It is 7 a.m. on a Tuesday morning, and I’m sitting on the New York City subway’s 1 train in sunglasses, sweatpants and some platform heels I got on The RealReal. For a moment I time travel back to the college-aged version of myself doing the walk of shame and I hope that is not a thing college-aged girls worry about anymore. But I’m not hungover, or worried over some questionable decisions that began with unadvisedly swiping right.
I’m married, and just leaving my husband’s apartment to get back to my own. I have a cat to feed, clothes to put on before work, and I’m pondering if I can ever find a way of ensuring that there are sneakers where I need them each morning.
I have a few sleeves of Nespresso and a roll of paper towels stashed in my bag from the front closet. I didn’t steal them; technically it’s “our” Nespresso and “our” paper towels, but it always feels a little questionable anyway. I am constantly schlepping things from one apartment to the other. We joke that I have a second job in shipping and receiving. I swapped out my tote for an ugly but durable backpack when my shoulder started to hurt from being my own messenger service.
“Where are you?” my husband, Peter, texts. “Fourteenth St.,” I reply. It’s become a running joke — somehow I am always at 14th St.
I can do the 38-minute commute in my sleep. Transfer from the 1 to the 2 express at 14th St. I know the right car to get on to minimize platform time. I’ve gotten really good at crossword puzzles and every version of Wordle. I know which weekends they are doing construction and I need to reroute to the Q train. I follow the MTA on Twitter.
This is not what I expected marriage to look like. It’s so much better.
Saying “I do” for the first time at age 42 meant having my own life built already. My apartment, and the mortgage it came with, has been my home for over a decade: a studio in a converted schoolhouse in Prospect Heights. Something I was able to pull off in part because I had no kids and the privilege of no student debt. It feels designed for an introverted writer — a cozy sleeping loft that feels like a fort where I write in bed. Morning light streams in from the tall classroom windows. The original “it girl,” Clara Bow, was once a student here, and some days I swear I can feel her energy in the halls.
The apartment was my refuge after a hard breakup. I bought it, I moved, I rebuilt my life. It has history. It’s a part of my family.
And then there’s Cleo. When Peter and I first started dating, I told him about Cleo, my rescue cat from Queens. Without missing a beat he asked how old she was, and in the haze of Moscow mules and first date jitters I missed the subtext. I soon learned that both Peter and his then teenage son are severely allergic to cats. Like the throat-closing-up kind of allergies. She would never be able to be a part of a home with him, and I had no plans to have a life without her — no wedding ring was worth giving her up. She was a smaller, furrier version of my apartment. She was also a part of my family, and she was there first.
After weathering the stress of the pandemic together as a family and still keeping our sense of humor, we decided that we wanted to be together for the rest of our lives. We got engaged. There are lots of personal and intrusive questions that everyone asks when you’re getting married. What are you going to do with your apartment? When are you moving in together? Are you having kids? I had to find new ways to dodge all of these questions without totally alienating everyone in my life. The truth was I just didn’t know. I knew I loved Peter, but I still couldn’t picture the end of the story.
Peter, a widower, was coming into our marriage with a teenage son and an adorable schnoodle. I had a studio apartment and a temperamental cat. How could we make this marriage something that worked for all of us? Following the traditional playbook wasn’t going to make anyone happy. Why did we have to live by old conventions? Why couldn’t we make it up as we went along? Who says what a good marriage should look like?
