Twenty Years in the Same Boat

Yesterday was our 20th wedding anniversary.

In many ways, I don't remember not being partnered with Fito. On the other hand, the actual celebration and ceremony seem as if they happened five or six years ago. There are so many routines and habits that are part of our daily lives that, at this point, they seem like lifelong structures.

How time plays tricks on us.

I have friends who have been together longer. Some were high school or college sweethearts who, thirty or forty years later, are still together. I'm not sure I would have ever been able to create a sustainable long-term relationship in my twenties or thirties.

In fact, I'm not sure I was ever really looking for one.

For the first thirty-plus years of my adult life, legal marriage wasn't even an option for a gay man. I know marriage was always important to some LGBTQ folks. For me, it just wasn't.

I used to think that was because I wanted my freedom. Now I'm not so sure.

Hindsight — or simply the ability to look at my younger self from a distance — has given me a different perspective. I'm not sure I knew who I was, or who I was becoming. I spent many years trying to define myself by what I thought other people, society or our culture expected of me. I was searching for my identity outside myself, as if something external would eventually tell me who I was.

Add to that my belief that monogamy isn't particularly natural, and it was easy enough to conclude that marriage — or perhaps even a lifelong committed relationship — just wasn't for me.

What I didn't understand then was that those weren't necessarily the same questions.

In my late thirties, I had a partner for about five years. We bought a home together and had a nice life. But I never thought it was forever. I don't think he did either.

Still, that relationship taught me something. Even if it didn't feel sustainable, I was comfortable being in a relationship. I was even pretty good at it — although sometimes the compromises required a lot of negotiation and work.

A few years later, I met someone else and, for the first time, had the sense that perhaps a relationship really could last a lifetime.

Even if it wasn't going to be with him.

And then along came Fito.

I thought ours would be a good transitional romance.

He was just looking to have some fun, and I was dipping my toes back into the water after a year of healing from my previous relationship. Neither of us could have known what the future would hold.

We became dance buddies at the local country-western bar. Dancing was something we were both good at — and especially good at together.

He was seeing multiple people. I certainly wasn't looking for a husband.

But the Universe has its own ways of aligning things sometimes.

After my previous relationship, in which it seemed I was always trying to make sure my other half was "okay," I had made a decision: this time, it was more important that I make sure I was okay.

That meant being brutally honest about what was going on with me — how I was feeling, what I was thinking and what I needed. Including when I needed space. Or when he did.

Fito was the first of us to know this was the right relationship.

It took me months longer.

I wasn't going to say "I love you" to someone unless I was sure. I know that was a trying time for Fito. But he gave me the space to figure it out. He was patient.

And while I brought honesty into our relationship, Fito brought vulnerability.

He would say things — about himself, his feelings, his fears — that I couldn't imagine saying aloud. There were many times I thought, I could never reveal something that personal.

But something interesting happens when one person tells the truth and the other is willing to be vulnerable.

Both are acts of intimacy.

And each invites the other person closer.

So I became more vulnerable. And Fito became more direct. Somewhere in all of that, we began creating a language that belonged to the two of us.

There was communication.

A LOT of communication.

Communication ad nauseam.

But all of that work during those first couple of years made so much of what came afterward easier. We learned how to communicate. How to fight. How to apologize. How to give each other space. How to tease one another without hurting each other.

We learned, I suppose, how to stay.

When we eventually decided to get married, there was one thing Fito specifically didn't want us to promise: forever.

He had made that promise once before and stayed in a relationship longer than he should have because of it.

I agreed.

If our relationship ever became something that no longer worked for one of us, I wouldn't want either of us to stay simply because five or ten or fifty years earlier we had promised we would.

Maybe that's part of why twenty years means so much to me.

Neither of us promised to stay forever.

We just kept choosing to stay.

And it doesn't hurt that he is so handsome and sexy.

We have both changed substantially over these twenty years — in our careers, our families, our health, our outlook and our understanding of ourselves.

Neither of us is the person the other one married.

And yet somehow, we have continued becoming people who still choose each other.

There are also the little things that have become so much a part of our life together that I barely notice them anymore.

Fito makes my coffee every morning. And throughout the morning, he keeps filling my cup. It's one of his love languages.

Even when he's going away for a few days — or a week — he'll set up the coffee pot before he leaves so that on that first morning without him, all I have to do is turn it on.

At first, that kind of care was almost too much for me to receive. I wasn't accustomed to someone doing so much for me simply because it gave him pleasure to do it.

Eventually, I understood that there was nothing I was supposed to do with his generosity except receive it.

My two older sisters have both been married and divorced for quite a while. Whenever Fito's constant care of me comes up, they have a standard response:

"Okay. You won."

I think I did too.

Together, we have crafted a life that sometimes feels magical to me. Not because it has always been easy. It hasn't. But because when I think about the life we have created together, I still find myself amazed that this is where that transitional romance at a country-western bar led us.

And now, as we celebrate twenty years of marriage, we're beginning another adventure together: moving to another country.

Maybe that's appropriate.

Because I've come to think marriage is a little like sharing a boat.

If two people stay in the same boat long enough, sooner or later one of them is going to end up in the water.

The important thing isn't never falling overboard.

It's knowing that the person still in the boat will throw you a line and help you climb back in.

Because eventually, they'll be the one in the water.

And you'll be holding the line.