Let’s spend it.” And we sat there on the porch holding hands in the dark like teenagers, like the two kids in the shoebox, having decided — out loud, on purpose, at long last — to be married again.

Not the marriage we’d drifted into.

The one we chose.

There is a difference, I have learned, between the marriage you fall into and the marriage you choose, and most people only ever get the first kind.

The first kind is easy and unconscious; you are young and in love and the choosing feels like weather, like something that happens to you, and you ride it as long as it carries you and then, when it stops carrying you — and it always stops, for everyone, that is not a failure, it is just physics — you assume the marriage is over, because the thing that made it went away.

But the thing that went away was never the marriage.