## The Question of the Marriage
I should address this directly, because I think anyone reading a story like this is wondering, and I don’t want to be evasive about it.
I don’t know if the marriage is fine. I don’t know if the work we’re doing will be enough, or whether what happened — not just the trip but the decade of accumulated pattern that the trip revealed — can be fully reckoned with. I know that I love Nathan. I know that he loves me. I know that love is not, by itself, a sufficient condition for a good marriage.
What I believe, at this moment, is that Nathan is trying in a way that is different from his previous tries. The difference is that he is trying to understand the problem rather than to resolve it quickly. His previous mode was to apologize sincerely and then continue the behavior, which is a form of trying that doesn’t actually help. What he is doing now is slower and less comfortable and more honest.
I am also trying. I am trying to be more explicit in real time rather than absorbing and then exploding. I am trying to tell him when something is bothering me before it has compounded into something heavier. This is harder than it sounds, because absorbing is a habit I built over many years, and habits don’t dissolve just because you’ve named them.
The counseling is helping. Priya is helping. The memory of that week — the farmers’ market, the trail, the long afternoon with a book, the Vietnamese food at my own kitchen table — is helping in a different way, reminding me that I exist as a person independent of my role in this household, which should be obvious but which I had somehow allowed to become unclear.