Just the Two of You Again

When the kids no longer fill the silence

Category: Family

The buffer is gone. The kitchen is quieter. The dinner conversation has to come from one of you, or both of you, and there’s no third person to redirect to when you run out. You’re looking at each other and you might be realizing how much of your relationship had been mediated through the children all along.

The Buffer You Didn’t Know You Had

For most of the parenting years, your relationship was buffered. The children were the third presence at the table, the topic at dinner, the reason for the trip, the thing you both turned toward when you didn’t know how to turn toward each other. You probably didn’t experience them as a buffer at the time. They were just there. Now the buffer is gone, and you’re looking at each other and realizing how much of your relationship had been mediated through them all along.

What You Set Aside Together

Parenting required compromise on a lot of fronts. Your sleep, your spontaneity, your travel, your sex, your hobbies, the careers you wanted. Both of you set things down. Now the children aren’t in the house. The constraints have loosened. You might find yourselves wanting different things you couldn’t articulate before. The parenting years buried these differences. The post-parenting years bring them back.

Don’t Decide in the Loudest Weeks

The acute grief of the children leaving is not the right state from which to make decisions about your marriage. Wait until you’re both more settled. The first year is the rawest. The second is when the new shape starts to be visible. The fifth is when you know what you actually have. Long partnerships moving into a new phase take years to find their new shape.

Good Company

Scenes from a Marriage — Ingmar Bergman, 1973
Bergman’s long, patient anatomy of a long marriage as it moves through phases, including the phase where the children are no longer the center and the two people have to look at each other directly. The film refuses easy outcomes. It just sits with two people figuring out, slowly, what is actually between them once the structure that organized their life together has loosened. It’s the closest cinema has come to filming the quiet that this booklet is about.
Stoner — John Williams, 1965
A novel about a marriage that survives by being mostly silent, and what it costs both people. Williams writes the long compromises and unspoken disappointments of a partnership with extraordinary economy. It’s not an empty-nest novel exactly, but it lives in the same emotional territory: two people who built a life together and have to keep deciding, decade after decade, what to do with what they actually have.
Mountains — Lonnie Holley, 2018
A slow, patient song from an artist who has lived through several lifetimes of partnership and loss. Holley doesn’t console. He just keeps singing through the quiet, letting the long view do the work. The song is good company for the kitchen-table evenings when the house has gone quiet and the two of you are trying to hear each other in the new acoustic.