![]() ![]() Months earlier we had come across a book - “The New I Do: Reshaping Marriage for Skeptics, Realists and Rebels” - that recommends short-term marriage contracts. ![]() We spent weeks anxiously enumerating the pros and cons of cohabitation. “I only want to live together if it’ll make our lives better.” ![]() ![]() “I don’t want to do it just because it’s what we’re supposed to do,” he said. More than that, I worried I might lose myself again, to a man and a relationship, overtaken by those old ideas about how love conquers all. I worried that the minutiae of domesticity would change us into petty creatures who bickered over laundry. But when we started talking about living together, I was wary. My dog, Roscoe, yelped with happiness at the sight of him. When I met Mark, he fit into my life so easily it surprised me. I resolved that in my next relationship I would love more moderately, keeping more of me for myself. It was such a joy to find that my time was mine, along with every decision from what to cook to when to go to bed. At 20, I gave myself over to love, and it wasn’t until the relationship ended, when I was 29, that I discovered what it meant to fully inhabit my days and the spaciousness of my own mind. Years earlier I had read Virginia Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own” and thought I understood it, but I hadn’t. I was in love, and love meant making compromises, right? But what if I had loved him too much? And not merely because my ex hadn’t offered it - it had never occurred to me to ask. It wasn’t until I moved out that I began to see that there hadn’t been room for me in my relationship. If I wanted to spend weekends together, I could go skiing with him and his friends. If I wanted to split the grocery bill, he suggested I buy only things we both liked. We were together for almost a decade, and in that time I somehow lost track of my own habits and preferences. I spent my 20s with a man who knew exactly what he wanted and how he wanted to be. In the past, expecting a relationship to work simply because the people involved loved each other had failed me. Being intentional about love seems to suit us well. That experience helped us to think about love not as luck or fate, but as the practice of really bothering to know someone, and allowing that person to know you. Two and a half years ago, I wrote a Modern Love column about how Mark and I had spent our first date trying a psychological experiment that used 36 questions to help two strangers fall in love. After all, this approach brought us together in the first place. It reminds us that love isn’t something that happens to us - it’s something we’re making together. Writing a relationship contract may sound calculating or unromantic, but every relationship is contractual we’re just making the terms more explicit. The contract spells out everything from sex to chores to finances to our expectations for the future. The latest version of “Mark and Mandy’s Relationship Contract,” a four-page, single-spaced document that we sign and date, will last for exactly 12 months, after which we have the option to revise and renew it, as we’ve done twice before. It was time to review the terms of our relationship contract.ĭid we want to make changes? As Mark and I went through each category, we agreed to two minor swaps: my Tuesday dog walk for his Saturday one, and having me clean the kitchen counters and him take over the bathtub. A few months ago my boyfriend and I poured ourselves two beers and opened our laptops. ![]()
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