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Zak leans his head against his hand. “You’re always asking about marriage and when we’re getting engaged.”
There’s the wordalwaysagain.
And he’s not wrong. Itisour biggest argument. I want to get married, settle down, have a family, and Zak isn’t ready. It’s not like I have unrealistic expectations. It’s been three years. That’s a normal amount of time in a relationship to start thinking about the next step. I mean, there’s even a song about it.First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes the baby in the baby carriage.I’ve been conditioned since I was three years old for this kind of outcome.
Except the man I love doesn’t agree.
Zak reaches out to the coffee table in front of him and grabs one of my student’s assignments from the top of the stack. He flips the paper over and takes my pen.
“What are you doing?” I walk over to the couch and sit beside him.
“I’m going to show you what our problem is,” he says as he begins drawing.
“You’re showing me with a diagram?”
He pauses, looking up at me. “I use diagrams with my team at work. The visual helps you see where you’re at and where you need to go so you can move forward to success.”
Zak is in sales, and unfortunately, his motivational manager speech comes out whenever we have a disagreement.It’s his “sales” voice.
I lean forward and examine the sixty-degree angle line that he’s drawn. His finger traces the line upward. “This is you and me.”
An upward line. That’s good, right? It means we’re growing together.
Zak shrugs. “Actually, it used to be you and me.”
Oh.
“You want our relationship to keep going on this same trajectory,” he says.
Do I want to see our relationship go up from here? Yeah, I do. Is that a crime? I give him a sideways glance. “And you don’t?”
He draws a straight line out from the top of the first. “I feel like our relationship has done this.”
It’s a plateau.
He drew a freaking plateau.
I shift my body, turning my knees into him. “Maybe we’ve stalled a few times, but I see no reason why we can’t continue on our original trajectory.” I don’t usually use words like “trajectory,” but this is Zak I’m talking to, and he’s all about sales, graphs, and goodtrajectories,so I’m using the stupid word.
“We’re not even on the same plane anymore.” He draws two more lines on the relationship diagram from Hell.
“We’re like this,” he says, pointing to the parallel lines. “Our lives don’t intersect.”
His words strangle my heart. “Of course they do.”
“They did at first, Meg, but now…” Zak rubs his hand over his prickly hair. “We don’t even like to do the same things.”
“Like what?” I’m going to need some examples, because right now, this entire conversation feels like it’s coming out of nowhere.
“My life is really all about the ABCs.”
“So is mine.” I raise my shoulders. “I teach second grade.”
“I’m talking about the ABCs of exercise. Abs, biceps, cardio.”
“Is that what this is about? You want me to go to CrossFit with you? Fine. I’ll probably complain the entire time, but I can do that so you feel like our lives intersect more.” I fold my arms across my chest. It’s all about compromise, right? I’m a second grade teacher. I can do compromise in my sleep.
“It’s not just the exercise thing. I want to stay out late and party, while you want to stay in and watch every season ofSurvivor.”
