We ran a household like two competent managers, dividing the labor, covering the shifts, communicating in logistics — did you call the dentist, the Hendersons invited us Saturday, Keegan needs the permission slip — a whole marriage conducted in the vocabulary of a to-do list.

And the tenderness, the dancing, the us of it, we set aside, not with any decision, just gently and continually, for later, because it seemed like the one thing that could safely wait.

The kids could not wait.

The mortgage could not wait.

The marriage, we assumed, would keep.

That was our mistake, the great quiet mistake of our life together: we assumed the marriage would keep, like a thing in a cupboard, and we did not know that a marriage is not preserved by neglect but slowly starved by it, and that we were, year by careful year, letting ours go hungry.

If I could go back and warn us — the young couple with the first baby, so sure of ourselves, so certain the love was a fixed thing we could bank and return to — I would tell them just this: it is not true that the marriage can wait.