Falling in love with someone is easy. Staying in love with the same person, year after year, is much harder. That's why we're recording an hour of conversation every week of our first year of marriage. For us, it’s a way to dig into our fascination with one another and this existential question of lasting love. For you, it’s an invitation to creep on our marriage as it unfolds, mistake by mistake and lesson by lesson, since no one ever really told us about theirs. We’ll work through fights, expose probably too much of our sex life, and try to get to answers for how to stay in love in this little human experiment called I Think I Love You.
Riley & Caro
Consider also seeking out podcasts created by black people, as well as those which aim to shed further light on systemic racism in America. A few suggestions: @nprcodeswitch , @yoisthisracist , the 1619 project by the @nytimes, “74 Seconds” (which tells the story of Philando Castile’s murder), and @livvperez’s podcast are a few that come to mind.
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Falling in love with someone is easy. Staying in love with the same person, year after year, is much harder. That's why we're recording an hour of conversation every week of our first year of marriage. For us, it’s a way to dig into our fascination with one another and this existential question of lasting love. For you, it’s an invitation to creep on our marriage as it unfolds, mistake by mistake and lesson by lesson, since no one ever really told us about theirs. We’ll work through fights, expose probably too much of our sex life, and try to get to answers for how to stay in love in this little human experiment called I Think I Love You.
Riley & Caro
Consider also seeking out podcasts created by black people, as well as those which aim to shed further light on systemic racism in America. A few suggestions: @nprcodeswitch , @yoisthisracist , the 1619 project by the @nytimes, “74 Seconds” (which tells the story of Philando Castile’s murder), and @livvperez’s podcast are a few that come to mind.
On the anniversary of our marriage, one year in, we zoom way out and ask each other some questions. How have we grown, together and individually? How can we be better in this next year, and the years to come after that? And of course, what have we learned about how to stay in love?
Riley and I have asked one another thousands of questions over the course of our relationship, but very few of them have been explicitly directed towards understanding one another’s sexuality. That changes in this conversation.
NOT AT THE SAME TIME. Well, in the same conversation, just not both at once, you know what I mean. We check in on progress since a healthy breakthrough in our understanding of our own sex life, and recount a particularly unhealthy "breakthrough" off the highway somewhere in suburban Massachusetts.
Riley and I break down a particularly painful experience that took place the night before, which forced us to address the current state of our sex life.
Caroline and I take edibles and see how much of a detailed finance conversation we can get through before they kick in. The odds were not in our favor.
If you've never considered making financial decisions based off of a mantra, then you're not living. In this conversation, Riley and I talk finances (plot twist: I have decided to become savvy as hell with money). We also dip our toes into airstream progress, chat about how Riley learned to create an electrical system from scratch, and discuss whether we should change our approach to sharing pod-related information on social media or not.
Turns out marriage can be isolating as all hell. Despite the excitement (is that the word?) of the past few months, I've been dealing with a novel feeling of loneliness that both makes me feel guilty and stresses me out. What does it say about my marriage that it's "not enough" for me socially?
We stopped sharing in May, leaving off with Week 16 of marriage at the end of January. It's now Week 43 of marriage — it's important that if we start again, we start here, close to the present.
Wish I was joking. We break down a fight (obviously), which leads us to discussion about how to communicate our way through the barriers of drinking and navigating a friend group, and land ourselves in a learning about how to approach one another "belly up" when trying to resolve something. And, yes, Caroline has a cup of coffee without drinking water first and leaves halfway through to vomit.
What do you do when your partner has agnostic anger, some directionless frustration? Ignore it and let them figure it out on their own, or confront it, even if it has nothing to do with you? We still don't have a total answer, but this conversation marks our efforts to get closer to a solution.
This conversation took place in January when I, Queen Caro, returned from my MFA residency in Vermont. Over the course of an hour, Riley and I talked about: the idea of marriage being an active choice, whether you have to put yourself in dangerous situations (i.e. in a bar with Ryan Gosling at two in the morning) in order to make that choice, and whether it's possible for me to get in a drunken fistfight without Riley feeling obliged to step in. It's one of those little conversational gems where Riley and I actually disagree MORE as the hour goes on, likely because I was getting drunk as a skunk while we talked.
Skip to 34:57 if you get tired of hearing us bicker over navigating long distance. After we have it out, we get to systems for converting negative emotion into better productivity, and then our new favorite armchair theory that your first fight becomes your central conflict.
Big ol’ fourth wall break incoming. In the last week of winter holiday, Caroline and I discuss challenges with working together, namely on this project (as well as our fears around putting it out into the world, which at this point we hadn’t yet done), but also the myriad other ways our partnership (in the most practical sense of the word) manifests.
This week includes a real helter-skelter hodgepodge of sex topics, all of which stemmed from one initial thought: men deserve to feel wanted just as much as women do. This conversation also includes brief forays into: the field of epigenetics, taboo sex fantasies, and us mumbling into mics with pretty significant head colds.
Why does it feel like this whole project is just me getting naked onstage? This week we discover new stuck points around sharing responsibility for our health with one another, and try to get to useful mental models for shortening the half-life of fights. — Riley
We try to reconcile aspirational but abstract plans for radically equal parenting with the reality that women are the primary biological caretaker. Also Caroline explains why babies are viruses.
When you marry someone, their family becomes your family. Their friends become your friends. And that can make for excellent holiday fights about Scrabble words that aren't actually about Scrabble words.
We play it fast and loose with armchair psychology, digging into Alfred Adler's advice on anger, which has been really helpful for both of us. We discuss Caroline finding a real therapist too, and whether your partner is responsible for your fulfillment.
This conversation is the first one where we talk about marriage from an aerial view: what it means to us conceptually, how we viewed it before we met one another, and how our expectations of marriage have been met or changed since tying the knot.
Falling in love with someone is easy. Staying in love with the same person, year after year, is much harder. That's why we're recording an hour of conversation every week of our first year of marriage. For us, it’s a way to dig into our fascination with one another and this existential question of lasting love. For you, it’s an invitation to creep on our marriage as it unfolds, mistake by mistake, lesson by lesson — since no one ever really told us about theirs. We’ll work through fights, expose probably too much of our sex life, and try to get to answers for how to stay in love in this little human experiment called I Think I Love You.
Falling in love with someone is easy. Staying in love with the same person, year after year, is much harder. That's why we're recording an hour of conversation every week of our first year of marriage. For us, it’s a way to dig into our fascination with one another and this existential question of lasting love. For you, it’s an invitation to creep on our marriage as it unfolds, mistake by mistake and lesson by lesson, since no one ever really told us about theirs. We’ll work through fights, expose probably too much of our sex life, and try to get to answers for how to stay in love in this little human experiment called I Think I Love You.
Riley & Caro
Consider also seeking out podcasts created by black people, as well as those which aim to shed further light on systemic racism in America. A few suggestions: @nprcodeswitch , @yoisthisracist , the 1619 project by the @nytimes, “74 Seconds” (which tells the story of Philando Castile’s murder), and @livvperez’s podcast are a few that come to mind.
