Love Can Look Like Anything, Even Marriage

Comedian and writer Josh Gondelman on choosing a "structurally vanilla" life.

Photography by Len Steckler

Like many people my age, I inherited a fairly limited cultural script for what romantic love entails. Boy meets girl. Boy and girl forsake all other sexual entanglements. Maybe they have a couple of kids? Yada yada yada…happily ever after. It’s a sweet story, but over time I learned that it’s not the only one. Sometimes boy meets boy, for example. Sometimes a girl meets several boys. Sometimes a person who uses gender neutral pronouns meets another person who uses gender neutral pronouns, and it feels right and natural immediately even if neither of their grandparents are quite sure what words to use to describe their relationship.

Obviously, physical and emotional love have taken many shapes since the first two people rubbed up against one another for warmth in a cave. But we’ve developed an increasingly mainstream understanding of the various pathways towards romantic fulfillment. It’s wonderful to watch the people in my life figure out what works for them. I know solo-poly relationship anarchists who practice numerous satisfying nonhierarchical romantic attachments. I know at least one person who has kids with one partner and also has another partner who’s deeply intertwined with their family life. I have several friends and acquaintances who were happy enough with their decisions to get divorced that they wrote books about the topic. A few people close to me barely date at all and others use the word “play” as a suffix when describing physical acts that wouldn’t even occur to me could make anyone horny. I am happy for all of them when they are happy.

I believe, truly, that the world is often a cold and lonely place, and if you find the kind of love that nourishes your body and/or soul with another consenting adult or group of adults, that’s a gift worth holding onto. Maybe to you that means a demisexual romantic relationship. Maybe it means being avowedly single and having sex with strangers in bar bathrooms. Maybe it means being in a long term relationship and also having sex with strangers in bar bathrooms while your partner is either busy somewhere else or getting busy along with you. The heart wants what it wants, and the same goes for the other body parts. And that’s beautiful. My life, however, is structurally vanilla. Love can look like anything, even marriage.

I have no stake in the concept of “traditional marriage,” which of course is between one woman (who spends four hours every morning making bread from scratch to to give her children and then spends the next eight hours editing footage of that project into a TikTok) and one man (who thinks the female orgasm is a myth invented by Sabrina Carpenter and who bites through a yard stick instead of saying “I’m feeling sad”). And you get the feeling if he caught her watching Heated Rivalry he would chop her up with an axe. It’s a relationship patterned on an understanding of the Bible that was misquoted to them by a guy with tombstone-sized veneers whose most frequent prayer is for God to cut America’s top marginal tax rate.

That kind of relationship seems worse than being alone. I guess it bears a cursory resemblance to my own situation: Two people in total, shared closet space, I’m allowed to look like shit if I want. I’m also physically stronger than my wife, and while I try not to subscribe to any rigid gender roles, someone in our apartment has to be stronger than my wife is or else half of our jars and windows would never get opened.

But it’s not a political statement. We’re not trying to propagate anything. Personally, I just think it’s nice to share a bed and a couch and a dog (and, fuck it, a tax return) with a brilliant and beautiful woman whom I love and admire. We don’t have children, which seems to go against some pseudo-biblical definitions of matrimony. I only really feel bad about that because it denies my parents the joy of grandchildren, a responsibility I have chosen to pass along to my sister without telling her.

I love going to parties with my wife and making up “authentic” Italian pronunciations for non-Italian foods in the kitchen. I love to run my fingertip along the outside of her ear. I love to learn about what she likes to listen to and read and watch so I can know her better. I love to know who she hates and to hate them as well. I love that she is good at making plans, and I am good at staying calm when plans get all fucked up on account of weather or mechanical failure. I love that our relationship strives for 50/50 equality, not like a check split down the middle, but like one of those little birds who hangs out on top of a rhinoceros.

I love to wake up and love my wife every day, and I love knowing that she is making the same choice. Because it’s always a choice. That’s what makes it real. If she’s not free to go, it’s not love; it’s detention. And I say that knowing that my wife suddenly taking off would be the worst thing that could happen in my life aside from just my penis getting run over by a tractor.

Which is to say, I do bristle a bit when people talk about how monogamy is so unnatural. Well, so are pants. Pants don’t occur in nature either, and no one makes a big deal about my choice to wear them. And people aren’t wrong to point out that marriage itself is historically a patriarchal system for combining estates and subjugating women. But those same people might have a dining room table made out of reclaimed driftwood and I don’t scream THROW IT BACK IN THE OCEAN when I see it. Things can become different things with time and intention.

But honestly, I am not defending the institution of marriage against people who have found it oppressive in the past, or consider the idea of it stifling to their future. Insomuch as I feel defensive at all it’s on account of how unpleasant the people who are ardent about defending the “traditional” marriage make it sound. The enemy of stability isn’t progress; it’s regression.

I love my wife. And I’m thrilled she can have her own bank account and kept her last name. And I’m also happy to open the jars.