Two Kinds of Loyal

My parents celebrated their fortieth wedding anniversary in the same house where they had stopped really talking to each other sometime around the mid-nineties.

I do not mean that cruelly. They were not unhappy people, exactly. They were two people who had built a life together with considerable skill and then, somewhere in the middle of it, had run out of things to say to each other and agreed, without ever quite saying so, to proceed anyway.

The Performance of Solidity

Growing up, I thought this was what marriage was. A kind of managed companionship. You loved each other, you raised children, you showed up at family occasions, and somewhere in between you lived parallel lives that occasionally intersected at the dinner table.

My parents did not fight. This impressed me when I was young. It took me longer to understand that they did not fight because they had stopped caring enough to disagree.

There is a version of loyalty that is really just endurance. Staying not because you have found a way to be together but because leaving would require decisions neither of you can face. My parents had that kind of loyalty in abundance.

And they had given it, I realised, to everything. To the neighbourhood, to the church, to their friends, to the idea of themselves as a couple. They were loyal to each other in every way except the one that would have required them to be honest.

What I Decided to Inherit

When I got married — nine years ago now — I made a deliberate decision about which parts of my parents' relationship I was taking with me and which parts I was leaving in the house I grew up in.

I wanted their steadiness. Their commitment to showing up. The way they never questioned whether to be there for each other in the practical ways: the hospital appointments, the difficult phone calls, the small daily maintenance of a shared life.

I did not want their silence. The particular peace that comes from never saying difficult things, which is really just the temporary postponement of their consequences.

My husband and I have had more arguments in nine years than my parents had in forty. We have also, I think, told each other more true things.

The Anniversary Party

At the party — eighty people in a function room, a slideshow, a cake that said 40 in gold numbers — my father gave a speech about my mother that was genuinely moving. He talked about her patience and her kindness and the way she had held their family together.

My mother cried. I cried. Everyone cried.

In the car on the way home, my husband asked if I was okay. I said I was, and then, because I was trying to be the person who says difficult things, I said: I love them so much and I am also so afraid of becoming them.

He held my hand for the rest of the drive. We did not say anything else. Sometimes that is enough.