My Husband Will Leave Me
My marriage is an emotional project — one with an endpoint
My husband will leave me. That’s not fatalism, it’s fact. It’s how our marriage is designed. If all goes according to our plan, I will get pregnant, I will have a baby, and he will leave.
I got married on February 22, 2019. It’s not entirely unlike other marriage stories: We met a decade ago, the summer after college, during the Shakespeare festival. I had planned to move to Chicago with a friend, but her internship fell through, leaving me looking for a place to live and people to know. One of my friends said, “You know, Chris is moving to Chicago.” We’d not yet met, officially. I walked over at a party with my Solo cup of jungle juice and we chatted briefly, and then I swear I blinked and we were just living together, with the myriad friends and lovers and squatters that come with a post-college hovel-like existence. I think of them as the lean years. I blinked again. Here we are. Sharing a home again. Married. But not quite married.
In the years since our last cohabitation, I’d forgotten things about being with this man all the time. He goes long stretches without saying anything, the sound of his breathing filling the space. His humor is razor-edged. As a comedian, I’m more likely to make a mental note of that’s funny than actually laugh at a social…
