We were still so new, so young in relationship terms; we had so much left to learn about each other, so much to work out, so much to decide. Yet there by the side of the highway, time seemed for a moment as it really is: the past long gone, the future unreal, the present perfectly sufficient. On the phone, the tow guy had said ninety minutes, give or take. Two hours had passed. The ice in our coffee had melted. The shade had vanished. In the bright midday light, our jeans had turned pleasingly warm and the dandelions looked like children’s drawings of the sun, round and rayed and brilliantly yellow. It seemed possible, and not at all troubling, that we might continue to sit there next to each other forever. Well, C. joked, looking out at the road in front of us with its ongoing lack of tow trucks, maybe it’s true: you can’t go home again.
I laughed out loud. Of course! What had I been thinking, driving westward so full of worry about what C. would make of where I was from? Most of us fit only partially into our past selves, and most of us are only somewhat at home in our former homes. Even if we love them, even if we sometimes long for them, even if we know them down to the last ancient orange spatula in the kitchen utensil drawer, we inevitably outgrow them; the world is so big that anywhere you’re from eventually becomes parochial by comparison. It’s not just that once you leave your hometown behind, you encounter very different people and places from those you first knew. It is that your own past life starts to look different as well. In that sense, the self-consciousness I felt about my childhood home was really (as it so often is) something closer to other-consciousness—an awareness of how a place so familiar to me would look to someone who had never been there before.
But it was foolish, I realized in that moment, to worry about that with C., who knew far more than I did about how it feels to fit incompletely into your own life. Even as a young child, she had had an unusual, serious, famished mind, and—partly because of that, and partly for reasons she could not quite name, even to herself, until much later—she had always stood slightly apart from other people. When she learned early that she liked to read, her mother began bringing hand-me-down books home from the customers on her postal route; her father, who didn’t share her literary bent, supported it the best way he knew how, by building shelves for her in the bedroom she shared with her younger sister. When she discovered that she also liked to think, she cultivated the ability to do so regardless of her surroundings, a habit that meant she sometimes unnerved those around her with her quiet. In school, her unapologetic focus on academics would have earned another kind of kid (me, for starters) a reputation as a nerd. Instead, she had the implacable cool of someone who is always slightly keeping her distance.
At seventeen, she went off to Harvard, on a scholarship that didn’t cover textbooks or trips home or meeting a classmate at a café instead of the cafeteria. She got a job cleaning the dormitory bathrooms and, in her first semester, spent a total of twenty-three dollars. In many ways she was at odds with the culture around her, but in one crucial respect, she was not: for the first time in her life, she found herself in a place where the educational offerings matched her desire to learn. She studied English, ran the literary magazine, made friends with graduate students and professors and the head pastor of Memorial Church. She spent evenings in the libraries, reading and thinking, while her peers assumed she was at cooler parties than they were. After graduation, she went to Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship and used the extra money from the stipend to travel all over Europe and the Middle East. Finally, ten years after she left home, two years before we met, and some uncountable number of cultural light-years from who she had been when she left, she moved back to the Eastern Shore.
By then, she lived, like so many people who venture far from their roots, in two largely non-intersecting worlds. Certain core parts of herself were invisible or inexplicable to most of the people she had grown up with; others were opaque or alien to those she met as an adult. She generally handled that bifurcation with ease, but all of us yearn to be seen in our fullness, and never more so than when we fall in love. We yearn for it so much, in fact, that we fear it—or, rather, we fear that if we are seen in our fullness, we will no longer be loved. That’s what I was worried about in the car on the way to my childhood home: that once C. and I got there, she would see in me the vestiges of my awkward younger self, together with all the banality, insularity, elitism, and entitlement associated, sometimes rightly, with the suburbs. Only later did I learn that she had a mirror image set of fears. Never mind the exceptional résumé, the encyclopedic mind, the fact that she can clarify the finer points of Hegelian philosophy and quote Marianne Moore: C. still worried that, when I saw her against the backdrop of her past, she would seem like just some windblown hayseed who had, as they say in the place where she grew up, gotten above her raising. To this day, in vulnerable moments, she worries that she will somehow reveal herself, to me or to the world, as a rube.
Nothing is more ridiculous to me, for all kinds of reasons: because she is brilliant and cosmopolitan (including in that beautiful root sense of the word: a citizen of the cosmos); because I love her country origins; because, as she knows better than anyone, the assumptions about rural and working-class life on which her fears rest do meager justice to the reality. Yet at the same time nothing is more understandable to me. No matter where you come from, no matter how proud you are of your family, no matter how much or how little you differ from the person you love, it is very difficult, in the face of intense scrutiny, to never for a moment be embarrassed by who you are.
Eventually, inevitably, couples lead largely overlapping lives. Over time, you start to share more and more things: your friends, your families, a home, a morning routine, a favorite restaurant, an annoying neighbor, that winter when the pipes kept freezing, the cat who liked to sleep on top of the refrigerator, the first Christmas, the forty-fifth Seder, that terrible health scare, the time you got a flat tire on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. And yet, even with this steady expansion of common ground, the enduring challenge of every relationship is to love across difference. That remains true no matter how similar you and your beloved might be, or might have become. Love is so often written about analogically—“my luve is like a red, red rose,” etc.—yet the point of the beloved, the whole reason that you are in love with her, is that she is like no one else on earth. That includes you: your beloved is not like you.
No one ever makes their peace with this fact immediately, and no one ever makes it just once. We are called on over and over to remember that the person we love does not always have the same thoughts, feelings, frames of reference, reactions, needs, fears, and desires that we do. But overall, the trajectory of a happy relationship, which begins with cherishing similarity, ends in cherishing difference. I could never declare with authority what I love most about C.; I love too much of her too much. But it is not a false consolation or a convenient exaggeration to say that I am most often moved to gratitude and tenderness and awe by those parts of her that are least like me—because it is in them that I see her most clearly, and because it is thanks to them that my own world has grown so much larger. And I can declare with authority that her ability to love those parts of me that are least like her is the greatest gift anyone, outside of my parents, has ever given me.
As it happens, C. and I found our favorite expression of this peaceful relationship to difference in one of the things we have in common. One night, when I was feeling anxious about some parting of ways between us that I can no longer recall, she reached into her mental bookshelves and came out with a poem that I, too, had loved for years: Robert Frost’s “West-Running Brook,” which takes the form of a conversation between two newlyweds. They are out walking, following the course of a stream that runs west, and one of them points out that this is strange, since all the others in the region flow east, to the sea. Nature requires that this one must eventually end up there, too, but:
It must be the brook
Can trust itself to go by contraries
The way I can with you—and you with me.