| Whether because of that slight generational difference, or because of the larger difference in personality between us, Andy brought to our shared cosmos a much longer comet trail of past involvements, with both men and women, than I did. Joining our orbits in 1995 was therefore more a matter of my merging into his than vice-versa, just as my mother had come into marriage in 1951 with little besides a sharp eye for observing the onslaught of my father’s friends and kin. |
|  | | Eight years later, that transaction long since ironed out (neither of us owns the boys; they own us), we are “four men living together” – though two of us enact a masculinity still defined by knights, superheroes, and furtive, contraband weapons. I can’t speak to the way my relationship to Andy might have proceeded had there been no children involved, or had they come along after a decorous honeymoon of several years. |
| |  | | | But there is more to a marriage than the chores. There is, for example, how you do the chores. I was astonished and frustrated to learn, in our first year together, that not everyone naturally bows to the obvious superiority of my method of loading the dishwasher –... |
|