She didn’t complain about her loneliness, then or later. Monica knew it would be like bitching about the obligations of wealth; she wasn’t going to get sympathy and she wouldn’t feel admirable. But she noticed. For a few years she even longed to have a weight problem, so she could gain admittance to the unacknowledged sorority of dieters. She kept reading and writing and thinking, and in college she met Charlie.

He was tall enough, good looking enough, smart enough, and very complicated. Monica admired his way with words, written and spoken, so much that she concluded she was in love with him. She also concluded that they would be life partners, even if it meant starving together in a garret somewhere, except Charlie flipped out at 21 and flipped into mental illness, and Monica wasn’t romantic enough to get past that. In fact, she turned away from Charlie so completely that she allowed herself to be recruited into a sales job she would have laughed at just months before, where she succeeded so well she didn’t leave.

It was just a season after that personal veer that she met Simon, whose clattering white horse (okay, it was a black Camry) and dazzling white teeth (the truth) must have deafened her sound sense and blinded her right vision. At least, that’s how she liked to sum up their story afterward.

They met, they dated, and they soon married. Monica’s parents expressed skepticism when she raved about how perfect Simon was for her. Even though their own engagement was only three weeks long they urged their daughter to give it some time. But Monica was set to marry. For the first time in her life she felt normal, and she couldn’t get enough of it, right then.

Monica has wondered since about the affect marriage has on a couple. She’s known of several relationships that were working just fine for as long as ten years, only to fall apart within months of tying the knot. She always thought there had to be more to those stories, until it happened to her.

Simon changed. He’d been fun, impulsive, sexy, even heroic at times, at first. And at first is when Monica said yes. Back then, when Simon said he loved her it seemed to mean something. No sooner were they married than his declarations became more like daily affirmations; every time Monica turned around her husband was enunciating those three little words or miming a kiss.

She felt stifled. It wasn’t that Simon rained on any parade or sought to change her. But his love and devotion became so prominent and public that she felt she had to regard it, too often. She started to notice that when they were in company Simon invariably looked at her when he talked, even though he was saying things that had already been spoken between them. She had to pay him attention when courtesy and interest invited her to attend to others, and she incurred a mixture of resentment and boredom about him that was hard for her to ignore. And got harder.