Modern Love: A Beginning

I met my husband in college. Along with a number of other girls, some of whom are among my closest friends today, I was assigned to the only all-womens dorm on campus--its single sex status thanks to the demand of its wealthy donor, who clearly was wedded to the Vassar of the past. A few days into freshman year, we were already desperate: Does anybody know any men? Suddenly Nicole remembered a guy from her high school who'd left after sophomore year. She'd heard he was here; maybe we should look him up. We figured he'd have friends at least, and we could hang out in his co-ed dorm instead of our estrogen fortress.

That guy was Ben, and about six years after we graduated together, we got married; this summer we will have been married ten years. When we first started going out, we were essentially children, insomuch as twenty years old is a child these days. I still slept with my baby blanket; Ben bought frozen burritos at Seven Eleven with his dad's credit card. We played computer Yahtzee together. It was not a sophisticated courtship. But we were equals, in every way. I was an English major, he was an economics major. I whipped off my papers last minute, he wrote his in advance. Our backgrounds were different--my extended family lived within ten minutes of each other in Massachusetts, my parents had already been married a quarter of a century, Ben had lived all over the country, his parents' divorce had been protracted and acrimonious--but we were young, we were college students, we were, in many ways, or so it seemed, the same.

Vassar in the early 1990s was a place where political correctness and awareness were twin pillars on which all else was built. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan put the school in the national news by allegedly making a racist remark after a lecture. A female professor did it again when she accused the school of sexism in her lack of promotion. And there was a movement, not as small as one would expect, to change the word "women" to "womyn," so as to avoid the inclusion of the patriarchal root.

When Ben and I graduated and moved together to an apartment in Cambridge, this was the air we had breathed for four years. The apartment had two bedrooms; we each set up our own desks and work areas. We shopped together for groceries and split the cost. I cooked more than he did, as it was second nature to me and I loved it, but he cooked too, sometimes, and I would no more have made his toast for him or poured his cereal than I would have ironed his socks. Actually, I have no idea how or if we did laundry; I have no recollection of doing any at all.

I remember our first salaries. I was an editorial assistant at a major publishing house. I earned $18,800. Ben was a paralegal at a major law firm; he earned $21,000. We thought we were rich. We could go out to dinner, to the movies, even away for the weekend if we wanted to, and pay for it ourselves. Our rent was $600 a month. That first year, Ben--who had a car and is the spender in our relationship to my saver--would occasionally borrow money from me to make up his half if he fell short. He always paid me back.

In the beginning, we both loved our jobs, loved working (the novelty takes a while to wear off), loved carrying our briefcases and wearing our suits, taking the T and meeting up for lunch downtown, between our offices. It did feel, in spite of our very real financial independence, in which we both took pride, like playing grown-up. But it never felt unequal. In every way, we were peers. I would not have been able to imagine this changing. In fact, it was Ben who wanted to get married. The summer before I left for graduate school in New York he asked me, afraid--I wonder now--of things changing too much when I left. I said no: I was going to become a writer, I was moving to New York. We didn't break up--yet. We memorized the bus schedule instead. For a year, almost two, this worked, and then it didn't. We split up.

Six months went by; we missed each other. I finished graduate school but Boston had lost its appeal. I had fallen in love with New York the way I had fallen in love with Ben: not overnight but over time, as its layers revealed themselves to me--so different from what I had known. Another six months--being apart wasn't working. We decided to get married after all.