Complete with the plaid vest he likes so much and the boots I can’t stop wearing, I walk up to a mirror.

The one in my bathroom, the one I’m peering into, deceives me. Daily. It has bad lighting, and on many occasions I am fooled to think I have a warmer complexion than I actually do or that I’ve gotten all those pesky eyebrow hairs when in fact, I have not because my car mirror tells the truth.
I check my hair, squeezing it at the crown of my head to give it volume that will evade by the time I come back later to take out my contacts. I gaze over my clothes to make sure there isn’t toilet paper hanging out the back of my jeans or apple juice on my shoulder from the kids. I’ve chosen gold, hoop earrings fit for a party I won’t attend and layers of shirts that avoid all resemblance of muffin top. I hope.

For well over a decade I have gone through this ritual. My husband and I have never stopped dating each other. And I don’t know that I could survive marriage or parenting without this night so sacredly carved from our weeks.
We’ve been met with everything from, “I can’t hear this. I don’t know the last time we had a date,” to, “Good for you. That’s so important.”

In a way I thought this one simple act would keep us from drifting, losing each other to life, would ward off anything bad happening. Now I realize it’s what gets us through the rough.

Standing at the sink to take a final glance I start to wonder about the way I have parted my hair on the same side since I was in middle school. I think about how I’ve cut it short, grown it long, and cut it again. The length has changed but the swoop it makes across my forehead, the ever-splitting ends, it’s framing against my cheeks has stayed constant.
It is me, and I begin to worry that he’ll get tired of it. Of me. How can one man love and devote to one woman for eventually more years than he’s done anything else? It stands to reason that when this body starts to wear out, so will he.

But then I turn it around. I remember that his hair still follows the curve of his head, short near his ears blending to long up top, like it has since I met him. His ears hold the same shape, his shoulders still fill out a medium sized shirt. He walks with his feet slightly inward, something I’ve always found charming, and when he speaks an “r” there is the faintest curl.

My gray strands mirror his and it’s in my own reflection that I begin to understand. This is how it works, this lifelong relationship thing. At the deep crevices of the wrinkles we are forming together is a history, a familiarity that cannot be touched. Not another person knows what it felt like the first time he kissed me in the freezing air by the college parking lot. No one else held my hand in the delivery room while we met each of our children for the first time. Those fears, disappointments, victories and sorrows we talk about when we can barely keep consciousness from the exhausting pace of three? That’s ours alone.

“Will you love me when I have turkey-neck?”
“Oh, I’ll love you even more.”

Let the sagging commence.