The laws of mechanics apply to marriage

The angle of repose is defined on dictionary.com as “the maximum slope, measured in degrees from the horizontal, at which loose solid material will remain in place without sliding.”

Reflections on 2020

As boundaries expand, our worlds contract.
The last theatre production we attended in the Before Times was Sam Shepard’s True West. We are lucky to live within walking distance of Seattle’s main arts district, aka Uptown or Lower Queen Anne, home of the Seattle Opera, SIFF, the Pacific Northwest Ballet, and many of the city’s theatres. On any given night before March 2020, you might have seen Will and me walking past the Big Howe ballfields, down Fourth Avenue for five minutes until reaching the stairs on the west side of Kerry Park, the top of the Space Needle a glowing orb landed on its leggy perch, with Mount Rainier stately in the background (if it’s not cloudy). Once past the scenic view, Queen Anne’s slopes gently even out as you walk down ridged sidewalks over Elliott Bay, past an eclectic mix of Craftsman and modern architecture, traditional wood and brick mixed with steel and glass. 
True West is a story about two brothers who fight, a representation of the conflict that exists in every American family. My family has seen a lot of it and sadly, estrangement is not strange to me. I haven’t spoken to my son once in the past year and have a close relationship with only one of my three older sisters. It’s as if our shared broken past is its own kind of coronavirus, requiring that we distance from each other in order to not be infected with the trauma once endured and now to be avoided at all cost. In 2020 we all pushed people away for self-preservation. Absence – sometimes, I guess – makes the heart grow stronger. 
Will and I do that walk still, only now there is no theatre to go to. I have never been much of a homebody until this year, preferring always to be out in the city, the city, our collective living room. But I am learning to be home, to live within tighter boundaries. Boundaries that cut people and their viruses out. 
“I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in.” 
― Virginia Woolf

Looking back on 2019, I can see how a relationship – in particular a marriage – might have an angle of repose. The loose solid material of relationships being trust, communication, kindness, forgiveness, integrity, respect. And how, if those loose building blocks, sturdy and strong at the onset of a relationship, stacked high with enough weight and friction to prevent sliding, become worn down and small over time from the normal, everyday stresses put on a marriage, let alone the abnormal, once in a lifetime ones, the angle decreases and the marriage falls flat. As Will often says to me, “marriage is not for sissies”. No. No, it is not. We are still inhabiting ours, sometimes more happily than others, but with special focus recently on the material particles of our own unique marital slope. 

I think a realistic vow is ‘I will fuck up on a regular basis, and, on occasion, I’ll admit it’.

Esther Perel

See also: How Do You Make New Friends As An Adult? Be Like the Golden Retriever. Plus links to my 2016 and 2018 reflections.