To Have And Preserve

CHLOE BENJAMIN FINDS A WAY TO CONTRIBUTE TO HER MODERN MARRIAGE—WITHOUT SACRIFICING HER VALUES.

I MET NATHAN when I was 21. I had just moved to Madison, Wisconsin, for grad school; he was handsome and inquisitive, a PhD student with a background in construction work and a study full of books. Three years after we met, he proposed during a downpour. In 2014, when I was 25, we were married.

I was the first of my friends to get married, but I had no doubts; loath as I am to use clichés, I knew Nathan was the one. Besides, I had always craved depth and security over experimentation and adventure, at least outside the bounds of my fiction. So the notion that Nathan would be my partner for life didn’t scare me. But the word “wife” did. It made me think of outdated expectations and sexist magazine ads from the 1950s.

I grew up in San Francisco in a big, modern family with two sets of parents—one gay, one straight. My dad’s house was the more normative: He was the breadwinner, and my stepmother, Ellen, managed the domestic sphere. My mom and her partner, Molly, took on similarly delineated roles— Molly worked full-time while Mom juggled acting with being the primary caretaker of us kids—but the fact that they were both women upended traditional narratives.

I had various models when it came time to create my own family. Nathan and I agreed that the allocation of responsibilities needed be based not on gender norms but on personal preference and familial circumstances. Early in our marriage, while Nathan worked part-time and reassessed his career, my pay served as our primary income. Meanwhile, he did almost all the cooking; I contributed little more than my great-grandmother’s party mix and tuna pasta, a childhood favorite whose slogan should be “It’s better than it sounds.” Nathan managed our home life, too. He knew when the cat needed a checkup, when the car needed an oil change or new winter tires.