When you got married, did you have a basic outline of what marriage was supposed to look like?
I did. And for a long time, that outline felt like a kind of safety net.
But eventually, a safety net can become a cage.
This is one of the ideas I loved most when I got to talk with writer Ramona Ausubel, author of The Last Animal, No One Is Here Except All of Us, and her newest book: Unstuck: 101 Doorways Leading From the Blank Page to the Last Page.
Marriage is messy: give it room
Ramona and I talked about the primordial sludge that was the beginning of everything and how unexpected things grow from that mess.
Marriage needs that kind of room. To grow. To evolve.
What if the goal isn’t to get marriage RIGHT, but rather to stay engaged with what your marriage is becoming? To keep discovering who you are becoming and who your partner is becoming.
To notice when the old agreement no longer fits and get curious about what might fit now?
Ramona asks a question in her newest book: Where is the energy? What is alive here now?
That question can change everything.
Instead of: you were supposed to…
Try:
- What is exciting to each of us now?
- What’s most intriguing to me now?
- How can we make room for what’s true for both of us?
After decades of marriage, questions like these led me to see that every struggle, every change, every surprise, every ordinary Tuesday morning became part of our shared story.
Has your marriage become something you couldn’t possibly have outlined in the beginning? Maybe that’s the point.
Your happily ever after isn’t a destination. It’s your willingness to keep discovering the relationship you’re actually in.
Subscribe to my Newsletter:
Connect with Ramona Ausubel
Ramona Ausubel grew up in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Her novel, The Last Animal, received a Science + Literature Prize from the National Book Foundation and was a National Bestseller and a Barnes & Noble monthly pick. Her newest book, Unstuck: 101 Doorways Leading From the Blank Page to the Last Page is a companion for writers at all stages of the process (Tin House Zando). Ausubel is the winner of the PEN Center USA Literary Award for Fiction and the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award, she has also been a finalist for the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award, California and Colorado Book Awards and long-listed for the Story Prize, Frank O’Connor International Story Award and the International Impac Dublin Literary Award and New York Times Notable Book selections. She holds an MFA from the University of California, Irvine where she won the Glenn Schaeffer Award in Fiction.
Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Tin House, The New York Times, NPR’s Selected Shorts, One Story, Electric Literature, Ploughshares, The Oxford American, The Best American Fantasy and online in The Paris Review.
Ramona has taught at Tin House, The Bread Loaf Environmental Writers Conference, The Community of Writers, Writing by Writers, the Low-Residency MFA programs at the Institute of American Indian Arts and Bennington. She is a professor at Colorado State University.
Want more like this?
Listen to Ramona Ausubel’s interview on the Emerging Form Podcast. If you enjoy that, Christie Aschwanden and Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer also interviewed me on the same show.
Want to stop arguing and start connecting with your spouse? This FREE e-course will offer you habits to improve your marriage communication so you can smile more and fight less. Sign up to improve marriage communication.
