Looking back, our marriage wasn’t built on grand romantic gestures, we had them but we weren’t built on them. Our marriage was built on hundreds of points of leverage. Sounds funny doesn’t it? It sounds a little like the opposite of how a marriage should work.
It was more like the way two people spend their days making
deposits into each other’s lives, without ever really keeping score. It was about doing something small now that
makes life easier for the other person, either now or later. Where one person spends 30 seconds doing
something that saves the other person 10 minutes later. Or doing something today so the other person doesn’t
have to worry about it tomorrow. Or even
noticing a need before it became a problem.
We mostly fell into a traditional separation of household duties,
not in any conscience sort of way but by the things we did not like to do, or
the things we didn’t care if we were doing.
I was the trash man, and she was laundry lady. Although that one came after she told me I’d
never have to do laundry if I built her an indoor laundry room in our first
house, which did not have one. She never
once ran a mower, weed eater or blower, she had it done when I was deployed and
later when we could actually afford it got a service, so I didn’t have to spend
two or three hours each weekend futzing with the yard, I enjoyed not having to
do it.
Bride rarely had to put gas in her car, and I rarely had to
go grocery shopping. She always made
sure coffee was made the night before, and I always made sure we had plenty of
paper products. She keep my underwear
rotated and I would tumble her robe on a cold day so when she got out of the shower
she would get the prize of a warm robe. I
would bring her favorite treats home and she would do the same with mine. I have painted every room in every house,
except this house, to some of the coolest colors.
She picked colors, I slapped it on the walls and did the fancy trim work. She designed the coolest pantry ever, and I built
it. It was floor to ceiling shelves that
were only wide enough for one thing, no more lost cans of soup behind all the
other stuff. It was brilliant.
I think we were so good at leveraging the leverage that it
became one of those things we probably both took a little bit for granted. It became a habit, and then almost thoughtlessly
invisible. They were things we just did,
on autopilot evidently. We just stopped
noticing, the trash was always gone, the coffee was always made. The bills were just paid, that was her and
her OCD on that contributed to us always have an outstanding credit score. Dogberts medication was just there, the doctor
appointment that just popped onto my calendar.
My laundry laid out, pull my shirts everyday from the right, she would ensure
they were arranged. We didn’t notice because
someone we loved was just quietly carrying a bit of weight. Maybe that’s what successful leverage looked
like. The work disappears and all we
are left with is the benefit.
The funny thing about leverage is that it worked because we weren’t
talking about what it really was. If we
were actually keeping score, it would have been something totally different,
almost transactional. Somewhere along
the way, those little deposits became part of the landscape of our marriage. We didn’t thank each other every day for the coffee,
clean laundry, full tanks of gas, stocked pantries or warm robes. We weren’t ignoring them either. They simply became part of the rhythm of our marriage. Neither of us woke up thinking, how can I create
leverage today? We just spent years learning
where the friction lived in each other’s lives and then got out the emery cloth
and smoothed it out best we could.
Then came the day when all that leverage stopped
working. Not because the systems failed,
but because the person behind that leverage was gone. My leverage had nowhere to be applied and hers
simply vanished. The difference was that
I could no longer do things for her. I
was only beginning to discover all the things she had been doing for me. I realized how hard she must have worked to make
my life easier. Things still feel a bit discombobulated. Trying to remember what order to hang my shirts in after washing them. For example, since
we were dating I never once picked a frame for my glasses. Mostly because I don’t have to look at them,
so I just let her pick ones she liked since she was the one looking. I have done that now, I think she’d like the
ones I picked, but it felt really weird doing it without her.
I keep finding fulcrums with no lever everywhere. I have to pay attention to ensure the bills
are paid on time. I coordinate and make
all my own appointments now and make sure I get them on the calendar. And yes, I have botched several of those. Shirts just hanging in the closet in the
order in which I should wear them. Socks
knotted together, not rolled together because that stretches out the band. She always folded my underwear, but not her
own. I stopped folding mine, no one to
impress with my wrinkle free underwear. None
of those things happened magically. They
happened because she loved me enough to keep paying attention.
Leverage was all about our love for each other and our
attempts to make each other’s day a tiny bit easier. We joked about leverage a lot but at the end
of the day, leverage was about the countless little acts that took a tiny bit
of effort from one of us that removed a little bit of friction from the other one’s
day. We spent nearly forty years learning
where friction existed in each other’s lives and working it smooth whenever we could.
We called it leverage. Looking back now, the little acts were the
lever, but the fulcrum was love. It turns
out love looked a lot like leverage. And
for nearly 40 years, we got to be each other’s.
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