Marriage

Good Company was the kind of novel that made me wonder what took me so long to read it. The characters were real and thoroughly likable, even when you didn’t want to like them.

In Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney’s excellent novel Good Company, Flora Mancini looks for a family photo she wants to frame for her daughter’s senior graduation party, and finds it in an envelope with her husband’s wedding ring--the one he told her was at the bottom of a lake. What does it mean? What will she do? How will this affect the rest of their world?

The story searches through marriage, motherhood, and friendship, and looks at the ways we lose and find ourselves in all three. I enjoyed the book both because it is well-written and because it looks at the complications inherent in being in relationship with others, and treats the challenging and the rewarding sides fairly.

Next week, I will have been married for 19 years to the man who’s still my favorite person in the world. He makes me laugh, and he really still likes me, even after he knows everything about me. (He shakes his head sometimes and asks me what the heck I was thinking, but he still likes me). 

Marriage is weird, I guess. It is a little strange to promise to be with somebody forever and just go on and do it, when most relationships tend to end. But this guy has stayed, and I am so thankful.

I’ve said that this year has been incredibly lonely, and it has been. But without Joe, it might have been just a dark hole. He kept me laughing; he drove on day trips; he navigated grocery pickup; he played endless games of basketball and kickball; he helped me set up my website and talked to me about it, genuinely curious and kind. He made silly voices to delight the kids. He read a joint book with me and talked about it every two weeks on a podcast he helped me make.

Books like Good Company, because of the way they explore the ways spouses hurt each other, remind me of the risks we take in making ourselves vulnerable to marriage, but also of the good in it. The way I feel about marriage has changed over the past nineteen years; it’s shifted and grown right along with us, but I’m still glad to be in it with him. Joe is my partner and best friend, and I’m so happy he’s stuck around.