The expedition of a marriage.

13 years of "how do you do it?"

Some version of “how do you do it?” or “how do you make it work?” is a question I get often when marriage comes up.

We have some particulars in common as two self-motivated and visionary self-employed creatives. We’re both saddled with a propensity toward vagabonding, both passionate souls that wander often separately to far-flung places on the map. We both can be homebodies. We both love large dogs, binging dark tv series, and maqlooba. We, unfortunately, prefer the same glasses and hair styles, and get told too often we look alike (please stop doing this!)

We’ve also at once been a peacemaker and a military cop. A Christian and unaffiliated. A Highly Sensitive Person and a metalhead. A climber and a total chickenshit.

A traditional marriage seemingly may not compute for our lives and spirits. The longer we’re together, the more we become an oddity, it seems.

When I get the question of “how do you do it?” I think they’re wondering if we’re actually that compatible. They’re wondering if we get lonely. They’re wondering if we’re happy. They’re wondering if they too can feel at home and free at the same time.

Explaining marriage feels like trying to explain language without using the words. I can’t tell you, but I can show you.

I have known my husband for 18 years, a couple years longer than I didn’t know him before we met the summer I was 16. In these 18 years, we’ve spent collective years of them apart on trips, deployments, expeditions, and work assignments. Despite the time apart, we’ve done all our growing up together. We have no time single in adulthood, no choices or changes that haven’t considered the one who’s been our partner for almost two decades.

It’s a bundle of contradictions.

It's been 13 years of hard goodbyes and call me when you get service. 13 years of watching my best friend walk away into the airport or get on the bus or load up his minivan that will take him far away from the life we have together, which is actually the life we do have together. Him, sleeping on portaledges on granite big walls and trekking 16 miles onto a glacier in Pakistan or the desert in Jordan. Me, working in the Middle East, horsepacking in the wilderness, or taking sabbaticals in Italy, Portugal, and beyond.

It’s been 13 years of launching our favorite person out into the wide world to do the things that helps them come alive, feel human, and make the art the world needs.

It’s been 13 years of learning who we are when we’re alone, which is invaluable lesson for anyone who married their high school sweetheart at age 20 and 21.

It’s been 13 years of relying on community of family, friends, and the other left-behind-partners so they’re my chosen family when he’s gone – the ones who take me in on the hard days or nights that always come. The ones I call from the hospital or in a panic because he's lost touch.

It’s been 13 years of loving and leaving. It’s been 13 years of knowing the gift of someone to come home to. 13 years of goodbyes and hellos, which is a lot to answer a simple curiosity. But of course no relationships are that simple.

We never really had another choice when it came to growing in independence through all the time apart. What I’ve been thinking about lately is how time apart increasingly makes my heart grow melancholic and homesick, though you’d think I’d be used to it by now.

I used to be a military spouse, and let me tell you: this is a community that knows what I know. The hardships military families face can't be overstated. I say this from personal and professional experience, with my years as an airman’s wife, working with a national military family nonprofit, and my many friends formerly or still serving.

I can still find threads of similarity to the military life in mine now. There are a thousand parallels, involuntary or not. We were forced into separation for years and then chose it ourselves, but the aches and losses are the same. The relational cost is the same. The hardships on the homefront are the same. Life from the middle, I’ve learned, is the same. We’re sending our partners off on a mission concerned about their safety, health, and what life will look like on the other side. We belong to each other in this resemblance.

But for us, I leave sometimes too. Lane has sent me off a dozen times or more on my own adventures. It’s much harder to be the one left at home. He would agree.

You can never forget how that feels, the expedition of a marriage.

When Lane was in Pakistan for over a month in 2022, I didn’t have the nerve to write about it while he was gone for several reasons. Mostly to maintain composure and privacy, and also because I was scared shitless. There were floods and news of disaster in southern Pakistan and, though they were in the north and likely safe, it was all I could do to not lose it on anyone checked up on him through me. Their alarmist speculations made me feel even more isolated and overlooked than not hearing from Lane for long periods of time.

It was the torture of not knowing and not knowing how to answer. It was feeling on the periphery of my own inner circle. It was wishing they’d asked how I was holding up first before getting their fix for information. All I could honestly say was there’s little-to-no communication and I haven’t heard from him this week. No word for days or weeks at a time during a historic disaster on top of a baseline high-risk expedition had this inexplicable way of making 35 days feel akin to the way it did when he’d deploy for 35 weeks.

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Message received:

14,321 ft elevation

35.480883°, 76.528380°

We had a good few days and hiking out soon. I’ll call you when we get to town next week. ily. –From Sam’s InReach

A precise location. A statement no longer than a tweet. Signed by another person's name from the shared satellite messenger.

There’s only time for proof of life. No, I’m not sleeping well. No, I got stung twice by a wasp and had an allergic reaction and have been sleeping with my Epi-Pen. No, Remember that time I wound up in the ER in San Antonio on your first deployment? No, the flooding in the south of the country looks serious. No, someone I love got sick and I was really worried and angry I couldn’t tell you. No, I’m feeling alone and I need to talk to you.

At times, this is the only “connection” to my husband. Ask me again how I make this work and I will say I don’t.

Message sent:

5,403 ft elevation

39.7392° N, 104.9903° W

We’re doing well. I miss you & can’t wait to see you. Love you too. –Shelby

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Last I’d seen him, I was weeping on the curb. The cop was asking me to move my unattended vehicle from the active unloading lane at airport departures. I didn’t move. I couldn’t. And I didn’t have it in me to put up a fight so I turned my back on the officer as tears streamed down my face. I was surrounded by eight heavy packs of climbing equipment and filmmaking gear that needed to be shuttled in two at a time to the check-in line. I wasn’t going anywhere.

He was.

Separation is not unfamiliar territory to me. Now when he goes, I can feel every separation: two long deployments and every far-away training. All the international and remote expeditions and more to come. It hits like a ton of bricks. It’s eight 50-pound duffels and packs on the curb because we’re too proud or cheap or flustered to just get the damn cart. We’ve learned we can carry it, so that’s what we do. We put it on our backs and accept the kind of separation you hope you both survive, in one piece.

I’ve also learned the pure chaos of the last few days before takeoff is inevitable, everyone operating almost entirely on adrenaline. I’ve learned the days before the trip starts are not mine: he’s already gone. He will do what it takes to get ready and fit for the mission and I cannot take it personally. I’ve learned the tension buildup in the weeks before takeoff is a normal way of detaching and making peace with leaving.

I know the limitations of infrequent communication. I know what can go wrong. I know emergency contacts for the climbers on the team. I know the protocol for a family emergency. I know I can’t always tell the truth because he has to stay focused so sometimes I carry it for him. I know what’s it like to end up in the hospital alone and have no one to call to come be with me. I know how essential community is because I’ll need the support even if everything goes right. I know there’s the climactic coming home followed by the uphill reintegration phase which may be when I need my people most.

As much as I do know and can anticipate, I am yoked to the unmoored elements of the unknown.

I'll be the weepy wife on the curb again someday soon, and I will hear myself asking why we do this to ourselves. Two weeks in, I’ll be asking how in the world are we so lucky to get to live out our dreams even if it means some time apart. Four weeks in, I'll be more than ready for a homecoming, because that part never gets old.

There’s a cost to doing it this way, I haven’t lied. There’s no hack, no cheatcode, no one-thing. We’ve just decided the bigger cost would be forsaking our dreams. Wandering home is a lifestyle we’ve chosen together. We’re always wandering, and we’re always returning. We’re free and we’re home.

You can never forget how it feels, that expedition of a marriage.

Time has a curious way of softening the edges of distance and disruption, and sharpening the good parts in our memories. Like how I forget I am not as strong as I have to be. Things aren't always the way I'd have them, yet I know the only way we stay together is to keep setting each other free.

When we’re trying to find creative, life-giving ways to balance ambition with intimacy, we find ourselves alone in the world at times, always returning home to the person that makes it so. And even then there are parts of home and marriage that stay close, and others you get to live out loud.

We celebrated 13 years of marriage last month. He asked me if I wanted to renew our vows on our wedding anniversary, and I said yes.

On May 14th, tucked away in the El Cap meadow of Yosemite Valley – one of the most magnificent landscapes I’ve ever seen – our good friend Sam officiated, another friend chilled vintage champagne in the river, one took photos on film, another put us on a tandem bike to bike from the meadow to our camp (10 miles in a DRESS) and another tied old cans to the back and made a sign on cardboard. “JUST RE-MARRIED” and more people honked and cheered and another made 30 homemade pizzas on a portable oven for a reception at the community picnic area where this particular dirtbag faction gathers morning and night for coffee, dinner, debriefs, and dreaming.

Our brand new and old friends spoke sweet words at the ceremony and each of them took photos and made toasts, which felt like such a celebration of our love.

We’d discovered we didn’t say individual vows at our ceremony in 2011, but even if we had, they’d be different now. Our commitments to each other have grown and been shaped by the lives we’ve had …and didn’t get to have. So much life, so many years trying to make it work, trying to adapt when it didn’t, trying to bottle it when it did but even a poet can’t muster what I mean when I say WE.

We spoke the vows we’d written just hours earlier near Mirror Lake. I love the evolution of these promises more than a decade in. It was a whole lot less “I do” and a whole lot more “we have and we will.”

If you’re asking what it takes, the question “how do you do it?” is perhaps best asked as “do you want to keep doing it?” That I can answer.

We have and we will.

Two of us,

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