When L and I were engaged, we threw parties to celebrate our last days as single people before becoming husband and wife.  His night consisted of beers with a few friends at his favorite taphouse.  Mine consisted of dinner and drinks at my apartment with my favorite 15 ladies.

Around 10:30pm, my party was in full swing. Something clinked on the glass door of my apartment balcony.  Then it clinked again. My roommate opened the sliding door to investigate. There was L.  Tipsy, happy, handsome, and radiating true love.  (His cousin was also there, serving as his designated driver, rolling his eyes.)

“What are you doing here?”, I asked, thrilled and radiating love right back.

“I love you, baby.  I wanted to say goodnight!”, he shouted up to me, all smiles.

“I love you, too!”, I shouted back.

My friends were giggling and swooning. You could cut the estrogen with a knife. And then.  Then.  HE CLIMBED UP THE WALL. He scaled two stories of  brick like Spiderman, hopped over the balcony fence and laid a perfect, passionate, beer-tinged kiss on my Bailey’s-flavored lips.  My friends aww’d and giggled, and I felt electrified with true love and devotion to my amazing future husband.

I had previously prided myself on not buying into the fairytale version of love and romance, FYI. We even embarked on several months of premarital counseling to untangle that toxic tale. But there it was. Possibility. This was TOTALLY a fairy tale moment.  My Prince Charming was making a valiant gesture of his devotion and true love mere hours before our pledge to be together other forever.

Fast forward a few months into newly-wedded bliss. And by bliss, I mean frequent fighting. L and I found ourselves locked into near-constant strife.  Most of the time, our arguments centered around petty things.  Dishes piled up by the sink.  My hair clogging the drain. Who’s turn was it to vacuum, anyway? What we were going to binge watch on Netflix. What was for dinner, and who’s responsibility was it to cook?  But those smaller annoyances opened the door to bigger issues. Sex.  Money.  Careers. Babies. Bodies. Validation.  This was most definitely not a fairy tale.

On one particular summer night, we were squawking at each other at full volume.  Wild gestures, name calling, and the lowest of blows thrown, “You sound just like your (insert family member)”.

Pro Tip: Negatively comparing your significant other to a family member is like throwing a lighted torch into a barrel of gasoline.

Now, we both have families who love us, parents who nurtured us, and siblings we care for deeply.  But we carry the positive and negative family interactions with us, allowing those deeply imprinted memories to make decisions for us in the heat of the moment.  Wild, easily triggered places hovering close to the surface, waiting for a spark, a breeze, or a drop of gasoline to ignite the fire.

We reminded each other of all the ways we sucked immensely. How we were just like a parent or sibling or distant relative. L stormed away from me, exclaiming he didn’t want to be near me.  I countered back that I didn’t even want to be in the same airspace, and he immediately went outside, slamming the door behind him.

I was furious.  HOW DARE HE WALK AWAY FROM ME.  Nevermind that I one-upped him in the leave-me-alone category.  He had the audacity to actually leave. That was it.  I stomped after him, ready to give him a serious piece of my mind and the hot side of my temper.  I opened the door to the balcony and slammed it behind me, dragging in a deep breath of oppressively humid summer air, ready to roar.

And then I saw L’s panicked face. A desperate”nooooooo!” escape from his lips as he lunged futilely for the already-shut door.

You see, the door automatically locked from the inside, and neither of us had keys.  Or phones.  L was shirtless, and I wasn’t wearing a bra. We were stuck on the balcony with no rescue in sight, feeling extraordinarily vulnerable.  This was NOT romantic.  And L was most definitely not Prince Charming any more than I was a Fairy Tale Princess.

We watched each other quietly, tensely, for a full minute, waiting for someone to throw the first verbal punch and lay blame for the locked door.  The evening air was suffocatingly hot, with the temperature rising as the clouds rolled in, trapping the heat.  We were both sweating buckets.

“What are we going to do?”, I asked meekly, staring hard at my bare feet.

Silence.

“This fighting.  It’s not worth it.  I love you.  You’re my friend.  I don’t want to tear you down.  I’m so sorry”, I whispered, tears mingling with the sweat on my cheeks.

“Me, too”, L whispered back as he wrapped his sticky arms around me.

Then we talked about our options to get back inside our home.

1. Break one of the glass panes in the door with our bare hands and turn the knob. (Dangerous and expensive.)
2. Scream for help until one of our neighbors called 911 to complain about the noise. (Possible, but seemed wasteful of fire department resources.)
3. Wait until one of our other neighbors pulled into the parking lot, try to get their attention, and  ask them to call the property manager and wait for several hours rescue us. (The management was notorious for not answering calls after hours, so this seemed HIGHLY unlikely as a real possibility.)
4. Send telepathic messages to my BFF, alerting her to our need for the spare key she carried. (Honestly, this was the best option except she would call first and we didn’t have our phones.)
5. Scale three stories, without footholds or anything except hot concrete to break a fall. (Yep.  This was the winner.)

L surveyed the wall for a minute and then he scrambled down the brick face of our apartment building, carefully, skillfully, bravely. I winced and held my breath the whole time, only exhaling to give L an occasional direction where to put his hands and feet. He landed safely on the ground, ran upstairs to our front door, which we had miraculously left unlocked, and let me in.

We stayed up very late that night.  We made up.  We made dinner.  We made love.  And we made a decision to go back to counseling because it was clear neither of us could untangle the toxic tales we had been telling ourselves.  We could systematically scale those walls, explore and unearth the murky, beautiful, impossible spaces together, and figure out a way to get unstuck. But we needed help.

We STILL go to counseling, almost 8 years later. We have wanted to quit this marriage thing more times than I’m comfortable admitting (approximately 1,438), but we are committed to finding a way out of our unmanageable places, to meeting each other there and holding out our hands.  Sometimes, I scale the wall. Sometimes L does.  And most of the time, we shout down for help to someone who tells us how to navigate our way off the balcony.

We laugh about that night now.  How silly we were, how much like a cheesy sitcom it was, and how we really should have waited for a neighbor instead. The way out of conflict is often terrifying and funny. It’s part of the story we tell.  We shed lots of tears. Maybe a little blood.  We make too many mistakes. We laugh to cover our tension. We make messes.  We make jokes. We break our own hearts. But we choose each other.  We choose forgiveness and growth.  We choose everyday to let Love win.

And maybe therapy wins a little, too.