I Won’t Marry You, But I’ll Move In

by J. Courtney Sullivan

That night, I text messaged my friend Laura: I am smitten. She left a voicemail an hour later that went something like, “You?! Smitten?! Smitten?! You?!” From the tone in her voice, you would have thought I’d said, “I am a rare tree frog.” I also told my mother that I’d just met a man I was going to love. Going to love, mind you. Because, smitten or not, a girl like me draws the line at love at first sight.

It had actually happened. Someone had captured my heart in an instant. But that certainly didn’t mean we were about to get married. I was still me, and so the questions began: what was his take on politics and God and sushi and Sinatra and 401Ks? I kept waiting for him to provide an answer that would rule him out. But that didn’t happen. It wasn’t that we always agreed—far from it—but I never heard a single answer from Colin that I couldn’t learn to live with.

We waded into official boyfriend/ girlfriend territory with the trepidation and clumsiness of two sixth graders. We said “I love you” nervously, then boldly, and later, offhandedly: “Gottarunintoameetingnow. Loveyoubye.”

We met one another’s close friends and families. I plugged a flat iron into his bathroom wall, and half of his socks somehow ended up under my bed. We fought about large issues like religion, and smaller ones, such as the ongoing debate in which I tried to sell him on the wonders of Centrum, and he grumbled back: “I’m not taking your damn vitamins unless you wrap them in bacon first.”

A year has passed and, while in some ways we feel eternally linked, in others, we are still just getting to know one another. I complain about his snoring, the fact that he sleeps too much, the amount of golf he watches every Sunday, his aversion to the outdoors, and his scary passion for late-night poker games and Doritos. He complains mostly about how much I complain. There is also the business of my being moody, messy, bossy, and inexplicably fearful of both making calls for takeout and answering the door once it arrives.