Love is Winter

Fairytale marriages do not exist. But is a lifelong commitment to show up for each other still possible?

- Selma Carvalho

If I think of marriage, I think of winter, a heavy northern winter, snow-blinded windows, hard frosts, dead leaves, skies so sullen, the grey bleeds into rooftops and trees. This seems contradictory, love is the coming of spring, bringing us its red-rosed promise of newness and hope, but to me it is winter's cold breath, its muffled sounds, its calm silences, its prolonged incarceration, the endurance of living things hidden underground.

This is the image my mind retains, because three months after we tie the knot, my husband and I arrive in Minnesota, in deep winter. Not a soul stirs in the pale light of lamp posts outside sparse and solitary houses buried in snow. Within the barren walls of our unfurnished apartment, within its cold and damp rooms, I discover I really don't know my husband. I am living with a stranger. Our year-long courtship has revealed only an illusion. Now that illusion is unravelling. Here in the small galley kitchen where I learn to cook, in the water-stained bathtub where I bathe, in the living room where I watch American news on the one thing we can afford to buy, a television set, I discover my husband is going to let me down, horribly and repeatedly, that I am going to spend many nights crying, and hating the man sleeping next to me. What is this stifling lifelong contract I have signed up to? Who devised this hobbling institution into which I have committed myself?