On 20 Years of Being Married

On April 24, 2025, my spouse and I commemorate 20 years of being married to each other.

This seems to be something of a remarkable milestone in this day and age, and certainly among our age cohort. For us, it is both unremarkable (because we intended for it to last from the start), and wondrous (because we have somehow managed it).

Of course, 20 years is not the entirety of it, because there was time that led up to the date of marriage. For us, that time is about a year and a half (though there’s a specific date within that time that we mark as the beginning of our romantic relationship). But that time is also kind of remarkable, and I haven’t fully told that part of the story before.

We first became acquainted in autumn 2003, in the shitposting forum of the Seattle gothic message board (and that is a collection of words that will really only make sense to a subset of people who were in particular times and places). He dropped into it with no difficulty at all and quickly caught my attention with both how readily he fell into the flow of it, and how consistently funny he was. This ended up being valuable; we had a good idea of each other’s humor (a thing that is absolutely crucial for a long-term relationship) and where we drew our lines on acceptable behavior even before we began a relationship.

Worth noting that at this stage, we were both starting over. He had recently ended a six-year marriage that hadn’t been a good idea to begin with, and he moved cross-country in August 2003, from Florida to the Salish Sea region; he was in the Air Force and the required PCS [permanent change of station] offered him an opportunity to start fresh. He chose the greater Seattle area deliberately, partly because of the climate and geography, partly because of the liveliness of the goth scene, and partly to get a new start far away from Florida. And upon joining the Seagoth scene, he quickly learned that being the New Thing made him very attractive, which became relevant later.

I was in the process of ending an eight-year relationship (seven years cohabiting) that had caused me a lot of damage (and which I would not fully understand the depth of for several more years). In September 2003 I told my then-partner that I no longer wanted to be involved with him; untangling financial issues and living arrangements took a couple of months, but the social life I had shared with this person had already separated entirely.

The in-person meeting between me and my future spouse was, absolutely true, at a Halloween party (hi, we’re goths). It was the first major social event I attended on my own since ending my previous relationship, and it took immense will for me to overcome the massive anxiety that going out as a newly single person caused for me. He attended on short notice, after a full 14-hour day at work; he came with a fellow Florida transplant that he was kinda-sorta seeing (because their shared Florida background had created a point of connection).

And even though this was our in-person introduction, in the end it was solely that: We were introduced to each other, shared our message board handles, engaged in small talk for a couple of minutes…and then didn’t speak again that night. Not a particularly auspicious or fated intro at all.

At this point of my life, my primary social activity was going to the weekly goth-focused night at a members-only goth/industrial/alternative nightclub. A good friend was the primary DJ for this night, the members-only status meant fewer creeps than the average nightlife scene, and it was on Tuesdays, so it was quieter than the weekends, which was beneficial to my anxiety. It gave me a chance to dress up, do some dancing, socialize at a low key, and simply be away from the stressors of my daily life for a few hours each week.

My new acquaintance was regularly attending ALL the goth/industrial nights in town (in part because this hadn’t been available to him in his prior circumstances, and in part because, well, his newness made him an object of interest), and he eventually realized that I was a regular at this particular club and night. So he started joining me to chat for a while. We learned more about each other through these chats, since it was generally just the two of us.

It didn’t occur to me that he might be…interested, y’know? Partly because I’ve always been extremely bad at gauging such things, partly because in the wake of my own recent breakup I had absolutely no interest or desire for such things, and indeed was looking forward to a future as a happily single cat lady. It was just enjoyable to chat with him and I thought of nothing beyond that. And he regularly circulated around the club talking to others, as he is quite a social butterfly. So he was just someone I enjoyed seeing at the club and I didn’t think of anything beyond that. This remained the case for the next few months.

Somehow, for reasons that are lost to time now, there was a challenge over who was best at trivia (this may have arisen from him learning that I had once been a contestant on Jeopardy!—my priors were solid), and it was eventually decided that there would be a Trivial Pursuit game at the club on Christmas Eve Eve (that is not a typo). Someone brought a box with the game and we built teams, with me on one team and him on the other. And in the end, the team he was on won, to his immense satisfaction. (In reality, both teams were very close in total correct answers, but once my team had filled up all our slots, we had the damnedest time getting to the center for the final question. It was less about ability than about how the die fell.) But the more notable thing about that night, for me, was that every time I looked up from the board/cards, he was looking at me, very intently. And it began to occur to me that maybe there was Interest.

But I tried to put it aside because I didn’t want to ruin our enjoyable friendship. And we continued our friendly conversations at the club over the next few weeks. And then somewhere in there, he learned he would be deploying to Afghanistan, for six months, in the first part of February. That became a marker in conversations.

The anniversary of the goth-focused night was the first week in February 2004, and my friend the DJ wanted to hold a party that night to celebrate it. I volunteered to help, and once the theme (a celebration of the dead of winter—look, it was a GOTH NIGHT) was decided, I went all in: I designed the promotional flyer, organized people to help with decorating, provided most of the decorations (including making over a hundred paper snowflakes), and did my own relentless promotion of it. On February 3, 2004 (running into February 4), we threw our little nightclub party. And it was a smashing success: There was a new record for attendance for that night, people loved the theme, and there was an incredible amount of laughter and joy and community. So many people thanked and complimented me for all my work in making the event happen, and I was glowing and joyous and hugging everyone because I was so happy.

My newish club friend came to say goodnight to me before leaving, a goodnight that was especially piquant as he knew he was deploying soon. As I was doing with everyone, I gave him a goodnight hug…and he held onto it just a little longer than necessary, and whispered something in my ear that was kind of a joke but also had profound seriousness under it. (I could say that I’d be reluctant to share the specifics of something that intimate, and I am, but also…I was so emotionally overwrought that night that I can’t actually remember the words with reliable accuracy.)

It was absolutely, 100%, for real a moment when time stopped and a thunderbolt hit. The air between us became pure electricity and absolutely everything else ceased to exist as we stood there in a half-embrace, with his whispered words hanging between us. And then for a second I thought he was going to try to kiss me, and I panicked, and I turned away to prevent that. The final goodnight was a little awkward.

It was a very late night for me, as once the club closed we had to take down all the decorations and clean up, so I didn’t have much space or energy to think about the odd, awkward thing that had occurred. The next morning, in the light of day, I wasn’t totally sure it had happened or that I was interpreting it correctly, and I decided to just set it aside and get on with things.

And then a couple of days later, he posted that he was having great difficulty finding someone to foster his dog while he was deployed and was worried he might have to surrender her to a shelter. I wasn’t in a position to foster the dog myself, but I didn’t want him to lose her and was confident I could help find someone to do it. So we began emailing about the dog and what kind of foster situation she needed, necessary details for solving this problem.

And somewhere in those conversations, I decided to go ahead and mention the weird thing that had happened between us at that club night, sure that he would have no idea what I was talking about…and instead he confirmed that he’d felt it too.

He was less than two weeks from the deployment date. And I didn’t know what to do with what had happened.

In the end he was fortunate that a friend had the capacity to take his dog in. And that ended the specific reason that we’d been emailing. But…we didn’t stop emailing.

Ove the next few days there was another night at the club (on a Saturday, when I didn’t usually go) in addition to the usual Tuesday, and calling in “sick” to work to hang out in downtown Seattle, and a hug on a streetcorner that lasted through three light cycles, and a kiss in a mall parking lot, and my cat (who had absolutely hated my ex from the start) refusing to get off his lap, and a dinner that I dressed up for. And more. We squeezed the first three months or so of a relationship into about a week, and it was heady and overwhelming and unreal.

But we couldn’t stop time and eventually he was up against the deployment date. We said a final in-person goodbye, promised to stay in touch to the extent possible (he didn’t yet know what kind of communications access he would have where he was going), and made no other promises except for him promising to return in one piece.

The process of deployment took several days (this is just how it works, apparently) and there were some phone calls as his unit hopscotched across the U.S. But there were also Livejournal posts from other people, and an odd uproar on the message board that his name got dragged into. Remember the part where I said that he was the attractive New Thing? Well, he’d availed himself of what came of that…and it appeared he hadn’t been entirely forthright with everyone involved. And that was a little concerning.

On one of the calls, I asked him about this, and he insisted that it was just a misunderstanding and explained it all. I still felt weird but I accepted it. I didn’t care much about whether he’d been seeing anyone else (we hadn’t made any agreements or set expectations of exclusivity—there wasn’t really time for that to happen), just that everyone affected be informed and clear about all of it.

And then a little later, on the verge of getting on the plane to leave the country (and be out of contact for at least a few days), he called me back and admitted that he had not quite been truthful in the last call, and that he had indeed not been entirely forthright with everyone. And then he got on a plane to another country.

He has acknowledged many times since then that he was, in his words, “a scoundrel.” He did not know how to handle all the changes in his life, along with a looming deployment, and he did not make good decisions. And in the times he was able to call me (and at least one other person) over the next several days, he had those poor decisions reinforced by the anger he was subjected to. (Again, I cared less about who was involved than I did about honesty and informed consent, which he did not handle well.) And there was a point at which I said I was done with any further conversations. It turned out that there wasn’t really opportunity for him to contact me for a while, as the remaining travel to his destination happened without options for calls, and he reached his destination and was introduced to the experience of being in a combat zone. And I used those several days of calm to reorient myself to my own life and get things back to normal.

When he called me again, he’d been through a few nights on patrol, and he asked me to please at least listen. He said that what he’d seen and experienced had changed him, that he understood that he had made mistakes and needed to be better, and that he hoped there would be something for him to think about returning to. And I listened, and decided that I would take him at his word, because there was something in me that just wasn’t ready to let go of who I thought he could be.

And that was the beginning of a relationship conducted largely in time-shifted emails, text chats at odd hours, a single phone call a day (if we were fortunate) that could be a couple hours or five minutes, and a handful of actual postal letters. The time difference was eleven and a half hours so one of us was always starting our day when the other was getting ready for bed. Each of us stayed up way too late on too many occasions. But the time-shifting also gave both of us the time and space to write thoughtfully, with care, and in depth. I gained new appreciation for the value of epistolary relationships (those 18th-19th century folks had something there) and for the way the constraints of separation changed how we related to each other and handled our interactions.

With nothing to do but talk or write, we learned a lot about each other, far more than we had in those conversations at the nightclub. We went into depth on our backgrounds, our families, and the painful relationships we’d both recently left. We discussed politics, values, ethics, and principles; we had differences, but the ability to discuss them in depth and in writing did a lot to find places where we were in accord. We went long on our interests and found we had a lot of them in common.

And eventually it became clear that we had found our way past the uproar and were into something that felt like it would continue to blossom. I told him stories about things going on with Seagoth, at the club, in Seattle; he told me about the violent absurdities of a combat zone and things he witnessed. He called me after members of his squadron were injured by old mines and told me how he couldn’t walk on any unpaved surface anymore. One morning he woke me up with a call and said, “I’m sorry, I broke my promise”—because he’d accidentally broken bones in his foot and wasn’t in one piece. (I forgave him for that.) I learned that he knew how to calm me, even at all that distance, when I spiraled into anxiety about my job, moving to a new apartment, trying to manage multiple priorities at once. He learned that I knew how to hold his fear and damage (because there was new damage simply from him being there) with care and help him find purpose beyond the war he was in the middle of.

I want to be really clear: Without this time of separation, we would not have a relationship. If it had all been in person, if we’d had to deal face to face with the febrile risk of limerence and the impact of his less-than-ideal decisions and the damage we were each carrying, we would absolutely have flamed out, one way or another. Those months of separation, time-shifting, and risk for him forced us to be more deliberate, to treat our conversations with care, to focus on what mattered in the core of each of us. I do not recommend war as a relationship device, not at all, and it was absolutely not enjoyable to have the separation. But for us, it ended up creating the circumstances for us to determine who we each were and what we were seeking. And as we found and shared those things, we became increasingly certain that we had something remarkable, and that we wanted to keep going.

The deployment was more than six and a half months in the end. He returned in the middle of me planning the memorial service for a dear friend who died suddenly and the grief and stress I had around that; it was very strange to be so happy and so full of sadness all at once, but he held up through it and for me. And I helped him navigate the return to a more normal life and the realization that he had PTSD.

And despite concerns we both had about resuming a relationship in physical proximity, it quickly became clear that what we had was wondrous, and that neither of us wanted to stop. Things weren’t perfect, but the skills we’d built over the months apart helped us through the challenging moments. And it started to feel like there was inevitability.

He asked me to marry him on October 12, 2004, six weeks after he returned from deployment and two days before my birthday. It didn’t come as a surprise; if he hadn’t gotten around to it within a few more weeks, I’d have asked him. He proposed on the dance floor at the club where we had first gotten to know each other and where a moment of thunderbolt and electricity told us to pay attention. It was quiet and private, not a big production, and in fact we didn’t tell anyone for a couple of days. (You can read the engagement announcement I wrote here.)

Later that month, we once again attended the Halloween party where we’d first met in person…costumed as Morticia and Gomez Addams, because that is, after all, Goth Couple Goals.

A little over six months later, we officially married.

Our wedding was held on a vintage ferryboat moored on Lake Union in Seattle; the ceremony was on the deck, with the city as backdrop, and then we had a delightful party inside. Our processional music was the theme from The Princess Bride. Our first dance was to Aztec Camera’s version of Cole Porter’s “Do I Love You,” and our final dance of the night was to “Storybook Love” by Mark Knopfler and Willy deVille, from the soundtrack of The Princess Bride. Every moment of it was perfect, even when everything didn’t go completely as planned.

Our wedding was the result of dozens of people in our community pitching in, for everything from our clothes to the décor to the cake to the music, and I am still so grateful to every one of them. Our wedding wasn’t “big” in the way the wedding industry defines that term, but there were a lot of people there, because it was crucial to us to share this milestone, this moment of transition, with the people who had helped us become who we were. I still think of that night with immense joy and gratitude, that this enormous life passage was exactly what I wanted it to be in all the ways that mattered.

Of course, the wedding wasn’t the end of our story—it was the beginning of what we hoped would be our happily ever after. And it wasn’t that we married because That’s What You Do; we married because we knew, in ourselves and through long conversation, that we wanted to make that commitment to each other and to the life we wanted to have together. (And there were practical issues too—he got military benefits from being married that made our life together a little easier.)

So what has it meant to be married for 20 years?

For us, it’s meant knowing there is someone who loves and cares and supports and relies on you. It’s meant having someone to come home to and to help solve problems, someone to provide comfort and laughter and a meal and a cocktail, as needed, and to fill in where needed to support each other’s weak spots.

It’s meant supporting each other through the grief of losses, family members and friends and the pets we’ve brought into our home to be part of our family, and through the stresses of life, from a bad day at work to the COVID pandemic and the nightmare of this country’s democracy falling apart.

It’s meant so much laughter and so much silliness, memes and puns and dad jokes and obscure references that only we will get and ridiculous gifts and things our pets do, and parties where we get to share our home and our laughter with other people we care about. I have told him repeatedly that while I didn’t marry him because he makes me laugh, I would not have married him if he didn’t.

It’s meant adventures of all kinds, starting with that very first (and very, very big) one. Some adventures are small: Let’s go explore this part of our area, or let’s try a restaurant we heard about. Some adventures are huge, like moving cross-country to New Jersey for three years when he became a federal law enforcement officer after leaving the military, and then him quitting that job and us moving back to Seattle with nothing set up on the other side. Some are capers: Sneaking around closed event spaces on the Queen Mary after hours in formalwear and dancing in a hallway to “They Can’t Take That Away From Me,” or the time we crashed an outdoor wedding reception and had a long conversation with the bride’s three-sheets-to-the-wind father. Some are wretched, like our water heater lines forcefully disconnecting and flooding the lower level of our house, or when we both got COVID three years into the pandemic and had to isolate for nearly two weeks; some are sublime, such as watching humpbacks bubble netting in the waters off Juneau, or the two weeks we spent in Scotland last October.

It’s meant introducing each other to new things, and discovering new things together. He introduced me to wine (which I’d thought until then I didn’t like and now love) and cocktails, and the particular quirkiness of south Florida; I introduced him to fandom/media conventions and the fun of cosplay, and the awe-inspiring beauty of the Cascade Mountains. We shared our favorite films and shows with each other. Together we’ve discovered how much we love ice hockey, and film noir, and volunteering as naturalists, and so many beautiful places we’ve been to together.

It’s meant working through the challenges, conflicts, and harm created by our own individual traumas and dysfunctions, and reinforcing the things that brought us together.

It’s meant navigating and understanding different frames of reference, from the differences in our class upbringing to expectations around issues such as money and housework to cultural frames due to age differences. (Oh yeah, he’s 12 years younger than I am. And absolutely true, I had a brief period of doubt when, as a postpunk kid, I realized he wasn’t old enough to remember the Sex Pistols.)

It’s meant figuring out how to work out serious disagreements with care and love and regard for each other, and what to do when we cause each other pain. Our wedding vows were statements of intent and permission, and one of them was, “Will you make each other angry?” “I may.” A number of guests laughed at that, but it was as important as the more traditional statements of love, partnership, and commitment.

It’s meant finding the pop culture references that reflect and explain us; for the sake of length I’ll avoid the full list here (you can see it at the end if you really want), but the first one was Nick and Nora Charles from The Thin Man films: detective stories, lots of cocktails, fabulous clothes, endless wisecracks, and devotion to each other. We still playfully call each other Mr. & Mrs. Charles and our home is The Charles Estate.

And it’s meant supporting each other through a variety of health issues, some of which eventually healed, some of which are chronic, and one of which shares its start with our anniversary date—on our anniversary trip in 2011, I tripped on some stairs and ended up with neuromuscular impingement/damage that caused Bell’s Palsy I didn’t fully recover from, so our anniversary will always be linked with that.

It’s meant a lot of numbers that for me help measure the scope of all we’ve done since we married:

• 5 homes lived in (4 rentals, 1 we own).
• 2 states lived in.
• 2 cross-country moves made.
• 3 dogs and 5 cats (so far).
• 4 cars (3 of which were technically his).
• 4 employers for him, 3 for me.
• 1 business started, which he began after he left his federal job and we returned to Seattle, and which we now own and work in together.
• 4 significant surgeries between us; 3 ER visits for each of us; 1 broken bone for each of us.
• 7 states visited together, plus 1 U.S. territory and 4 countries.
• The equivalent of more than a year living apart due to assorted military and federal training requirements.
• 3 months living in 5 motels after we moved back to Seattle (it took that long to find a home that met our needs & we could afford).
• 2 hurricanes (Katrina, which we flew through *twice*, and Sandy) and 3 tropical storms experienced (one of which was in Seattle!), plus 1 significant earthquake (in NJ, with epicenter in VA, NOT in Seattle).
• 1 viewing of Aurora borealis (in Seattle, in May 2024—but we’ve been to Alaska twice and never seen it there!).
• 3 fashion shows (this is what happens when you’re goth, you end up knowing a lot of clothing designers).
• Countless wine tastings done, cocktails shared, restaurants visited, special meals prepared, day trips undertaken, all of it part of joys that we have in common and that are sweetened by doing them together.

For us, marriage was not “this is just what you do if you love a person”; it was a considered, discussed, deliberate decision, that we made because we were confident the form and depth of our feelings for each other was meant to be long-term, and marriage was the best option for formalizing that. And we were old enough, experienced enough, and self-reflective enough to consider all of these factors and examine them before we made this choice and commitment. (And that is part of the reason that those six and a half months of separation back at the start were so crucial to how we made it to 20 years.)

I hope for everyone who chooses to marriage to take a similar path. Don’t marry just because of limerence or desire; marry because you can’t envision living a life without this person in it and alongside you, for decades to come. The moment I knew this was what I wanted was when I found myself envisioning waking up next to him when I’m 80 years old.

And no, it hasn’t all been easy and joyous every moment; there have been hard times and there will be more in future, and don’t believe anyone who says they never have those moments. But what makes it work is our choice to find our way through those moments and try to improve and repair what’s gone poorly, because our marriage—our commitment to sharing our life together—is so important to us. A marriage is an entity, a living thing that is created by the people in it, and we are the ones responsible for maintaining that entity and making it grow and thrive.

I’m so glad, still, to be with him. We fit so well. We finish each other’s jokes and say the thing the other was thinking, because after all this time, we understand each other so well that we know what the punchline will be. We often anticipate what the other is going to suggest we do. We know what gifts (serious and jokey) that the other will like best. When we discuss business, we’ll work out our ideas and theories on a case in real time, coming up with pieces together and impressing each other with what we find out. (He’s a private investigator and I’m the operations manager—the Effie to his Sam Spade.) And we have maintained the sense of romance, the fairytale love and wisecracking delight and swooning devotion, because those things have never stopped being part of who we are and what our marriage is.

Here’s to 20 years of being married to my adventure co-conspirator, my business partner, my household support, my fellow pet guardian, my mixologist, my comedy relief, my always-there friend, the deepest and most sustained love in my life. Here’s to (hopefully) making it to 50 years, for all the reasons we’ve made it to 20.

Happy anniversary, Mr. Charles.

We Are Hopeless Nerds

So, if you actually got this far, I guess you want to read it: The list of other pop-culture characters that we are, in addition to Nick and Nora Charles. Here ya go.

• Tony Stark and Pepper Potts from the MCU Iron Man. (This started with the very first film, including the Afghanistan sequence, and has remained very relevant; he has cosplayed Tony numerous times.)
• Sterling Archer, with a bit of Krieger (him); bits of Lana Kane, Mallory Archer, and Pam Poovey (me), from the animated series Archer. (There are times when he is being particularly Archer-ish that I have to say in exasperation, “NOT A ROLE MODEL.”)
• Jake Peralta (with a bit of Rosa Diaz) for him, Amy Santiago (with a bit of Kevin Cozner) for me, and differing pieces of Raymond Holt for each of us, from Brooklyn 99.
• Lucifer Morningstar and Dr. Linda Martin from Lucifer. (No, I am not really Chloe—I am DEFINITELY Linda.)
• The best (and a bit of the worst) of Eleanor and the Floridian of Jason (him), and most of Chidi (especially the anxiety and decision paralysis) and the know-it-all-ism of Janet (me) from The Good Place.
• Dewey Duck and Webby Vanderquack from the latest version of DuckTales.
• Beast Boy and Raven from Teen Titans Go! (Someday, if the world is safe enough for us to go to a convention again, we want to cosplay the elderly versions of these two.)
• Bob Belcher (me) and both Gene and Louise Belcher (him) from Bob’s Burgers.
• Combo of Ron Swanson and Andy Dwyer (him), and Leslie Knope and April Ludgate (me) from Parks & Recreation.