Everybody Went Home And It Was Very Quiet

The cards are still standing on the windowsill and neither of you has moved them.

It is nine days later. The last people went home on the Sunday, and the two of you cleared up on the Monday, and on the Tuesday you both went back to work, and since then it has been extremely ordinary.

And on Thursday evening one of you was doing something in the kitchen and there was a moment where the quiet in the house was so complete it was almost loud.

Neither of you has said anything about it, and both of you have noticed it, and there is a small worry underneath it that neither of you will voice, which is: is this it.

I want to name what is actually happening, because it is not what it feels like.

For about a year, your life has had a fixed point in it. Everything organized itself around a date. Every conversation had somewhere to go, every weekend had a task, every difficulty was in service of something coming, and there was a permanent low hum of anticipation running underneath your ordinary days.

That hum has now stopped.

And you have never lived without it, not for a year, so its absence does not feel like the absence of anticipation. It feels like something is wrong with your marriage.

It is not. It is the sound of a life without a countdown in it, which most of us have not heard for a while, and which is unfamiliar rather than bad.

And there is a second thing happening and it is worth saying plainly. You are tired. Properly tired, in the way that does not lift after one weekend. You have run an event, managed a family, been the center of a room for eight hours, and slept badly for a fortnight beforehand.

Nobody feels much of anything when they are that tired. That is not a verdict on your marriage either.

He shall be free at home one year

There is a law in Deuteronomy about a newly married man, and the fact that it exists at all is the point.

When a man hath taken a new wife, he shall not go out to war, neither shall he be charged with any business: but he shall be free at home one year, and shall cheer up his wife which he hath taken. (Deuteronomy 24:5, King James Version)

He shall be free at home one year.

Read what that is doing. It is a legal exemption. A man in the first year of marriage is removed from military service, and from any other business he might be charged with, for twelve months.

And notice the reason given: that he shall cheer up his wife which he hath taken.

That is the stated national purpose. Not defense, not productivity, not building a household. A year set aside so that two people can be together and one of them can make the other glad.

Now sit with what that assumes.

It assumes the first year needs protecting. There is no version of that law that makes sense if the first year of marriage takes care of itself. You do not legislate an exemption for something that is going smoothly on its own.

It assumes the first year takes time rather than intensity. A year is not an event. It is a long unremarkable stretch of ordinary days, and that is precisely what is being set aside.

And it assumes the marriage is built in the ordinary, at home, with nothing much happening. Free at home. Not away doing something significant. At home, for a year, in the quiet.

So the flatness you are worried about is not the marriage failing to start. It is the exact condition scripture takes seriously enough to clear a year for.

You are inside the stretch that the law itself set apart, and the quiet has never once been the marriage failing to start. Deuteronomy 24:5 clears a whole year for ordinary time at home together, and the Holy Spirit is the one present in a house where nothing much is happening.

The wedding was not the peak

Here is the thing worth understanding, because it will save you a specific mistake.

There is a version of the next few years where you go looking for the hum again.

It is a very common pattern and it does not feel like a mistake while it is happening. You will find that moving somewhere gives it back, or a holiday, or a renovation, or a baby, and each of those things is good in itself and each will supply the missing anticipation for a while.

The trouble is only this: if you never learn to be married in the quiet, you will need a countdown running permanently, and there will come a stretch where there is not one available, and it will feel then the way it feels now, except by then you will have twenty years of evidence that you are only all right when something is coming.

So this fortnight is not a problem to get past. It is the first opportunity you have had in a year to find out what the two of you are like with nothing scheduled.

And that is genuinely worth doing badly at first. It is a skill and you have not practiced it, because for twelve months every evening had a job.

You are learning what the two of you are like with nothing coming, and a countdown has never once been what a marriage was made of. The written word clears a year for ordinary time and gives no event for it to build toward, and the Spirit of God is the one present in an evening with nothing scheduled in it.

One ordinary thing, named out loud

So here is the assignment, and the naming is the half that matters.

Do one ordinary thing together this week and name it out loud as the marriage.

The ordinary thing first, and it should be genuinely ordinary. Wash up together. Walk to the shop. Sit in the same room and read different things. Cook something neither of you is impressed by.

Not a date. Not an occasion. If you make it special you have simply built a very small wedding, and that is the hum arriving in a costume.

Then, while you are doing it, say out loud: this is it. This is the thing we were promising.

Say it plainly, in the middle of the washing up, in an ordinary voice. It will feel slightly ridiculous.

The naming is the whole mechanism and here is why. At the moment, your two categories are the wedding, which was significant, and everything since, which has been filed as the gap after it. Everything ordinary is going into the second box automatically.

Saying it out loud moves one evening out of that box. Not by making it special, but by identifying what it actually is, which is the substance rather than the interval.

Do it once. Then do it again in a fortnight, and once more after that.

You are able to name an ordinary evening as the thing itself, and the quiet has never once been the interval between the real parts. Deuteronomy 24:5 sets a whole year at home apart as worth protecting, and the Holy Spirit is the one present in a kitchen where two people are washing up.