Of all the things this year has brought, the most abundant offering has been time. I half expected (or perhaps half hoped) at the beginning that I had learned to deal with empty days in my years of seasonal work— growing accustomed to tranquil Januaries and Februaries. But there is a difference between an interim period in which you know when and how the end will come and one in which the end is nebulous. Will it ever be really safe to go out into the world again? Will I go back to work? When should I start looking for something new? For what should I look? We are all on new and tremulous ground. 

There have certainly been waves of flat-out denial for me during this year—weeks of hiding in computer games and TV shows and projects. Piling significance on the less significant things in order to shield myself from everything roiling away beneath the surface. But, undoubtedly with the aid of all my walking and reading (and my amazing Harry Potter group!), I have made space in these strange months for a good deal of self-reflection as well. I have always been the reflective type, and I have done a lot of deep and conscious reflecting in the last four years especially, which is partly why (I think) I’ve been so surprised by what has come up this year. We humans are never fully “resolved,” are we? 

In a way (in many ways) this time has been a great gift—bringing up all sorts of touch points and triggers (things I knew were there and thought I had addressed) in a new way at a crucial moment. Dylan proposed in May. We are getting married! I have no doubts. I’ve lived enough life to know that this is what I want, and that I couldn’t ask for a better fit. We’ve gone into every stage of our relationship thoughtfully and carefully. We’ve talked a good deal about marriage leading up to this point. He is my best friend and my teammate. But even though we have lived together for more than two years now—sharing expenses, space, and life—there are some big things that marriage will still change, and this pandemic year has brought some of those things to the forefront of my mind. 

I suppose my biggest hurdle is that I have never seen a good, solid marriage up close. My grandparents were married for sixty-two years and had what I assume was a strong, loving, and stable relationship. From the stories I remember them telling and the things they left behind, it seems they led a grand adventure of a life together. But they were not a demonstrative pair (perhaps their own temperaments or merely a holdover from a more guarded era?) and, unfortunately, once it finally occurred to me to be interested enough in my family to ask the more important sorts of questions, it was too late. My godparents similarly have been solidly coupled for the majority of their lives, running a business, a farm, and a life together, but I have only known them together in peaceful moments. I have had close friends over the years whose parents seemed to have good relationships, but I only ever saw them in glimpses as well—just enough to be a little bit jealous, but not enough to get a true understanding of how things worked on a daily basis. The marriages closest to me in my formative years were therefore either inscrutable or in various stages of collapse. I spent a long time clinging to all sorts of drama, thinking that if a person cared enough to fight rather than choosing to live in silence, that must be where love resided. Dylan has helped disabuse me of that notion.  He walked right into the drama-free space I had begun to consciously carve out for myself as I entered my thirties, and ever since, he has been helping me to carve that space deeper and wider and to shore up the edges of it. Our life together is wonderfully calm and supportive, and I’ve found that ample stores of energy, no longer being tied up in loops of negativity and fear, have now been made available for all sorts of other adventures and endeavors. I feel like we are building our foundation on solid ground. 

But as firm as I hope and believe our foundation is, what about the rest of the house? What do we really want our life to look like going forward? We’ve begun by learning to lead our two single lives in harmony, which is certainly a good beginning. But the crux of this pandemic year (the greatest hurdle, but also the greatest gift?) has been that we are now faced with an almost clean slate. What do we make of it? I, who am terrified to be financially dependent on someone else, find myself unemployed from an industry that does not promise to bounce back any time soon. I’ll be rebuilding no matter what. And Dylan has been feeling ready to make a shift in his career as well. Great! So, what does this new beginning look like for us? Do we stay here and hope to build back up in somewhat familiar surroundings, or do we take the opportunity to try something completely different? Neither of us is really ambitious in the “climbing the career ladder” sort of way—something I know we’ve both struggled with to various degrees on our own—and this pandemic year has really brought home to us how much we value home, creative time, travel, and a slower-paced lifestyle. How do we set ourselves up to make sure we don’t loose sight of those newly-clarified priorities when the world finally begins to open back up again?

I have made many decisions in my life from a place of panic or fear. Fear of failing and fear of trying something new when I have something comfortable, even if the comfortable is not the best fit. I have met with several crucial turning points as well, though none exactly like this one. While I’ve never been entirely alone at these moments in the past, this time I am part of a team. Decisions on where to live and work and what kind of work to do will affect both of us. We are not roommates who may end up parting ways or who will end up reevaluating the living arrangement if one of us can’t quite come up with our equal share of the expenses for a month or several. Marriage is a different sort of partnership than that. We are looking ahead to the long-term future now—a future that is much more firmly entwined than anything I have ever experienced.  With that in mind, putting panic and pride aside, what is the best next step considering the plans we’ve made together? Trust is a good one, I think. Trust that we really do have each other’s backs no matter what might be going on on any particular day. Trust that we’ve both meant what we’ve said, and that together we’ll be able to navigate any hurdles that come our way. Heck, if we can survive almost a year in quarantine together, hopefully we can navigate life back in the really world, right? I think we have a solid chance.

I will, undoubtedly, continue to struggle with financial fear—am I really pulling my weight? How long can I struggle with this paycheck-less career transition phase before I’ve used up my partner’s good will? —things I know are my own with which to make peace. I know there will be other points of pride and differing experience we’ll have to work through over the course of our marriage. And I know we’ll encounter other turning points in our life together—more job and career transitions, more moves, more of one of us needing to lean on the other a little or a lot more than usual. And reflecting on all of that, I’m glad we’ve had this weird pandemic year before we officially tie the knot. All things considered, it’s not such a bad time to be getting married!