Architecture of a Marriage

If a marriage were a house, ours would be a rambling, old, slightly crooked structure built over many years. We didn’t follow a blueprint. We built it room by room, wing by wing, sometimes with grand designs, other times with hasty repairs when life’s weather tore the shingles off.

The grand, soaring room of Passion was the first we built. It was all vaulted ceilings and stained glass, a place where we lived for years, drunk on the light. We thought it was the entire house. We didn’t know it was just the foyer.

Then, we built the Kitchen of Shared Labor. This is where we learned to nourish each other, not just with food, but with acts of service. It’s where we stood, side-by-side, scrubbing pots after a failed dinner party, where we learned the rhythm of who washes and who dries. It’s a warm, steamy room, often messy, but always humming with the purpose of sustenance.

The Nursery was a frantic, sleep-deprived addition. We built it with trembling hands, its walls papered with worry and lullabies. The air in that room was thick with a new, terrifying kind of love. We bumped into each other in the dark, passing a crying baby back and forth like a sacred, fragile torch. That room taught us that we were a team, even when we were too exhausted to speak.

Some rooms were built in times of crisis. The Sickroom, with its hushed tones and shared vigils, where we learned that love isn’t always about fixing, but about sitting quietly in the dark, holding a hand. The Room of Grief, added when we lost his father, a cold, stark space where we huddled together for warmth, learning that some sorrows are too vast for one person to hold alone.

And then there are the rooms we built for ourselves. His Study, filled with the scent of old books and the quiet click of keyboard keys, a sanctuary for his need for solitude. My Studio, a sunlit space with an easel and splatters of paint on the floor, where I go to remember who I was before I was a “we.” We learned that a strong house needs separate, locked doors, not to keep each other out, but to ensure we have a self to bring back to the shared spaces.

Of course, there are closets stuffed with resentments. A small, dark one where I keep the memory of the birthday he forgot. A dusty shelf in his mind where he stores the hurtful thing I said during an argument ten years ago. We try not to open them, but sometimes the door swings ajar, and the old, musty smell fills the hall. The work of marriage is often about airing out those closets, or at least agreeing to keep the doors firmly shut.

The plumbing groans sometimes. The communication pipes, to be exact. A misunderstanding can cause a leak, a buildup of unspoken words can lead to a clog. We’ve had floods. We’ve had times when we had to call in professional help—a counselor—to snake the lines and get the water of affection flowing freely again.

The foundation, though—the foundation is sound. It’s made of a thousand small moments of choosing each other. It’s the memory of him holding my hair back when I was sick. It’s the way I still laugh at his stupidest jokes. It’s the silent agreement that this house, for all its creaks and drafts, is our home. We have painted its walls with our fights and its windows with our forgiveness.

People from the outside might see the overgrown garden or the peeling paint on the shutters. They don’t see the intricate, beautiful, lived-in architecture within. They don’t feel the solidity of the floorboards underfoot, worn smooth by the daily dance of two lives intertwined.

We don’t live in the grand foyer of Passion anymore. We’ve moved deeper into the house. Our favorite room now is the Library of Shared Silence. It’s a room with two comfortable chairs, where we can sit for hours, him reading, me sketching, not saying a word, yet feeling more connected than in any heated declaration of our youth.

This house is not a showpiece. It is a living, breathing thing, constantly under renovation. Some days, we’re putting up new shelves for new dreams. Other days, we’re just patching a leak in the roof. But it’s ours. We built it. And every day, we choose to live in it, to fill its rooms with the messy, beautiful, ordinary noise of our life together. It is the greatest thing we will ever build.