Medium Doesn’t Want Our Love Story
Postcard from the Shelf that is Marriage
I love Medium, but sometimes I think it doesn’t love me back.
I opened my e-mail yesterday morning to find a message from Medium Daily Digest announcing that Medium would be featuring stories on love in four different categories during the month of February. Interested, I opened it, thinking I would look over the categories and see if anything would come to me that fit the guidelines. I went through them one by one:
1.Swiping Out: Dating — the good, the bad, the cringe-worthy.
Hm. I really rarely think about my dating experiences anymore — in fact I try not to. Suffice to say they were too humiliating even for me to share (and you all know I’m not above selling my dignity for likes). And I really doubt they were what Medium had in mind anyway.
2. Alt love: Notes on nontraditional relationships
Well, we’re just regular. I guess we don’t fit in here either.
3. Pillow Talk: Stories about sex, and other elephants in the (bed)room
I … don’t write about our sex life. Thuh end.
4. Bad Romance: on heartbreak, unhappy ending, and moving on
I guess I could dredge up my journals from eight years ago and refresh my memory about the one break-up I went through, but again, that’s not really what I want to be writing about.
Four strikes, and I’m out. There is apparently no place on Medium for non-explicit stories about happily married couples stumbling through life and love together. Chastened, I put my tail between my legs and returned to the dusty shelf from whence I came.
I guess it should not surprise me that Medium doesn’t really want my stories about how we sit around in our PJs eating ice cream and watching This Old House, or my play-by-play commentary on our steamy Costco dates. Nobody wants to hear about how our love survived the skylight falling off of our new house in the middle of an ice storm*. No one, in short, wants to hear about our tired, predictable “happily ever after”. But you guys … it’s all I’ve got.
I’ve got no torrid love affairs or soap opera dramas to offer you. Just this brick-by-brick, day by day story of two humans choosing to say “I love you” each morning and each night, even when life doesn’t feel like Gone With the Wind. Just this tale of two friends who became lovers, then became even better friends. Just the miracle of going to bed each night still liking each other. Just the wonder of trust, vulnerability, and the never-ending depths of intimacy. Just this feeling of having everything needed for happiness hidden away behind our own front door. And do you know what? I secretly think it’s extraordinary.
It makes me sad to think of all the stories we’re not going to get because Medium has smilingly, politely told us fuddy duddy married people that we’re not invited to the class Valentine’s Day party.
I’d like to hear more from people like Roy Schlegel and D Mitchell and Patrick Faller and Jack Herlocker and Jack Preston King and Gail Boenning and Michelle Hozey and Randomly Me and Leslie Loftis and dozens of others I’m forgetting or haven’t discovered yet. Their love stories matter, too.
Sigh. Medium, sometimes I wish I could quit ya. But you know I won’t.
*By popular demand, I wrote the skylight story. Check it out here:
Thanks for reading! Click the link to follow my new publication, I Digress
