My favourite sentence of Phil Christman’s essay, “How to be Married,” was omitted from the Harper’s edit. “If adolescence lasted even six months longer than it did,” Christman writes, “it would certainly kill us all.”
That is a very good line: hyperbolic bullshit (aka irony) that functions as free indirect discourse. Yes, that is how it felt, to some of us. And this is how we feel about the fact that it felt that way. The whole essay is voiced between teenage disbelief and the knowingness of middle age.
Christman meets his future wife when they are teenagers and nothing happens for six years. When he recounts the meeting, he sustains the affectionate eye-roll:
She enjoyed theater, she told me with her mouth—the exact right shape for a mouth, I suddenly realized. Her nose had very light freckles. She eventually used the word “existentialism,” which made the connections between us altogether eerie, for I, too, knew what that was.
He kisses her briefly, once—a kiss that, six years later she …
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