducing myself. She keeps introducing herself. We keep sharing the versions of us quietly forming under the surface, the ones no one has fully met yet.
So when she’s talking and my face lights up, it’s not because I’ve memorized her. It’s because I haven’t. There’s still something new in her sentences. There’s still a person across from me I don’t entirely know yet.
I look up and realize I’ve fallen in love with someone new.
Same woman. Brand new person.
Related
Bold
