It is also, I learned, the very rationalization that allows one person to drown while the other floats, because a partnership only works if both people are swimming in the same direction, toward a shared shore.

If one of you is swimming and the other is only riding on your back, calling it teamwork, then you are not the stronger swimmer carrying more weight.

You are a life raft being mistaken for a spouse.

It took me years to see the difference, because the difference is invisible from inside the water, and because I did not want to see it, because seeing it would have meant admitting that the man I loved was not tired alongside me.

He was comfortable on top of me.