My husband and I met on a Sierra Singles hike in Marin County 41 years ago today, after which we went with the entire group to Red Boy Pizza in Fairfax. Unlike the Ethiopian restaurant where Jonathan proposed and the Bed and Breakfast where we married, Red Boy is still going strong, just like us. It’s where we celebrate every June 2, always ordering a pepperoni and green pepper pizza and inflicting our history on the bored teenager taking our order.
We are not as fresh and ebullient as we were when we met, with the wear and tear long-term marriages acquire, the sometimes alarming aspects of being 70, and the outside world pressing hard on us all right now. So it was a special gift to listen today to Ezra Klein’s conversation with the writer Kathryn Schulz about how to hold radically different feelings at once.
The podcast springs from Schulz’s memoir, Lost & Found: Reflections on Grief, Gratitude, and Happiness, about the intense grief of losing her father while simultaneously falling in love with her partner. They’ve been together 10 years now, and have two kids–long past the bliss of love’s initial rush, well into the middle. The advanced middle is where Jonathan and I now live, and Shulz really captures the deeper appreciation and commitment that comes from living within those intertwining contradictions of life and love:
Most of what we read and hear and watch of love stories is either the beginning or the ending. . . . When you are happily together with someone, what actually matters to you is the middle. And actually what you want to have go on and on and on is the middle. But nobody writes about the middle. There’s very little about the day-to-day happiness and texture of a happy life, which isn’t just happy. . . . A lot of this book is about the endless overlap and contradiction and friction in different emotions. And a lot of happiness is infused with annoyance or frustration or bad days or whatever it may be, but still somehow, fundamentally feels for us that the deep and essential name you would give to it is happiness.
Happiness is a state of profound appreciation for what you have in that exact moment.
At this exact moment, I have had 41 years with a man who sometimes drives me crazy and whom I deeply love and appreciate. I’m sure he feels the same way. And tonight we’ll both savor those radically different feelings along with our pepperoni and green pepper pizza.
