All Of The Burden With None Of The Benefits
I’ve had a lot of great conversations lately about sex and intimacy and chronic illness. It comes up in passing a lot on the podcast, but we tend not to jump into the details. So here are a few details from my own marriage, which I wrote and shared at Stories We Don’t Tell in September 2018. You can hear the live recording of this story on the SWDT podcast, along with my husband’s own story about the same time period.
Before I decided to get married, I read a lot of books about commitment. I read memoirs from commitmentphobes and I read advice books written by therapists and I invited my future husband to spend a weekend in Montreal with me where I could tell him everything I’d learned about the institution of marriage. And because he is patient and also because he wasn’t really worried about what it would mean to be married, he agreed. We did a lot of surveys. They were about how we would manage household chores and how we would raise any future kids and how we would handle it when our values and politics were at odds.
Because we were 28 and considering a life together, we talked about who would do the laundry and if we would have kids and who would stay home with them if they got sick. We talked about how often we wanted to have sex and what our love languages were and what we would do if I got unexpectedly pregnant. We talked about faith…
