Fifty years since our first date

In a couple of days, on June 24, 2026, it will be the fiftieth anniversary of my first date with my husband, and I can't resist marking the occasion with a celebratory post. If you'd told us that evening that we were launching a fifty-year relationship, we'd have laughed our heads off.

We met at the Free Association, an anarchist free school on West 20th Street off Fifth Avenue long before that block's gentrification. After a few months of snappy banter and a couple of heated political disputes, he invited me out for a beer at Paula's, a lesbian bar on West 11th Street off Greenwich Avenue in the Village. Both places are long gone, but Paula's was resurrected briefly in the alternative New York of Lawrence Block's The Burglar Who Met Fredric Brown (2022). As his character Bernie Rhodenbarr says, “There were guys who came there on a regular basis, and not to hit on lesbians. I guess they liked the atmosphere." We were so skeptical about the evening going well that we each invited a friend along.

We had little in common beyond our zest for political dialectic—the left’s fancy word for arguing at that time. And we both were readers. My favorite book was Ursula LeGuin’s The Dispossessed. I was also reading P.D. James, Ellis Peters, and Patricia Moyes. He was reading Kropotkin’s The Conquest of Bread, Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century, and Heinlein’s The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress. By two years later, much had changed. In a poem titled “Insomnia,”* I wrote nostalgically about

. . . love among the leaflets and petitions
we had no place else to go
all we had then is gone
the strangeness, the friendships, the poverty
we have nothing left of that
except each other

Change is a constant in a fifty-year relationship. At the beginning, nobody thought we’d stay together, including us. Today, we’re still discovering unexpected ways in which we’re so different we’d be incompatible if we hadn’t also spent fifty years on working out how to get along. When we married, we talked about growing old together but didn't quite believe it would happen or could have imagined what it would be like. He’s retired and I’m in that liminal space between setting myself a rigorous standard of productivity and doing as much or as little as I like, happy as a bee knee deep in pollen.

He’s currently reading The Triangle of Power by Alexander Stubb, current president and former prime minister of Finland. I read a book a day or sometimes two in three days. Right now I’m particularly enjoying Sherry Thomas’s Lady Sherlock series, a riff on the Holmes canon that may be my favorite since Laurie King created Mary Russell. On our various electronic devices, I stream videos, mostly French and Korean series, also British and other English-language cop shows, rarely American. He hangs out online with global gaming friends he’s made over the years, listens to short story podcasts, and watches videos on art restoration, cooking, archaeology, and what’s going on in the world. I can’t get him to watch a movie with me, even on the rare occasion when it’s one I think we’d both enjoy. As I said, we’re different.

A lot of people ask us how we make it work. Certain aspects anyone can try at home (that’s the work). For the rest, you have to be lucky. You have to love each other (that’s the luck). It takes a lot of work, especially if you’re different: talking to each other; not always being right; letting go of expectations, including that you’ll agree on everything and do everything together. You can’t expect perfection. It doesn’t exist. You find that your beliefs and ways of doing things are not the absolutes you thought they were. What a liberating surprise, once you get used to the idea.


*included in my first poetry collection, I Am the Daughter, and in a volume of Best Poems of 1980 (Monitor)