At Everwell Home, my work reinforced the habit. During one meeting, our marketing director asked the team to compare two advertisements for a new living-room collection. One depicted a couple reading together on an old sofa. The other showed a woman standing in a doorway while her boyfriend carried in an enormous wrapped gift. The second advertisement performed better, even though the product barely appeared in it. We were instructed to make the campaign more emotionally urgent, which in our language meant creating anxiety and then promising that a purchase would resolve it.
My manager, Alicia, praised a caption I wrote about not settling for ordinary. I meant it as a harmless sales line, but it followed me home. Ordinary was exactly what Donovan offered: steady meals, errands made lighter, gentle affection, difficult conversations approached without threats. I began thinking ordinary was a polite word for insufficient. That interpretation had little to do with him and everything to do with the fear I carried from childhood, but I had not yet learned to distinguish the two.
There were moments when my better judgment nearly reached the surface. One evening Donovan came over straight from a long shift because my kitchen sink had started leaking onto the floor. He replaced a worn fitting, cleaned the cabinet, and made sure the wood underneath could dry. Afterward he sat at the table with tired eyes and asked whether I wanted to take a walk. I looked at the damp towel on the floor, the dry cabinet, and his work clothes, and felt a rush of love so strong it embarrassed me.
I almost said what I needed to say: that I was afraid of becoming unimportant, that old wounds were making me suspicious of quiet happiness, and that I sometimes needed him to tell me plainly what our future meant to him. Instead, I waited for him to announce those things without being asked. When he said he was looking forward to having more evenings like this, I answered that fixing plumbing hardly counted as a romantic date. The disappointment that crossed his face lasted a second. He smiled and said he would plan something nicer for the weekend.
He did plan something nicer. On the next Saturday, he took me to a small lake an hour outside Dayton, where autumn had begun turning the trees gold. He packed a picnic, borrowed his father's old camera, and let me choose the hiking trail. We sat on a wooden dock while the sunlight moved across the water, and I admitted that I sometimes worried our life would become repetitive. Donovan said he worried about that too, which surprised me. Then he added that repetition could be good or bad depending on what it contained: the same old unresolved argument was exhausting, but waking up beside someone you loved sounded like a privilege.