Mating: Elizabeth Well

Banishing the Flannel Nightgown What happened when I invited Esther Perel into bed with my husband.

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ON A RECENT SUNDAY, our 23rd anniversary, I asked my husband to marry me again. This was not romantic. This was triage, a dose up the nose of marital Narcan. The night before, Dan had smacked closed his laptop, on which we were watching that tender, electric meet-cute scene in season two of The Bear. "Wait," he said. "Do you think we're going to be sitting on this couch watching Netflix until we die? Like, for the next 35 years?"

I said "yes."

In 2000, when we got married, we had two rules: No cheating and no dying. Back then, nobody talked about ethical nonmonogamy, just as nobody talked about gluten. On your wedding day, you just put on your fancy clothes, took (took?) your lover as your spouse, and walked away betrothed.  The plan from there was ...no plan, really. Go to a hotel once in a while? Try not to destroy each other? Good luck!

The no-plan plan works well enough at first. Probably because when you are newly married, you're not really married anyway. You've promised to fuse your lives, but you haven't done it yet, so everything is floaty and roomy and easily forgiven.

Then we had a kid and another kid, a dog and another dog, two cats, a mortgage, miscarriages, foot surgery, melanoma, tax bills, black mold. Marriage working "well enough" began to seem like an idiotically low bar, almost a form of self-harm for a compact we'd (1) staked our sexual-economic-procreative lives on and (2) committed to forever.

So I bought a stack of books, looking for a relationship guru, hoping to find someone to tell me not just how to survive marriage but love it here and thrive. Let me save you a lot of time: Don't do this. There's little that's uplifting in these texts. The general view seems to be if you work very, very, very hard-if you make yourself less unruly; if you sand down enough of your weird human edges-you can fix yourself/your spouse/your relationship and make lifelong pair-bonding tolerable.