permanent. For me, it was another reason why winter couldn’t end soon enough.
We’d talked in abstract ways about how each of us viewed marriage, and it
worried me sometimes how different those views seemed to be. For me, getting
married had been a given, something I’d grown up expecting to do someday—
the same way having children had always been a given, dating back to the
attention I’d heaped on my baby dolls as a girl. Barack wasn’t opposed to getting
married, but he was in no particular rush. For him, our love meant everything
already. It was foundation enough for a full and happy life together—with or
without rings.
We were both, of course, products of how we’d been raised. Barack had
experienced marriage as ephemeral: His mother had married twice, divorced
twice, and in each instance managed to move on with her life, career, and young
children intact. My parents, meanwhile, had locked in early and for life. For
them, every decision was a joint decision, every endeavor a joint endeavor. In
thirty years, they’d hardly spent a night apart.
What did Barack and I want? We wanted a modern partnership that suited
us both. He saw marriage as the loving alignment of two people who could lead
parallel lives but without forgoing any independent dreams or ambitions. For me,
marriage was more like a full-on merger, a reconfiguring of two lives into one,
with the well-being of a family taking precedence over any one agenda or goal. I
didn’t exactly want a life like my parents had. I didn’t want to live in the same
house forever, work the same job, and never claim any space for myself, but I did
want the year-to-year, decade-to-decade steadiness they had. “I do recognize the
value of individuals having their own interests, ambitions, and dreams,” I wrote
in my journal. “But I don’t believe that the pursuit of one person’s dreams should
come at the expense of the couple.”
We’d work out our feelings, I figured, when Barack came back to Chicago,
when the weather warmed up, when we had the luxury of spending weekends
together again. I just had to wait, though waiting was hard. I craved permanence.
From the living room of my apartment, I could sometimes hear the murmur of
my parents talking on the floor below. I heard my mother laughing as my father
told some sort of story. I heard them shutting off the TV to get ready for bed. I
was twenty-seven years old now, and there were days when all I wanted was to
feel complete. I wanted to grab every last thing I loved and stake it ruthlessly to
the ground. I’d known just enough loss by then to know that there was more
coming.