The Quiet Work of Staying

My aunt and uncle have been married for thirty-one years, and when I asked her once what had kept them together, expecting something about love or compatibility, she said, after thinking about it properly, 'We just decided to stay, most days, even the days we didn't especially want to.' It wasn't a romantic answer. It was, I've come to think, the truest one I've heard on the subject.

We're given a lot of language for falling into things — falling in love, falling into a friendship, the sense that connection is something that happens to you, chemically, almost involuntarily. We're given much less language for the part that comes after, the unglamorous daily decision to remain, made again and again, long after the falling has stopped doing any of the work.

What staying actually looks like

Nobody writes songs about the Tuesday version of staying — choosing, again, to have the annoying conversation instead of the silent resentment; choosing, again, to call the friend even though the friendship has gone quiet and calling first feels slightly undignified; choosing, again, to forgive something small before it hardens into something structural. It's not dramatic. It rarely gets told as a story, because a story needs incident, and staying is mostly the absence of the incident that would have ended things.

I think this is why long friendships and long marriages can look, from the outside, almost boring — no crisis, no rupture, no third act. But that apparent boredom is usually load-bearing. It's the accumulated weight of a hundred small Tuesdays where somebody could have let it drift and chose, instead, not to.

I have one friendship, going on nineteen years now, that has survived two long silences, one real argument I'm still slightly embarrassed about, and a decade of living in different cities. Nothing about it looks remarkable from the outside. From the inside it's one of the sturdiest things I have, built almost entirely out of ordinary decisions to remain.

Staying is not the absence of a story. It is the story, just told in a register nobody thinks to record.

Eighteen letters in, I think this is close to what I actually believe about all of it — the friendships, the faith, the ordinary Tuesdays I keep writing about. Very little of what matters announces itself. Most of it just quietly stays, if you let it, and if you keep choosing, on the unremarkable days, to stay too.