08.20.2007 - 3:53 p.m.

Know why else I stopped writing here so much? I got engaged, got married. All those thoughts, which I still have in spades, about what it means to be with someone, or whether I�m doing it right, or whether we�re the right kind of happy, have seemed wrong to put here. With a boyfriend, I�d kiss and tell, so to speak, though I've kept the more racy stuff elsewhere. With a husband, it seems more like it should only be the two of us who talk about such things. If I tell the world we are happy, it seems like I�m bragging; if I say we�re not, it feels like a betrayal. I know of a few people who read this; I do not know them all. Such personal things should be discussed in known confidence.

That�s how I knew he was it, anyway. When it became so obvious to me that we were good that I didn�t even need to write about it to know what I was feeling, didn�t need to spout off to friends in return for advice. When they kept giving it anyway, saying things like �You seem so much more serene than you used to be,� or �Your face just glows when he shows up.� When you find yourself in such a state, and it doesn�t go away after a year or two, then you marry him. Duh.

Still, though, there�s lots more I need to figure out. I�ve filled notebooks, run pens dry, and I still don�t know what I think half the time. Or who I�m supposed to talk to about it, or whether I talk enough. I need more perspective than I have access to.

This weekend we did nothing. It was a beautiful, wondrous sort of nothing, making each other food, talking or playing games or just knowing the other was also in the house, also relaxing as best they knew how. I wish we had time to do that more often. It let me get around to saying some things, important things, that would not have come out over the grind of a normal week.

My mother was telling me about an idea that struck her from some movie or other: That marriage, more than anything else, is an agreement to be a witness to another person�s life, so that at the end of it, both partners can feel like they�ve been heard, like they�ve mattered, like they�ve been part of something greater than they were on their own.

I am witnessing his life. And I asked him, yesterday, whether he felt like I told him enough of what I was thinking.

�Of course you do,� he answered, his face lost in my hair.

I am not certain I agree, though. That I do. I should work on that.

-stonebridge

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