After 10 years, a marriage deserves an honest and unflinching appraisal

You frustrate the hell out of me because you don’t seem to know that after 5pm only children wear shorts with short-sleeved tops.

Without doubt, I love you. Not like I did. Not with the desperate need to suck you dry of stories, humour, experience like at the beginning. Now I love you in a way that veers between vague disinterest in the predictability of it all and occasional fury because you matter so much.

But sometimes I hate you too. Is that usual in a 10-year-old marriage? I can’t remember from first time around.

I hate that while you’d step in front of a bus to save me from harm, some days, somehow, you are the bus. Refusing to do the one thing twice a week I ask for – it’s not scary, not expensive, and it’s not a weird sex thing – then getting shitty when I remind you. And thus an innocuous issue turns into a festival of hot shrieking (me) and icy coldness (you).

Your drinking. Christ. That deserves its own card. You know what that did. To me. To us. How I sat beside you, smiling at parties, shrinking in private. There were nights I wanted to grab my passport and run but couldn’t remember the code to the briefcase safe.

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Time and again I’ve calculated the maths of sacrifice in long-term love. How much of yourself can you surrender to save someone else? How much of them can you sacrifice to save yourself? What do we need to give, take, lose? And would I know if it was time to bail before I forgot how?

And in the end, I didn’t need to do anything. You did. And here we are, a decade after stepping out into the sunlight from the Fitzroy Town Hall to Steve Winwood’s When You See a Chance. Together.

Ten years. The tin anniversary. For resilience, the ability to be shaped and reshaped without breaking, conduct warmth and weather storm. To polish up beautifully if tarnished.

Let’s keep putting more dings on this thing. It’s solid enough.

Love, Kate

Kate Halfpenny is the founder of Bad Mother Media.

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