It should be the floor of what love is.

It had been, for two years, more than I was given.

And I have thought a great deal, since, about how a person ends up grateful for the floor — how I came to experience the simple absence of contempt as though it were a gift, rather than the baseline any decent partnership starts from.

Because that is what two years with Andrew had done to me, without my noticing it happen: it had lowered my expectations so gradually and so thoroughly that basic respect began to feel like generosity.

I had been so long in a relationship where my calling was tolerated at best and resented at worst that a man simply not resenting it struck me as remarkable, as something to marvel at, as almost too good to be true.