Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace With Marriage

By October 2006, Felipe and I had already been traveling for six months and morale was flagging. We had left the Laotian holy city of Luang Prabang weeks earlier, having exhausted all its treasures, and had taken to the road again in the same random motion as before, killing time, passing hours and days.

We had hoped to be home by now, but there was still no movement whatsoever on our immigration case. Felipe’s future was stalled in a bottomless sort of limbo that we had somewhat irrationally come to believe might never end. Separated from his business inventory in America, unable to make any plans or earn any money, utterly dependent on the United States Department of Homeland Security (and me) to decide his fate, he was feeling more powerless by the day. This was not an ideal situation. For if there is one thing I have learned over the years about men, it is that feelings of powerlessness do not usually bring forth their finest qualities. Felipe was no exception. He was becoming increasingly jittery, quick-​tempered, irritable, and ominously tense.

Even under the best of circumstances, Felipe has the bad habit of sometimes snapping impatiently at people he feels are either behaving poorly or interfering somehow with the quality of his life. This happens rarely, but I wish it would happen never. All over the world and in many languages I have watched this man bark his disapproval at bungling flight attendants, inept taxi drivers, unscrupulous merchants, apathetic waiters, and the parents of ill-​behaved children. Arm waving and raised voices are sometimes involved in such scenes.

I deplore this.

Having been raised by a self-​composed midwestern mother and a taciturn Yankee father, I am genetically and culturally incapable of handling Felipe’s more classically Brazilian version of conflict resolution. People in my family wouldn’t even speak this way to a mugger. Moreover, whenever I see Felipe fly off the handle in public, it messes around with my cherished personal narrative about what a gentle and tender-​hearted guy I have chosen to love, and that, frankly, pisses me off more than anything else. If there is one indignity I shall never endure gracefully, it is watching people mess around with my most cherished personal narratives about them.

What’s worse, my yearning to have everyone in the world be best friends, combined with my near-​pathological empathy for underdogs, often leaves me defending Felipe’s victims, which only adds to the tension. While he expresses zero tolerance toward idiots and incompetents, I think that behind every incompetent idiot there lies a really sweet person having a bad day. All this can lead to contention between Felipe and me, and on the rare occasions that we argue, it is generally over such questions. He has never let me forget how I once forced him to walk back into a shoe store in Indonesia and apologize to a young salesclerk whom I felt he had treated rudely. And he did it! He marched back into that little rip-​off of a shoe store and offered the bewildered girl a courtly expression of regret for having lost his temper. But he did so only because he found my defense of the salesclerk charming. I did not, however, find anything about the situation charming. I never find it charming.

Blessedly, Felipe’s outbursts are fairly uncommon in our normal life. But what we were living through right then was not normal life. Six months of rough travel and small hotel rooms and frustrating bureaucratic holdups were taking their toll on his emotional state, to the point that I felt Felipe’s impatience rising to almost epidemic levels (though readers should probably take the word “epidemic” with a large grain of salt, given that my hypersensitivity to even the faintest human conflict makes me a thin-​skinned judge of emotional friction). Still, the evidence seemed incontrovertible: He was not merely raising his voice at complete strangers these days, he was also snapping out at me. This really was unprecedented, because somehow Felipe had always seemed immune to me in the past-as though I, alone among everyone else on earth, was somehow preternaturally incapable of irritating him. Now, though, that sweet period of immunity seemed to have ended. He was annoyed at me for taking too long on the rented computers, annoyed at me for dragging us to see “the fucking elephants” at an expensive tourist trap, annoyed at me for planting us on yet another miserable overnight train, annoyed when I either spent money or saved money, annoyed that I always wanted to walk everywhere, annoyed that I kept trying to find healthy food when it was clearly impossible…

Felipe seemed increasingly stuck in that awful breed of mood where any glitch or hassle whatsoever becomes almost physically intolerable. This was unfortunate, because traveling-particularly the cheap and dirty traveling we were undertaking-is pretty much nothing but one glitch and hassle after another, interrupted by the occasional stunning sunset, which my companion had evidently lost the ability to enjoy. As I hauled the ever more reluctant Felipe from one Southeast Asian activity to the next (exotic markets! temples! waterfalls!), he became only less relaxed, less accommodating, less comforted. I, in turn, reacted to his befouled humor the way I’d been taught by my mother to react to a man’s befouled humor: by becoming only more cheerful, more upbeat, more obnoxiously chipper. I buried my own frustrations and homesickness under a guise of indefatigable optimism, barreling forth with an aggressively sunny demeanor, as though I could somehow force Felipe into a state of lighthearted gladness by the sheer power of my magnetic, tireless merrymaking.

Astonishingly, this did not work.

Over time, I became irritated with him-exasperated by his impatience, grumpiness, lethargy. Moreover, I became irritated with myself, annoyed by the false notes in my voice as I tried to engage Felipe in whatever curiosity I’d dragged him to this time. (Oh, darling-look! They’re selling rats for food! Oh, darling-look! The mommy elephant is washing her baby! Oh, darling-look! This hotel room has such an interesting view of the slaughterhouse!) Meanwhile, Felipe would head off to the bathroom and come back fuming about the filth and stink of the place-whatever place we happened to be in-while simultaneously complaining that the air pollution was making his throat sting and the traffic was giving him a headache.

His tension made me tense, which caused me to become physically careless, which caused me to stub my toe in Hanoi, to cut my finger on his razor in Chiang Mai as I dug through the toiletries bag for toothpaste, and-one really awful night-to put insect repellent in my eyes instead of eyedrops because I hadn’t looked carefully at the travel-​sized bottle. What I remember most about that last incident is howling in pain and self-​recrimination while Felipe held my head over the sink and rinsed out my eyes with one lukewarm bottle of water after another, fixing me up as best he could while raging in a steady, furious tirade about the stupidity of the fact that we were even in this godforsaken country to begin with. It is a testament to how bad those weeks had become that I do not now specifically remember which godforsaken country we were in.

All this tension reached a peak (or, rather, hit a nadir) the day I hauled Felipe on a twelve-​hour bus ride through the center of Laos to visit what I insisted would be a fascinating archaeological site in the middle of the country. We shared the bus with no small amount of livestock, and our seats were harder than Quaker meetinghouse pews. There was no air-​conditioning, of course, and the windows were sealed shut. I can’t rightly say that the heat was unbearable, because obviously we bore it, but I will say that it was very, very hot. I couldn’t rouse Felipe’s interest in the upcoming archaeological site, but I also couldn’t get a rise out of him about the conditions of our bus ride-and that really was notable, given that this was probably the most perilous public transportation experience I’d ever endured. The driver operated his ancient vehicle with a manic aggression, several times almost dumping us over some fairly impressive cliffs. But Felipe did not react to any of this, nor did he react to any of our near collisions with oncoming traffic. He just went numb. He shut his eyes in weariness and stopped speaking altogether. He seemed resigned to death. Or perhaps he was merely longing for it.

After several more such life-​threatening hours, our bus suddenly rounded a curve and came upon the site of a big road accident: Two buses not at all unlike ours had just crashed head-​on. There seemed to be no injuries, but the vehicles were a twisted-​up pile of smoking metal. As we slowed to pass, I grabbed Felipe’s arm and said, “Look, darling! There’s been a collision between two buses!”

Without even opening his eyes, he replied sarcastically, “How on earth could that possibly have happened?”

Suddenly I was shot through with anger.

“What is it that you want?” I demanded.

He didn’t answer, which only made me angrier, so I pushed on: “I’m just trying to make the best out of this situation, okay? If you have any better ideas or any better plans-please, by all means, offer some. And I really hope you can think of something that will make you happy, because I honestly can’t take your misery anymore, I really can’t.”

Now his eyes flew open. “I just want a coffeepot,” he said with unexpected passion.

“What do you mean, a coffeepot?”

“I just want to be home, living with you in one place safely together. I want routine. I want a coffeepot of our own. I want to be able to wake up at the same time every morning and make breakfast for us, in our own house, with our own coffeepot.”

In another setting, maybe this confession would have drawn sympathy from me, and perhaps it should have drawn sympathy from me then, but it just made me angrier: Why was he dwelling on the impossible?

“We can’t have any of that stuff right now,” I said.

“My God, Liz-you think I don’t know that?”

“You think I don’t want those things, too?” I shot back.

His voice rose: “You think I’m not aware that you want those things? You think I haven’t seen you reading real estate ads online? You think I can’t tell you’re homesick? Do you have any idea how it makes me feel that I cannot provide you with a home right now, that you’re stuck in all these beat-​up hotel rooms on the other side of the world because of me? Do you have any idea how humiliating that is for me, that I can’t afford to offer you a better life right now? Do you have any idea how fucking helpless that makes me feel? As a man?”

I forget sometimes.

I have to say this, because I think it’s such an important point when it comes to marriage: I do forget sometimes how much it means for certain men-for certain people-to be able to provide their loved ones with material comforts and protection at all times. I forget how dangerously reduced some men can feel when that basic ability has been stripped from them. I forget how much that matters to men, what it represents.

I can still remember the anguished look on an old friend’s face when he told me, several years ago, that his wife was leaving him. Her complaint, apparently, was that she was overwhelmingly lonely, that he “wasn’t there for her”-but he could not begin to understand what this meant. He felt he had been breaking his back to take care of his wife for years. “Okay,” he admitted, “so maybe I wasn’t there for her emotionally, but by God, I provided for that woman! I worked two jobs for her! Doesn’t that show that I loved her? She should have known that I would have done anything to keep providing for her and protecting her! If a nuclear holocaust ever struck, I would’ve picked her up and thrown her over my shoulder and carried her across the burning landscape to safety-and she knew that about me! How could she say I wasn’t there for her?”

I could not bring myself to break the bad news to my devastated friend that most days, unfortunately, there is no nuclear holocaust. Most days, unfortunately, the only thing his wife had really needed was a little more attention.

Similarly, the only thing I needed from Felipe at that moment was for him to calm down, to be nicer, to show me and everyone else around us a little more patience, a little more emotional generosity. I didn’t need provision or protection from him. I didn’t need his manly pride; it wasn’t serving for anything here. I just needed him to relax into the situation as it was. Yes, of course, it would have been much nicer to be back home, near my family, living in a real house-but our rootlessness right now didn’t bother me nearly as much as his moodiness.

Trying to defuse the tension, I touched Felipe’s leg and said, “I can see that this situation is really frustrating for you.”

I had learned that trick from a book called Ten Lessons to Transform Your Marriage: America’s Love Lab Experts Share Their Strategies for Strengthening Your Relationship, by John M. Gottman and Julie Schwartz-​Gottman-two (happily married) researchers from the Relationship Research Institute in Seattle who have received a lot of attention lately for their claim that they can predict with 90 percent accuracy whether a couple will still be married in five years merely by studying a fifteen-​minute transcript of typical conversation between the husband and the wife. (For this reason, I imagine that John M. Gottman and Julie Schwartz-​Gottman make terrifying dinner guests.) Whatever the breadth of their powers may be, the Gottmans do offer some practical strategies for resolving marital disputes, trying to save couples from what they call the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: Stonewalling, Defensiveness, Criticism, and Contempt. The trick I had just used-repeating back to Felipe his own frustration in order to indicate that I was listening to him and that I cared-is something the Gottmans call “Turning Toward Your Partner.” It’s supposed to defuse arguments.

It doesn’t always work.

“You don’t know how I feel, Liz!” Felipe snapped. “They arrested me. They handcuffed me and marched me through that entire airport with everyone staring-did you know that? They fingerprinted me. They took away my wallet, they even took the ring you gave me. They took everything. They put me in jail and threw me out of your country. Thirty years of traveling, and I’ve never had a border closed to me before, and now I can’t get into the United States of America-of all bloody places to get kicked out of! In the past I would’ve just said, ‘The hell with it,’ and moved on, but I can’t-because America is where you want to live, and I want to be with you. So I have no choice. I have to put up with all this shit, and I have to turn my entire private life over to these bureaucrats and to your police, and it’s humiliating. And we can’t even get any information about when this is all going to be finished, because we don’t even matter. We’re just numbers on a civil servant’s desk. Meanwhile, my business is dying and I’m going broke. So of course I’m miserable. And now you’re dragging me all over goddamn Southeast Asia on these goddamn buses-“

“All I’m trying to do is keep you happy,” I snapped back at him, pulling away my hand, stung and hurt. If there had been a cord on that bus to pull to signal the driver that a passenger wanted to get off, I swear to God I would have pulled it. I would have jumped off right there, left Felipe on that bus, taken my chances in the jungle by myself.

He inhaled sharply, as though he was going to say something hard but stopped himself. I could almost feel the tendons in his neck tightening, and my frustration escalated, too. Our setting didn’t exactly help, by the way. The bus lurched along, loud and hot and chancy, whacking low-​hanging branches, scattering pigs and chickens and children in the road before us, throwing up a stinking cloud of black exhaust, slamming every vertebra in my neck with each jolt. And there were still seven hours left to go.

We said nothing for a long time. I wanted to cry but held myself together, recognizing that crying might be unhelpful. Still, I was angry at him. Sorry for him, yes, of course-but mostly angry at him. And for what? For bad sportsmanship, maybe? For weakness? For caving in before I did? Yes, our situation was lousy, but it could have been infinitely lousier. At least we were together. At least I could afford to stay with him during this period of exile. There were thousands of couples in our exact situation who would have killed for the right to spend even one evening together during such a long period of enforced separation. At least we had that comfort. And at least we had the education to read the monstrously confusing immigration documents, and at least we had enough money to enlist a good lawyer to help us through the rest of the process. Anyhow, even if worse came to worst and the United States rejected Felipe from its shores forever, at least we had other options. My God, we could always move to Australia, for heaven’s sake. Australia! A wonderful country! A nation of Canada-​like sanity and prosperity! It wasn’t as if we were going to be sent to exile in northern Afghanistan! Who else in our situation had so many advantages?

And why was I always the one who had to think in such upbeat terms anyhow, while Felipe, frankly, had done little over the last few weeks but sulk over circumstances that were largely out of our control? Why could he never bend to adverse situations with a little more grace? And would it have killed him, by the way, to show a little enthusiasm about the upcoming archeological site?

I very nearly said this-every word of it, the whole crapping rant of it-but I refrained. An overflow of emotions like this signifies what John M. Gottman and Julie Schwartz-​Gottman call “flooding”-the point at which you get so tired or frustrated that your mind becomes deluged (and deluded) by anger. A surefire indication that flooding is imminent is when you start using the words “always” or “never” in your argument. The Gottmans call this “Going Universal” (as in: “You always let me down like this!” or “I can never count on you!”). Such language absolutely murders any chance of fair or intelligent discourse. Once you have Flooded, once you have Gone Universal on somebody’s ass, all hell breaks loose. It’s really best not to let that happen. As an old friend of mine once told me, you can measure the happiness of a marriage by the number of scars that each partner carries on their tongues, earned from years of biting back angry words.

So I didn’t speak, and Felipe didn’t speak, and this heated silence went on for a long time until he finally reached for my hand and said, in an exhausted voice, “Let’s be careful right now, okay?”

I slackened, knowing exactly what he meant. This was an old code of ours. It had come up for the first time on a road trip we’d taken once from Tennessee to Arizona early on in our relationship. I’d been teaching writing at the University of Tennessee, and we were living in that strange hotel room in Knoxville, and Felipe had found a gemstone show that he’d wanted to attend in Tucson. So we’d spontaneously driven out there together, trying to make the distance in one long push. It had been a fun trip for the most part. We had sung, and talked, and laughed. But you can only sing and talk and laugh so much, and there came a moment-about thirty hours into the drive-when both of us reached a point of utter exhaustion. We were running out of gas, literally and figuratively. There were no hotels around and we were hungry and weary. I seem to remember a stark difference of opinion between us about when and where we should stop next. We were still speaking in perfectly civil tones, but tension had begun to encircle the car like a light mist.

“Let’s be careful,” Felipe had said then, out of the blue.

“Of what?” I’d asked.

“Let’s just be careful of what we say to each other for the next few hours,” he’d gone on. “These are the times, when people get tired like this, that fights can happen. Let’s just choose our words very carefully until we find a place to rest.”

Nothing had happened yet, but Felipe was floating the idea that there are, perhaps, moments when a couple must practice preemptive conflict resolution, arresting an argument before it can even begin. So this had become a code phrase of ours, a signpost to mind the gap and beware of falling rocks. It was a tool that we pulled out every now and again in particularly tense moments. It had always worked well for us in the past. Then again, in the past we had never gone through anything quite so tense as this indeterminate period of exile in Southeast Asia. On the other hand, maybe the tension of travel only meant that we needed the yellow flag now more than ever.

I always remember a story my friends Julie and Dennis told me about a horrible fight they’d had on a trip to Africa together, early in their marriage. Whatever the original dispute may have been, they can’t even remember to this day, but here’s how it ended up: One afternoon in Nairobi, the two of them became so enraged at each other that they had to walk on opposite sides of the street toward their mutual destination because they could no longer physically tolerate each other’s proximity. After a long while of this ridiculous parallel marching along, with four defensive lanes of Nairobian traffic between them, Dennis finally stopped. He opened his arms and motioned for Julie to cross the street and join him. It seemed to be a gesture of conciliation, so she conceded. She walked over to her husband, softening along the way, fully expecting to receive something like an apology. Instead, once she got within speaking distance, Dennis leaned forward and gently said, “Hey, Jules? Go fuck yourself.”

In response, she stomped off to the airport and immediately tried to sell her husband’s plane ticket back home to a perfect stranger.

They worked it out in the end, happily. Decades later, this makes for an amusing dinner-​party anecdote, but it’s a cautionary tale, too: You kind of don’t want to let things get to that point. So I gave Felipe’s hand a small squeeze and said, “Quando casar passa,” which is a sweet Brazilian expression meaning “When you get married, this will pass.” This is a phrase Felipe’s mother used to say to him as a child whenever he fell down and scraped his knee. It’s a small, silly, maternal murmur of comfort. Felipe and I had been saying this phrase to each other a lot lately. In our case, it was largely true: When we finally got married, a lot of these troubles would pass.

He put his arm around me and pulled me close. I relaxed into his chest. Or as much as I possibly could relax, given the slamming momentum of the bus.

He was a good man, in the end.

He was basically a good man anyhow.

No, he was good. He is good.

“What should we do in the meanwhile?” he asked.

Prior to this conversation, my instinct had been to keep us moving at a fast clip from one new place to another with the hope that fresh vistas would distract us from our legal troubles. This sort of strategy had always worked for me in the past anyhow. Like a fussy baby who can fall asleep only in a moving car, I have always been comforted by the tempo of travel. I’d always assumed that Felipe operated on the same principle, since he is the most widely traveled person I’ve ever met. But he didn’t seem to be enjoying any of this drifting.

For one thing-though I often forget it-the man is seventeen years older than I am. So we must excuse him if he was feeling moderately less excited than I was about the notion of living out of a small backpack for an indeterminate period of time, carrying only one change of clothing and sleeping in eighteen-​dollar hotel rooms. It was clearly taking a toll on him. Also, he’d already seen the world. He’d already seen great huge swaths of the damn thing and had been traveling through Asia on third-​class trains back when I was in the second grade. Why was I making him do it again?

What’s more, the last few months had brought to my attention an important incompatibility between us-one that I’d never noticed before. For a pair of lifelong travelers, Felipe and I actually travel very differently. The reality about Felipe, as I was gradually realizing, is that he’s both the best traveler I’ve ever met and by far the worst. He hates strange bathrooms and dirty restaurants and uncomfortable trains and foreign beds-all of which pretty much define the act of traveling. Given a choice, he will always select a lifestyle of routine, familiarity, and reassuringly boring everyday practices. All of which might make you assume the man is not fit to be a traveler at all. But you would be wrong to assume that, for here is Felipe’s traveling gift, his superpower, the secret weapon that renders him peerless: He can create a familiar habitat of reassuringly boring everyday practices for himself anyplace, if you just let him stay in one spot. He can assimilate absolutely anywhere on the planet in the space of about three days, and then he’s capable of staying put in that place for the next decade or so without complaint.

This is why Felipe has been able to live all over the world. Not merely travel, but live. Over the years, he has folded himself into societies from South America to Europe, from the Middle East to the South Pacific. He arrives somewhere utterly new, decides he likes the place, moves right in, learns the language, and instantly becomes a local. It had taken Felipe less than a week of living with me in Knoxville, for instance, to locate his favorite breakfast cafe, his favorite bartender, and his favorite place for lunch. (”Darling!” he’d said one day, terribly excited after a solo foray into downtown Knoxville. “Did you know that they have the most wonderful and inexpensive fish restaurant here called John Long Slivers?”) He would’ve happily stayed in Knoxville indefinitely if I’d wanted us to. He had no trouble with the idea of living in that hotel room for many years to come-as long as we could just stay in one place.

All of which reminds me of a story that Felipe told me once about his childhood. When he was a small boy in Brazil, he used to get scared sometimes in the middle of the night by some nightmare or imagined monster, and each time he would scamper across the room and climb into the bed of his wonderful sister Lily-who was ten years older, and therefore embodied all human wisdom and security. He would tap on Lily’s shoulder and whisper, “Me da um cantinho”-“Give me a little corner.” Sleepily, never protesting, she would move over and open up a warm spot on the bed for him. It wasn’t much to ask for; just one little warm corner. For all the years that I have known this man, I have never heard him ask for much more than that.

I’m not like that, though.

Whereas Felipe can find a corner anywhere in the world and settle down for good, I can’t. I’m much more restless than he is. My restlessness makes me a far better day-​to-​day traveler than he will ever be. I am infinitely curious and almost infinitely patient with mishaps, discomforts, and minor disasters. So I can go anywhere on the planet-that’s not a problem. The problem is that I just can’t live anywhere on the planet. I’d realized this only a few weeks earlier, back in northern Laos, when Felipe had woken up one lovely morning in Luang Prabang and said, “Darling, let’s stay here.”

“Sure,” I’d said. “We can stay here for a few more days if you want.”

“No, I mean let’s move here. Let’s forget about me immigrating to America. It’s too much trouble! This is a wonderful town. I like the feeling of it. It reminds me of Brazil thirty years ago. It wouldn’t take much money or effort for us to run a little hotel or a shop here, rent an apartment, settle in…”

In reaction, I had only blanched.

He was serious. He would just do that. He would just up and move to northern Laos indefinitely and build a new life there. But I can’t. What Felipe was proposing was travel at a level I could not reach-travel that wasn’t even really travel anymore, but rather a willingness to be ingested indefinitely by an unfamiliar place. I wasn’t up for it. My traveling, as I understood then for the first time, was far more dilettantish than I had ever realized. As much as I love snacking on the world, when it comes time to settle down-to really settle down-I wanted to live at home, in my own country, in my own language, near my own family, and in the company of people who think and believe the same things that I think and believe. This basically limits me to a small region of Planet Earth consisting of southern New York State, the more rural sections of central New Jersey, northwestern Connecticut, and bits of eastern Pennsylvania. Quite the scanty habitat for a bird who claims to be migratory. Felipe, on the other hand-my flying fish-has no such domestic limitations. A small bucket of water anywhere in the world will do him just fine.

Realizing all this also helped me put Felipe’s recent irritability in better perspective. He was going through all this trouble-all the uncertainty and humiliation of the American immigration process-purely on my behalf, enduring a completely invasive legal proceeding when he’d just as soon be setting up a newer and much easier life in a freshly rented little apartment in Luang Prabang. Moreover, in the meantime, he was tolerating all this jittery traveling from place to place-a process he does not remotely enjoy-because he sensed that I wanted it. Why was I putting him through this? Why would I not let the man rest, anywhere?

So I changed the plan.

“Why don’t we just go somewhere for a few months and stay there until you get called back to Australia for your immigration interview,” I suggested. “Let’s just go to Bangkok.”

“No,” he said. “Not Bangkok. We’ll lose our minds living in Bangkok.”

“No,” I said. “We won’t settle in Bangkok; we’ll just head in that direction because it’s a hub. Let’s go to Bangkok for a week or so, stay in a nice hotel, rest up, and see if we can find a cheap plane ticket from there to Bali. Once we get back to Bali, let’s see if we can rent a little house. Then we’ll just stay there in Bali and wait until this whole thing blows over.”

I could see by the look on Felipe’s face that the idea was working for him.

“You would do that?” he asked.

Suddenly I had another inspiration. “Wait-let’s see if we can get your old Bali house back! Maybe we can rent it from the new owner. And then we’ll just stay there, in Bali, till we get your visa back to America. How does that sound?”

It took Felipe a moment to respond, but-honest to God-when he finally did, I thought the man might weep with relief.

So that’s what we did. We headed back to Bangkok. We found a hotel with a pool and a well-​stocked bar. We called the new owner of Felipe’s old house to see if it was available to rent. Marvelously, it was, at a comfortable four hundred dollars a month-a surreal but perfectly fine price to pay for a house that had once been yours. We reserved a flight back to Bali, leaving in a week’s time. Instantly, Felipe was happy again. Happy and patient and kindhearted, as I had always known him to be.

But as for me…

Something nagged.

Something pulled at me. I could see that Felipe was relaxing, sitting by the nice swimming pool with a detective novel in one hand and a beer in the other, but now I was the agitated one. I am never going to be the person who wants to sit by a hotel pool with a cold beer and a detective novel. My thoughts kept turning to Cambodia, which was so tantalizingly close, which was just over the border from Thailand… I had always wanted to see the temple ruins at Angkor Wat but had never quite made it there in my past travels. We had a week to kill, and this would be a perfect time to go. But I couldn’t imagine dragging Felipe over to Cambodia with me right now. In fact, I couldn’t imagine anything Felipe would want to do less than get on a plane to Cambodia to visit crumbling temple ruins in the searing heat.

What if I went to Cambodia alone, then, just for a few days? What if I left Felipe here in Bangkok sitting happily by the pool? For the last five months, we’d spent nearly every single minute of the day in each other’s company, and often in challenging surroundings. It was a miracle that our recent spat on the bus had been the only serious conflict so far. Couldn’t we each benefit from a short spell of separation?

That said, the tenuousness of our situation made me concerned about leaving him for even a few days. This was no time to be messing around. What if something happened to me while I was in Cambodia? What if something happened to him? What if there was an earthquake, a tsunami, a riot, a plane crash, a bad case of food poisoning, a kidnapping? What if Felipe wandered out one day in Bangkok while I was gone and got hit by a car and suffered a serious head injury and ended up in a mysterious hospital somewhere with nobody knowing who he was, and what if I could never find him again? Our existence in the world was in critical flux right now and everything was so delicate. We’d been floating across the planet for five months in a single lifeboat, bobbing together uncertainly. Our union was our only strength for the time being. Why risk separation at such a precarious moment?

On the other hand, maybe it was time to ease up a bit on the fanatical hovering. There was no sane reason to assume that things would not ultimately work out just fine for Felipe and me. Surely our strange period of exile would eventually pass; surely Felipe would be granted his American visa; surely we would get married; surely we would find a stable home in the United States; surely we would have many years to spend together in the future. That being the case, I should probably take a quick trip alone right now, if only to set a solid precedent for the future. Because here was something I already knew to be true about myself: Just as there are some wives who will occasionally need a break from their husbands in order to visit a spa for the weekend with their girlfriends, I will always be the sort of wife who occasionally needs a break from her husband in order to visit Cambodia.

Just for a few days!

And maybe he could use a break from me, too. Watching as Felipe and I had become more irritable with each other over the last few weeks, and now feeling so strongly that I wanted some space away from him, I started thinking about my parents’ garden-which is as good a metaphor as any for how two married people must learn to adapt to each other and to sometimes simply clear out of each other’s path in order to avoid conflict.

My mother was originally the family gardener, but my father has become more interested in home agriculture over the years, maneuvering his way deep into this realm of hers. But just as Felipe and I travel differently, my mother and father garden differently, and often this has led to strife. Over the years, then, they have divided their garden in order to keep some civility out there amid the vegetables. In fact, they have divided the garden in such a complicated manner that, by this point in its history, you would practically need a United Nations peacekeeping force to understand my parents’ carefully partitioned spheres of horticultural influence. The lettuce, broccoli, herbs, beets, and raspberries are all still under my mother’s domain, for instance, because my father has not yet figured out a way to wrest control of that produce from her. But the carrots, leeks, and asparagus are completely my father’s province. And as for the blueberries? Dad chases Mom out of his blueberry patch as though she were a foraging bird. My mother is not allowed anywhere near the blueberries: not to trim them, not to harvest them, not even to water them. My father has laid claim to the blueberry patch, and he defends it.

Where the garden gets really complicated, though, is with the question of tomatoes and corn. Like the West Bank, like Taiwan, like Kashmir, the tomatoes and the corn are still contested territories. My mother plants the tomatoes, but my father is in charge of staking the tomatoes, but then my mother harvests the tomatoes. Don’t ask me why! Those are just the rules of engagement. (Or at least they were the rules of engagement last summer. The tomato situation is still evolving.) On the other hand, there is corn. My father plants the corn and my mother harvests the corn, but my father insists on personally mulching the corn once the harvest is done.

And so they toil on, together but separate.

Garden without end, amen.

The peculiar truce of my parents’ garden brings to mind a book that a friend of mine, a psychologist named Deborah Luepnitz, published several years ago called Schopenhauer’s Porcupines. The operative metaphor of Deborah’s book was a story that the pre-​Freudian philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer told about the essential dilemma of modern human intimacy. Schopenhauer believed that humans, in their love relationships, were like porcupines out on a cold winter night. In order to keep from freezing, the animals huddle close together. But as soon as they are near enough to provide critical warmth, they get poked by each other’s quills. Reflexively, to stop the pain and irritation of too much closeness, the porcupines separate. But once they separate, they become cold again. The chill sends them back toward each other once more, only to be impaled all over again by each other’s quills. So they retreat again. And then approach again. Endlessly.

“And the cycle repeats,” Deborah wrote, “as they struggle to find a comfortable distance between entanglement and freezing.”

Dividing and subdividing their control over such consequential matters as money and children, but also over such seemingly inconsequential matters as beets and blueberries, my parents weave their own version of the porcupine dance, advancing and retreating on each other’s territory, still negotiating, still recalibrating, still working after all these years to find the correct distance between autonomy and cooperation-seeking a subtle and elusive balance that will somehow keep this strange plot of intimacy growing. They compromise a lot in the process-sometimes compromising away precious time and energy that they might have preferred to spend doing different things, separate things, if only the other person wasn’t in the way. Felipe and I will have to do the same thing when it comes to our own spheres of cultivation-and certainly we would need to learn our own steps of the porcupine dance around the subject of travel.

Still, when it came time to discuss with Felipe my idea of going off to Cambodia without him for a spell, I broached the topic with a degree of skittishness that surprised me. For a few days, I could not seem to find the right approach. I didn’t want to feel as though I were asking his permission to go, since that placed him in the role of a master or a parent-and that wouldn’t be fair to me. Nor, though, could I imagine sitting down with this nice, considerate man and bluntly informing him that I was heading off alone whether he liked it or not. This would place me in the role of a willful tyrant, which was obviously unfair to him.

The fact was, I was out of practice for this kind of thing. I had been on my own for a while before I’d met Felipe, and I had grown accustomed to shaping my own agenda without having to take account of somebody else’s wishes. What’s more, up until this point in our love story, our externally mandated travel restrictions (as well as our lives led on separate continents) had always ensured that the two of us had plenty of time alone. But with marriage, everything would now change. We would be together all the time now, and that togetherness would bring trying new limits, because marriage is a binding thing, a taming thing, by its very nature. Marriage has a bonsai energy: It’s a tree in a pot with trimmed roots and clipped limbs. Mind you, bonsai can live for centuries, and their unearthly beauty is a direct result of such constriction, but nobody would ever mistake a bonsai for a free-​climbing vine.

The Polish philosopher and sociologist Zygmunt Bauman has written exquisitely about this subject. He believes that modern couples have been sold a bill of goods when they’re told that they can and should have it both ways-that we should all have equal parts intimacy and autonomy in our lives. Somehow, Bauman suggests, we have mistakenly come to believe in our culture that if only we manage our emotional lives correctly we should each be able to experience all the reassuring constancy of marriage without ever once feeling remotely confined or limited. The magic word here-the almost fetishized word here-is “balance,” and just about everybody I know these days seems to be seeking that balance with a near-​desperate urgency. We are all trying, as Bauman writes, to force our marriages to “empower without disempowering, enable without disabling, fulfill without burdening.”

But perhaps this is an unrealistic aspiration? Because love limits, almost by definition. Love narrows. The great expansion we feel in our hearts when we fall in love is matched only by the great restrictions that will necessarily follow. Felipe and I have one of the most easygoing relationships you could possibly imagine, but please do not be fooled: I have utterly claimed this man as my own, and I have therefore fenced him off from the rest of the herd. His energies (sexual, emotional, creative) belong in large part to me, not to anybody else-not even entirely to himself anymore. He owes me things like information, explanations, fidelity, constancy, and details about the most mundane little aspects of his life. It’s not like I keep the man in a radio collar, but make no mistake about it-he belongs to me now. And I belong to him, in exactly the same measure.

Which does not mean that I cannot go to Cambodia by myself. It does mean, however, that I need to discuss my plans with Felipe before I leave-as he would do with me were our situations reversed. If he objects to my desire to travel alone, I can argue my point with him, but I am obliged to at least listen to his objections. If he strenuously objects, I can just as strenuously overrule him, but I must select my battles-as must he. If he protests my wishes too often, our marriage will surely break apart. On the other hand, if I constantly demand to live my life away from him, our marriage will just as surely break apart. It’s delicate, then, this operation of mutual, quiet, almost velvety oppression. Out of respect, we must learn how to release and confine each other with the most exquisite care, but we should never-not even for a moment-pretend that we are not confined.

After a good deal of thinking, I finally brought up the subject of Cambodia with Felipe one morning over breakfast in Bangkok. I selected my words with a ridiculous amount of mindfulness, using such abstruse language that for a time the poor man clearly had no idea what I was talking about. With a good dose of stiff formality and a whole lot of preamble, I awkwardly tried to explain that, while I loved him and was hesitant to leave him alone right now at such a tenuous moment in our lives, I really would like to see the temples in Cambodia… and maybe, since he finds ancient ruins so tedious, this was a trip I should perhaps consider undertaking by myself?… and maybe it wouldn’t kill us to spend a few days apart, given how stressful all the traveling had become?

It took Felipe a few moments to catch the drift of what I was saying, but when the penny finally dropped, he put down his toast and stared at me in frank puzzlement.

“My God, darling!” he said. “What are you even asking me for? Just go!”

So I went.

And my trip to Cambodia was…

How shall I explain this?

Cambodia is not a day at the beach. Cambodia is not even a day at the beach if you happen to be spending a day at an actual beach there. Cambodia is hard. Everything about the place felt hard to me. The landscape is hard, beaten down to within an inch of its life. The history is hard, with genocide lingering in recent memory. The faces of the children are hard. The dogs are hard. The poverty was harder than anything I’d ever seen before. It was like the poverty of rural India, but without the verve of India. It was like the poverty of urban Brazil, but without the flash of Brazil. This was just poverty of the dusty and exhausted variety.

Most of all, though, my guide was hard.

Once I’d secured myself a hotel in Siem Reap, I set out to hire a guide to show me the temples of Angkor Wat, and ended up with a man named Narith-an articulate, knowledgeable, and extremely stern gentleman in his early forties who politely showed me the magnificent ancient ruins, but who, to put it mildly, did not enjoy my company. We did not become friends, Narith and I, though I dearly wished us to. I do not like to meet a new person and not make a new friend, but friendship was never going to grow between Narith and me. Part of the problem was Narith’s extraordinarily intimidating demeanor. Everyone has a default emotion, and Narith’s was quiet disapproval, which he radiated at every turn. This threw off my composure so much that after two days I barely dared to open my mouth anymore. He made me feel like a foolish child, which was not surprising given that his other job-aside from being a tour guide-was schoolmaster. I’m willing to wager he’s terrifyingly effective at it. He admitted to me that he sometimes feels nostalgic for the good old days before the war, when Cambodian families were more intact, and when children were kept well disciplined by regular beatings.

But it wasn’t merely Narith’s austerity that prohibited us from developing a warm human connection; it was also my fault. I honestly could not figure out how to talk to this man. I was keenly aware of the fact that I was in the presence of a person who had grown up during one of the most brutal spasms of violence the world has ever witnessed. No Cambodian family was left unaffected by the genocide of the 1970s. Anyone who was not tortured or executed in Cambodia during the Pol Pot years merely starved and suffered. You can safely assume, then, that any Cambodian who is forty years old today lived through an absolute inferno of a childhood. Knowing all this, I found it difficult to generate casual conversation with Narith. I could not find any topics that were not freighted with potential references to the not-​so-​distant past. Traveling through Cambodia with a Cambodian, I decided, must be something like exploring a house that had recently been the scene of a grisly family mass murder, guided along on your tour by the only relative who had managed to escape death. This leaves one rather desperate to avoid asking questions like “So-is this the bedroom where your brother murdered your sisters?” or “Is this the garage where your father tortured your cousins?” Instead, you just follow along politely behind your guide, and when he says, “Here is a particularly nice old feature of our house,” you merely nod and murmur, “Yes, the pergola is lovely…”

And you wonder.

Meanwhile, as Narith and I toured the ancient ruins and avoided discussing modern history, we stumbled everywhere on groups of unattended children, whole tattered gangs of them, openly begging. Some of them were missing limbs. The kids without limbs would sit on the corner of an abandoned old edifice, pointing at their amputated legs and calling out, “Land mine! Land mine! Land mine!” As we walked by, the more able-​bodied children would follow us, trying to sell me postcards, bracelets, trinkets. Some were pushy, but others tried more subtle angles. “What state are you from in America?” one little boy demanded of me. “If I tell you the capital, you can give me a dollar!” That particular boy followed me for long stretches of the day, throwing out the names of American states and capitals like a shrill, strange poem: “Illinois, madam! Springfield! New York, madam! Albany!” As the day passed, he became increasingly despondent: “California, madam! SACRAMENTO! Texas, madam! AUSTIN!”

Strangled by grief, I offered these kids money, but Narith would only scold me for my handouts. I was to ignore the children, he lectured. I was only making things worse by giving out cash, he warned. I was encouraging a culture of begging, which would spell the end of Cambodia. There were too many of these wild children to help, anyhow, and my boon would only attract more of them. True enough, more children gathered whenever they saw me pulling out bills and coins, and once my Cambodian currency was gone, they still flocked around me. I felt poisoned by the constant repetition of the word “NO” coming out of my own mouth again and again: an awful incantation. The kids became more insistent until Narith decided he’d had enough and scattered them back across the ruins with a barking dismissal.

One afternoon, walking back to our car from a tour of another thirteenth-​century palace and trying to change the subject from the begging children, I asked about the nearby forest, wondering about its history. Narith replied, in an apparent non sequitur, “When my father was killed by the Khmer Rouge, the soldiers took our house as a trophy.”

I could summon no reply for this, so we walked along in silence.

After a spell, he added, “My mother was sent into the forest with us, with all her children, to try to survive.”

I waited for the rest of the story, but there was no rest of the story-or at least nothing more that he wanted to share.

“I’m sorry,” I said finally. “That must have been terrible.”

Narith shot me a dark look of… what? Pity? Contempt? Then it passed. “Let us continue with our tour,” he said, pointing to a fetid swamp on our left. “This was once a reflecting pool, used by King Jayavarman VII during the twelfth century to study the mirror image of the stars by night…”

The next morning, wanting to offer up something to this battered country, I tried to donate blood at the local hospital. I had seen signs all over town announcing a blood shortage and asking tourists for help, but I didn’t even have any luck with this venture. The strict Swiss nurse on duty took one look at my low iron levels and refused to accept my blood. She wouldn’t even take a half pint from me.

“You are too weak!” she accused me. “You have obviously not been taking care of yourself! You should not be traveling around like this! You should be home, resting!”

That evening-my last evening alone in Cambodia-I wandered around the streets of Siem Reap, trying to relax into the place. But it did not feel safe to be alone in that city. A peculiar feeling of composure and harmony usually settles on me when I’m moving solo through a new landscape (in fact, that very sensation is what I had come to Cambodia to find), but I never reached it on that trip. If anything, I felt like I was in the way, that I was an irritant, an idiot, or even a target. I felt pathetic and bloodless. As I was walking back to my hotel after dinner, a small swarm of children gathered around me, begging again. One boy was missing a foot, and as he hobbled gamely along he stuck out his crutch in front of me, deliberately tripping me. I stumbled, arms flapping clownishly, but did not quite fall.

“Money,” said the boy in a flat tone. “Money.”

I tried stepping around him again. Nimbly, he stuck out his crutch once more, and I had to basically leap over the thing to dodge it, which seemed awful and insane. The children laughed, and then more children gathered: now it was a spectacle. I picked up my pace and walked faster toward the hotel. The crowd of kids tagged behind me, around me, in front of me. Some of them were laughing and blocking my way, but one very little girl kept pulling at my sleeve and crying out, “Food! Food! Food!” By the time I neared the hotel, I was running. It was shameful.

Whatever equanimity I’d proudly and stubbornly been holding together over the last few chaotic months caved in Cambodia, and caved fast. All my expert-​traveler’s composure fell to bits-along with all my patience and basic human compassion, apparently-as I found myself panicked and adrenalized and running full-​speed away from small, hungry children who were openly begging me for food. When I reached my hotel, I dived into my room and locked the door behind me and pushed my face into a towel and trembled like a shitty little coward for the rest of the night.

So that was my big trip to Cambodia.

One obvious way to read this story, of course, is that perhaps I should never have gone there in the first place-or at least not at that moment. Perhaps my trip had been an excessively willful or even reckless move, given that I was already fatigued from months of travel, and given the strain of Felipe’s and my uncertain circumstances. Perhaps this had been no time for me to go proving my independence, or laying down precedents for future freedoms, or testing the boundaries of intimacy. Perhaps I should have just stayed there in Bangkok with Felipe by the swimming pool the whole time, drinking beer and relaxing, and waiting for our next move together.

Except that I don’t like beer and I would not have relaxed. Had I reined in my impulses and stuck around in Bangkok that week, drinking beer and watching the two of us getting on each other’s nerves, I might have buried something important within me-something that may have ultimately turned fetid, like King Jayavarman’s pool, creating contaminating ramifications for the future. I went to Cambodia because I had to go. It may have been a messy and botched experience, but that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t have gone. Sometimes life is messy and botched. We do our best. We don’t always know the right move.

What I do know is that the day after my encounter with the begging children I flew back to Bangkok and reunited with a Felipe who was calm and relaxed, and who had clearly enjoyed a restorative break from my company. He had passed the days of my absence happily learning how to make balloon animals in order to keep himself busy. Upon my return, therefore, he presented me with a giraffe, a dachshund, and a rattlesnake. He was extraordinarily proud of himself. I, on the other hand, was feeling more than a little undone, and was not at all proud of my performance in Cambodia. But I was awfully glad to see this guy. And I was awfully grateful to him for encouraging me to attempt things that are not always entirely safe and that are not always fully explainable and that do not always work out quite as perfectly as I may have dreamed. I am more grateful for that than I can ever say-because, truth be told, I am certain to do this kind of thing again.

So I praised Felipe for his marvelous balloon menagerie, and he listened carefully to my sad stories about Cambodia, and when we were both good and tired we climbed into bed with each other and lashed our lifeboat together once more and continued on with our story.