Marriage, Or a State Of Constant Something-or-Other

Have you ever wondered why romance novels focus on falling in love? The title of the genre is literally romance, which can take place at any point in a successful or unsuccessful relationship, but we always seem to focus on the beginning.

But Sidney, you may say, that’s the best part! That’s when all the fluttery feelings are best! Why wouldn’t you want to read and write about that part?

Yeah.

Except no?

I mean, there’s a reason people get married. And stay married for three, ten, or, best case scenario, fifty years. There’s other feelings besides the fluttery ones, and they must be awesome, or people wouldn’t have invented getting married for love instead of using marriage to align kingdoms and shit. There’s a reason people want to stay married instead of breaking up and finding someone new so they can start the whole cycle over. If the first lovely burst of infatuation was really the part worth living for, we’d all be serial daters and womanizers and man-inizers. But we’re not. The dream isn’t a constant blur of new partners that you bail on the second things get less-fluttery. That’s the shit we dream of getting away from. Taylor Swift has built a career on wanting to get away from that.

And let’s be real, if the stakes in will-they-or-won’t-they-get-together are high tension, imagine the fucking tension of will-they-or-won’t-they-stay-together-now-that-they-have-three-kids-and-own-a-house-and-have-a-mother-in-law-or-two-living-with-them? Those are some stakes, ya’ll.

Before I got married, I thought marriage was about how much you loved someone. Now, eleven years in, I know marriage is the conscious, willful act of managing the frustrations of life in a way that allows you to continue to like your partner as much as you love them. It’s hard to do. It’s easy to not pay attention and screw it up. But if you know how to do that? MARRIAGE FUCKING ROCKS. It’s so romantic, you guys.

Granted, it’s not the kind of romance that means the usual trappings of first dates and dramatic screw-ups that must be overcome.

But there’s other stuff to compensate. Like, sometimes, he loads and runs the dishwasher .

Imagine it.

You wake up. You stumble to the kitchen with one eye closed and your hair in a rat’s nest and wearing your grody pajamas with the hole in them that make you look like a bloated teapot. You go to the cabinet only to find there are no bowls for your morning Cap’n Crunch. You flail, horrified. And then you growl, because it is too goddamn early to take on goddamn 2020 without your goddamn beloved Cap’n Crunch. And you keep growling and growling and growling.

I searched for a gif of a monster in pajamas, but I couldn’t find one. Either way, this is pretty close to accurate.

Then you hear him say from the couch, with actual affection for your rabid self, “Oh, hey. There’s clean bowls in the dishwasher.”

Because he did the dishes. He loaded the dishwasher, ran it, and then went the extra step of telling you before your whole morning could be ruined. He made it so you don’t have to be a feral mess all day. He saved you. It’s not quite as dramatic as saving you from brigands or sexual harrassers or the mob. But in a way, it’s also more dramatic, because dishes are the worst, and he did them, knowing how you’d feel if there weren’t any clean bowls. Now you can have your diabetes-in-a-bowl, and it’s all because he loves you enough to look, notice, and care about your stupid problem.

That’s fucking ROMANCE.

(This story may or may not be based on a thing I heard once about someone I met once. I don’t know. Probably there’s no truth to it. None of my pajamas have holes in them.)

Plus, I’ve noticed that when I read fanfic—sorry, in case you didn’t know, I read a lot of fanfic, because it’s awesome—and the biggest difference I’ve noticed? Beyond the fact that only 12% of writers (this statistic could be 67% accurate) have mastered the past imperfect while writing in present tense, I mean. There’s a lot of established relationship fiction in fandom. Like, in romance novels, established relationship stories take up about, say, 0.00003% (this statistic could be 79% accurate) of the total output. But in fanfic, it’s probably about 25% of the total output. (That statistic is also some percentage of accurate, but I’m not sure how much, because I’m bored of coming up with fake numbers.) So there’s clearly a market for the kind of shit that can go wrong or can put pressure on existing relationships. There’s good stuff in all that Jell-o, kids.

…is what this blog post is about.

All of this to say I want to read novels that have established relationships in them, thank you. So if you have any recs, I’d love to hear them.