In 2025, I became fascinated by memoirs about marriage. I read Madeleine L’Engle’s Two Part Invention in a matter of days, and C.S. Lewis’ A Grief Observed has been staring at me from the shelf in our living room since I found it in a warehouse in D.C.
I don’t read them for marriage advice, nor for a bit of romance to round out my day. In fact, none of the three memoirs I’ve gathered into myself over the past year have had much to do with either.
But a friend of mine recently told me he was “fascinated by your fascination” with these books, and since then I’ve been trying to figure out why these stories live in me the way that they do. I think I’ve found my reason in The Year of Magical Thinking, right near the end.
Joan Didion writes, as she lays bare her memories of the year following her husband John’s passing, that “marriage is something different [than falling in love]. Marriage is memory, marriage is time.”
I remember being caught on this. I read it in November, on a long flight home, and I remember putting the book down on my fold-out meal tray, staring past the Bulgarian-American grandma sitting next to me, and gazing out the window at the clouds gathering over the Atlantic.
Marriage is time.
I can think of all kinds of things that “take” time. Learning a new skill takes time; making new friends takes time; decorating a new home takes time. When I started a new job, eight months ago, a new coworker told me to allow myself to settle in for a year—that it would take that much time to really feel like I had wrapped my mind around what we do. And I remember the response I kept in my head: “well, then, I’ll take six months to know exactly what I’m doing. Watch me.”
What does this verbiage do, when we trade “takes” for “is?”
These memoirs are about thirty-, forty-, fifty-year marriages, and each of these authors writes that intimacy, growth, and any relationship at all (not just a marriage) are time. They don’t take time, they just are. To these authors, time has become not a thief, but an old friend.
I am young. I turn twenty-four next week, and my perception of time has always been that I am running out of it. Of course, of course, any day could be my last, but it’s not out of some holy understanding of my mortality that I feel this way. There was once a time that I was sure that I had to finish a PhD before I was twenty-eight. Why twenty-eight? Because that is before twenty-nine, which is before thirty, which is when your life is over.
Of course it’s hard to not want things now when we believe time is a thief who steals.
But since when are our days actually our possessions to steal? If we believe that the life we have was not something that was ours to begin with, then time is an invitation. And life becomes about the gift in front of us today, rather than the end goals that ambition, fame, and fortune would have us desire.
Someday, I want to carry the memories of every day of a fifty-year marriage, if that is a gift I can have. I want to be marked, as Madeleine L’Engle, C.S. Lewis, and Joan Didion were by their spouses, and I think that begins with realizing that whatever is ahead of me is an invitation.
So yes, Joan Didion, marriage is time. Intimacy is time. Friendships are time. Growth is time.
Life is time, and we can choose to accept or refuse it.
