A couple years into the marriage, the husband and wife decided it was time to get a dog. The wife was teaching a few college classes but mostly working at home, and it seemed like a nice thing for a dog, to have someone mostly at home. The dog they chose was a sickly, skinny, low-key Catahoula rescue when they first brought him home, but soon enough he was a healthy eighty-pound puppy, which was a bit of a surprise, since they’d been told he was close to a year old when he was found and therefore surely full grown, only to see him more or less double in size, all this to say that training him became a bit of a challenge for the wife. They took him to an eight-week training class and he learned to sit and to stay and to drop it, to take it and to leave it, and he got his photo taken at the end of eight weeks with a photocopied diploma and a mortarboard on his head. Come, this was never the dog’s favorite, and Heel, well, that really never took. She blamed herself for this and the husband basically blamed her too. We have to be consistent, he said.
I know, she said. It’s hard. He indicated frustration. She cried.
He said I love you. I’m not leaving. He had been aware of her abandonment issues, and taken it upon himself to provide ongoing reassurance that abandonment would not occur. He would go on to say this many more times in their future. He would say this every time they had conflict. They did not have that much conflict, but he would say this every time. She hoped she would believe him one day. They would stay married for many more years, and as those years went on, it seemed more and more believable that they might stay married forever.
At forty-one, she brought nothing but furniture, books, abandonment issues, and theories to the relationship; she’d always had theories, which is to say that her relationship history prior to the husband is arguably nonexistent. There had been a few three-to-six-month deals, one that lasted a year and a half, with four breakups. She had a low threshold for fighting or abusive behavior, no threshold at all for being called a cunt, a higher threshold for boring conversation, if the dude was sexy enough, a higher one still for dubious behavior that’s harder to pinpoint, and a way higher one for unavailability. Back in the day, this was really her thing; she could always get behind a guy she couldn’t have. She liked her story that she usually knew how it was going to go with a guy from the beginning, that if she made a poor choice, she knew what she was doing. She would take the responsibility and the ride. Maybe it would be fun. You never know. Dating a comic you meet on the Atlantic City boardwalk might turn out just fine. Her main theory about a real and long-term relationship was that it shouldn’t be that hard. Show up, compromise, say what you mean to the best of your ability. Something like that. She brought this theory into her marriage and it turned out to be true. She was pleased. The hardest part, always, was believing he wouldn’t leave. Any and every conflict they had, no matter how small or how mercifully infrequent, her mind would go to him leaving. Thoughtful in a conflict, he always offered preemptive reassurance. I’m not leaving, he’d say. This isn’t a big deal, he’d say. I promise. I love you. I will never leave you.
They finally got one of those harnesses that the dog couldn’t pull on, which helped.
She began to turn a corner somewhere around their tenth anniversary. Wow, she thought, he hasn’t left. Ten years is a long time. He still really loves me. I guess he’s not leaving.