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I first spotted my husband Richard (or Dick, or Dickie) on the night bus, on another night of shuttling across London on public transport for a party. It is incredible how most couples imbue their first meeting with a certain majesty, a beguiling magic, as if the stars aligned and their guardian angel was on a roll. But it was just another night in a long list of nights, and Richard, I’m afraid to say, was just another guy. It’s odd to think of a time when my husband was just some guy, just tallish (nearly every guy that kissed me before needed the orthopedic assistance of a wedged Croc) and funny-ish (I remember laughing, I think), and certainly not, at that time, a vessel for my personal sense of satisfaction and a mirror for my shortcomings, a constant test for my patience and compassion. It’s quite a transformation, quite a leap, but I guess that’s the way relationships roll out: you morph from polite stranger to salacious mate to domestic companion, while maintaining some kind of emotional equilibrium.
But in Dalston, on the top deck of the 243, I could not have predicted a family future with this drunk chap, I did not foresee a Royal wedding balcony kiss, followed by a lifetime of Call Me by Your Name summers and Brokeback Mountain winters. There was no premonition, no psychic flash-forward, no foretelling palmistry when we touched. I was not enlightened, I was not called to God like a nun, Cupid’s arrow didn’t roll my eyes to a heart shape like a Vegas slot machine. I was not looking for love. Being a bachelor and cruising other bachelors has a certain panned out quality, in that you meet men in person but never really get close. You never have to commit. There’s a personal safety in keeping a safe distance, a way of never giving your full self to anyone, of never getting hurt. In retrospect, I can see I was at my most lonely, but I honestly had no idea. I was ostriched to myself, ear-deep in my own sand. Richard may have been manifested by guardian angels, divined by a James Blunt song, but I was too busy searching out good times to notice. I did not take to Richard like a duck to water, yet here we are, a decade later, married and sharing a domestic pond, and emotional farmyard.
I remember my 20s as a series of unrequited lovers, the ones that got away, that slipped through my clumsy, selfish, needy fingers. I now think of all the men I chased round town—dressed brilliantly (sort of like a male Sugababe, original lineup) so they’d notice me ignoring them—as dickheads, though there’s no concrete evidence of that. Richard is the one that didn’t get away—a keeper, a sticker, a boy scout badge in going the distance—but I cannot tell you how and why it worked out. Somewhere between casual sex and authentic boyfriending something clicked, something twigged, I can’t for the life of me remember what. I never felt the dawning “light of my life, fire of my loins” obsession. It was gentle and each progressive step into coupledom lacked the emotional turmoil I’d become so accustomed to. I wasn’t worried about my heart getting stamped on, which I appreciate is novel in itself. I wonder what he saw in me, the young Raven full of shit? Bravado, maybe? In 2010, nobody wanted no scrubs, and yet I somehow was one, living hand to mouth and night to night in incredibly small and cheap clothes. I’m not sure how datable I read to the casual observer. When I met Richard, I was a month out of living on my mate’s sofa (waiting each night for them to finally go to bed so I could settle down on the cushions). My attitude was very fuck it. Fuck it, I won’t sleep. Fuck it, I’ll have a Jägerbomb for breakfast. Fuck it, I’ll fly to New York next week. I was happily, almost proudly restless, but my ‘rip it all up’ mentality wasn’t sustainable. The loose threads of my late 20s snagged on this man, the two bachelors were mutually caught. We are now mutual captives, which sounds like prison and it isn’t not. I am his cellmate. I am his bitch. The chances of me baking a file into a cake for him are small but not impossible.
As more of my friends have babies, they seem to be hypnotically drawn to the times they were “still fun.” We don’t have kids yet, but mine and Richard’s “remember when…”s are honestly so lively, it’d be cruel to keep you out of the loop. Remember when we hunkered in our mate’s attic room and you ignored your oyster allergy and passed out on the floor after vomiting in the guest loo next to the platinum discs? Remember when the rat ran at us and I screamed so loudly it did a jig towards us rather than running away? Remember when you actually met a guardian angel at a bus stop and asked if you could come over so you weren’t alone and I said yes but I fell asleep and I couldn’t be roused to answer the door? Remember us both crying in South Africa when we both got the runs because we both thought fuck it and drank tap water? (Was that my last fuck it? Oh God.) When we first lived together, I remember getting locked out and Googling how to break into our own house with a bent credit card (which is depressingly easy, people. Double lock your door for fuck’s sake). I remember getting locked out of our next flat too, and not having a robber’s YouTube to help and just having a massive tantrum and being accused of turning into my mother.
Not to blow too much smoke up his arse, but Richard is dependable and patient, supporting my bouts of hardcore typing, long periods isolated and writing, my unrelenting procrastination. I blame my mood swings and character defects on Mercury in retrograde, and Richard nods along, knowing I’m just hungry. He turns the other cheek while I’m checking in my eyebags at the airport. He coaches me through the following morning in the hotel room when I’m over-accessorizing to patchily cover my morbid jet lag. He supports my failed digital detoxes, as I try to avoid my jealousy of people on the other side of the equator in better clothes than me. He’s silent when my pescatarianism stutters and I eat fried chicken.
My husband is very measured, which is never a bad thing. He can always see both sides of a situation or argument or tweet, and on lazy days we can chalk that up to being a middle child, a peacemaker. This means I get an annoyingly balanced view when I’m “on one.” It’s a healthy and needed perspective, but it interrupts my flow when I’m about to lose my shit.
Yes, I sometimes feel tolerated rather than adored, but I think when the dust settles on the early-courtship love bombing, you shouldn’t expect choirs of angels every other day. By far the worst thing about a long-lasting partnership is that all the stupid and unkind things you said in the past sit within that person, sometimes buried deep and nowhere near the surface, and sometimes just behind their eyes. What really hurts is knowing that I would do anything to stop this man getting hurt, and yet I seem to be one of his main agitators, the reason for his turbulence. Nit-picking, scab-picking, getting drunk and being my worst self. He’s seen it all. The good and the bad, a sort of potted history of marital disharmony, a series of much less pleasant ‘remember when’s. I want to say he’s forgiving, that moving swiftly on from discord is the only way a marriage can work, but maybe he’s cataloged all of these misdemeanors for our divorce papers? I would love the drama of getting served on Christmas Day, I just would.
Unlike serial dating, marriage is up close and personal and therefore has its own up close personality. When you’re married long-term, you can lose great swathes of time to petty stuff (washing up seems to be our biggest cause of strife, as is the volume of recycling I create on a daily basis) but the petty stuff is part of marriage’s richness. Not to sound like Trump’s base in MAGA hats bemoaning the media, but the media is affecting how we all do emotional business. Online, we Pac-Man overly-emotive content, slowly being conditioned to respond to the melodramatic. Despite enjoying the locked horns of two snarky drag queens, it’s a certain calmness, and a lack of theatrics, that makes a marriage. I find that the flat bubbles between the effervescence of champagne soirées are where the living is really done. Richard and I live a relatively drama-free life, retreating from the chaos of the outside world into our stable for two, our personal world of interiors, a joint but healthy agoraphobia. As a teen, I assumed lack of conversation was a sign of relationship decay, a gesture of drifting apart, but I realize that quietness is a sign of the work, the comfort, the closeness. I thought in my 20s that I’d rather die than be predictable, but predictability is the epicenter of long-term love. The easy dinners and repeat breakfasts (we’re huge on waffles atm). The ever-thine sex that floods your body with endorphins, rather than performative acrobatic birthday shagging. Yes, sometimes we’re dressed to the nines like aristocrats in a period drama, sometimes we’re talking about threesomes, but twos-ing a two-kilogram tin of candy in our pajamas on Christmas Eve, perhaps retiring to the kitchen for prance music, is just as rewarding.
Richard didn’t arrive like this, as if overnighted from Amazon. He’s changed. There’s not so much two Richards, as the fresh one I bought off the shelf and the one I have at home now (good condition, slightly used). They are both the same guy, but ten years (40 seasons, 3650 times round the sun) is bound to ripen you. Richard has matured, and he’s on a decent trajectory to being my Mrs Robinson, hotter and older than when first unboxed. The little minx I met on the bus is more of a twunk, and he’s grown into the head of gray hair that looked so out of place at 22.
During a rough patch a few years back, communication dwindled and I did feel us drifting apart. It was incredibly scary and though flash mobs are super passé, I momentarily toyed with hiring a troupe of divorce lawyers with briefcases to serve him papers at work (on Christmas Day, no less). I’m not sure what happened, but like driving in the snow, we suddenly hit invisible ice, swerving across the highway. I want to say it’s all cleared up now, and for the most part we’re back on track. But no matter how happy you are, coasting can mean less vigilance, so sometimes the car skids and you have to take a moment to correct the course. During this particular skid, I complained to a friend that Richard had diluted me. I was so proud of my youthful individuality and my potent 20-something strain of self-influenza. I thought I had been somehow whittled by the union rather than fortified. The friend suggested that I needed watering down at this point, that I was erratic and flighty, that I was what the French would call a lot, that maybe a little less of that was not a negative. Water, I realized, isn’t the enemy: it makes concrete stronger. Richard hadn’t been diluting me, he’d been hydrating me.
This sounds so naff to my jaded, cynical ears I want to delete it immediately, but it’s absolutely true. What I hadn’t realized was how much better I had become in our 3650 joint trips round the sun, the positive weathering effect of my time with this man. He somehow saved me from myself, a realisation that makes me want to cringe inside out, but is entirely accurate. I joke that Richard’s my best branding work, but I am also his. I’ve always been as chaotic as I am driven, but Richard became a reason to build upwards rather than constantly spreading out. The rootless Raven of 2010 was fun, my God he was fun, but the weathered (good condition, slightly used) Raven gets to be at home with Richard on a Saturday night with a spotted dick at the back of the fridge waiting to be reheated. Couples change over time, individually, and in turn as a unit. I am not 2010 Raven, he is not the same Dick I spotted. Yet here we are, it still works. We’re in the car together, jointly vigilant for ice patches. Like people, a marriage is ever-changing, you just have to stay in the car and try to keep up.
From the book Raven Smith’s Men by Raven Smith, in paperback on July 18. Copyright C 2022 by Raven Smith. Reprinted by permission of Fourth Estate, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.