Sarah Peterson

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Do tonight out of order

For about six years our evenings have been a four panel comic strip, and I could draw you all four panels from memory. Panel one, dinner, usually something with rice. Panel two, the couch, one of us holding the remote and neither of us really watching. Panel three, phones. Panel four, his lamp, then my lamp, and the whole thing starts again tomorrow with different rice. My name is Kate. I am forty one. I have been with Paul for fourteen years, I do the books for a landscaping company, and we have two kids, nine and twelve, and a dishwasher that has needed replacing since March. I want to say the important thing first, because when I typed versions of this into my phone the internet immediately assumed my marriage was in trouble, and it is not. Paul is a good man and I like him enormously. He still makes my coffee before he makes his own. He still sends me the same joke about the neighbour's caravan every single time it moves an inch. When my dad was in hospital he drove ninety minutes each way for eleven days and never once made it a thing. Nothing is wrong with us. That is not me being defensive. That is the actual situation, and it is also the reason it took me six years to notice anything at all. Because here is what nobody tells you about a good marriage. It does not fall apart. It just gets very, very efficient. We used to have more panels. He wore a shirt and tie to work back then and I used to pull the tie loose when he got in the door, not for any reason, just because it was there and so was he. I could not tell you the year I stopped doing that. I could not tell you the year he started coming to bed in the striped pajamas his mother bought him, at ten to ten, like a man clocking on for a shift. There was no argument. There was no incident. There was a Tuesday, and then about two thousand more of them. And the strange part, the part I did not admit to anybody, is that I was not even sad about it. I had decided this is simply what it looks like after the fun part. You love each other, you run a house, you watch the show, you turn off the lamps. Everybody lives like this. That thought used to sting a bit and then one year it just did not anymore. That is the bit that got me later. Not the routine. The fact that the routine had stopped bothering me. Then in April my twelve year old had a school project. Draw your family as a comic. Four panels, one for each of us. He drew his sister mid cartwheel. He drew himself with a football. And he drew me and his dad sitting on the couch, both of us with a little rectangle in our hands, and he had shaded in grey lines coming off the television to show it was on. He was proud of it. It went on the fridge. He did not mean one single thing by it, and I want to be clear that I did not cry or have a moment in the kitchen, because I did not. I made dinner. But I looked at that drawing about nine times over the next week and I kept thinking, out of everything he could have drawn us doing, that is what we look like from the outside. That is our panel. He has only ever known us as the couch. I am not going to tell you that ruined anything. It just left a little door open in my head that would not shut. Three weeks later I was in my sister Meg's kitchen. Meg has three kids, a job she hates, and a husband who has an actual bad back, and somehow the two of them have been irritatingly pleased with each other since about Christmas. I had noticed. I had not asked, because you do not ask your sister that. I asked her that. She laughed at me for about a minute and then went and got a bag out of her fruit bowl, next to the bananas, like it was nothing, because to her it was. She said the two of them take one each in the evening. She said it very casually and then she said the thing I actually wrote down later. "The first ingredient isn't for your body. It's for your head. That's the bit that convinced me. Everything else in that aisle is shouting." I laughed at her. Out loud. I need that on the record, because three weeks later I was buying the same thing off my phone in a car park and feeling completely ridiculous about it. They are called Lunore Spicy Cubes. They are peach flavoured gummies. I sat at the kitchen table that night and read about them properly with Paul, which was its own small event, because Paul reads the label on everything including bread. The idea underneath it is simple enough that it annoyed me. The noise of the day sits on top of the evening like a coat thrown over a lamp. The light is not gone. It is covered. So the first ingredient, L-Theanine, is not there to fire anything up. It is there to quiet the head, the part of you that is still doing tomorrow's list at ten at night. Then Muira Puama, Maca Root and Horny Goat Weed give the wanting that is already underneath a bit of room to come back up on its own. Four plant ingredients, one job each. No caffeine. Nothing that revs you, which mattered to me, because tired was never really our problem. Booked solid in the head was our problem. Two small things sold me more than the ingredients did. Peach flavour, because a company that has watched real people knows nobody keeps taking something that tastes like a chore. And gummies rather than capsules, so they sit in the fruit bowl and not in the cupboard with the vitamins nobody finishes. Then Paul read the label out loud and we both went quiet for a second, because it does not promise fireworks. It talks about supporting the mood and giving the evening a little room. That is all. Everything else I had ever scrolled past in this category was yelling in capital letters about a boost. This one was almost shy about itself. Paul, who is suspicious of everything, said "well, that's the first honest sentence I've read all week." One thing we did that I would do again. Paul is on something for his blood pressure, so he asked his pharmacist before adding anything new. Two minutes at the counter and she was completely unbothered by the question. If you take prescription medication, do that. So we tried it. One each in the evening, and we agreed to give it a real month before deciding anything, because we are both the sort of people who quit things on day three. The first evening was, honestly, just a nice evening. We laughed at the flavour. We stayed up a bit later than usual. Nothing cinematic, nothing I would put in an ad, and I am aware I am currently putting it in an ad. What I actually noticed first had nothing to do with romance. It was that I stopped narrating. There is a running commentary in my head from about six until eleven, school forms, invoices, whether the dishwasher is finally going, and one evening around week two I realised it had gone quiet and I was just sitting in my own living room. I had forgotten the living room could be that quiet. Then the talking came back before anything else did. We stayed up until half past midnight on a Sunday going through everything and nothing, the way you do at the start, when you have not already told each other everything. That was not on the label. And then a Wednesday. Not a date night. Not an anniversary. Nobody planned it and there was no babysitter involved because the kids were asleep upstairs like they are every Wednesday. Paul came in from work and I pulled his tie loose in the hallway, no reason, just because it was there and so was he, and I heard myself laugh at how long it had been since I had done that. He had already changed into the striped pajamas by nine, because he is who he is, and I told him that was fine, they were coming off anyway. I threw the covers back off the bed at ten at night like I was making it at eleven in the morning. I went to the door for the light switch and looked back at him over my shoulder from it, which is a thing I have not done since our old flat with the brown carpet. Four panels became five. That is the whole story. That is all that happened. Now the part I owe you, because I am not going to pretend a peach gummy rebuilt my marriage. Several things changed at once. We started going up at the same time instead of me at half nine and him at eleven. We put the phones on the dresser instead of the bed, which sounds tiny and was not. My twelve year old started sleeping through, finally, which gave us back an evening we had not had in years. I am not telling you the cubes did all of that alone. What I will tell you is that we tried the phones-on-the-dresser thing twice before and it lasted nine days, and this time it did not fall over, and I think the difference was that we were both actually present in the room by then rather than braced for tomorrow. If you want the practical bits, they are plant based, made by a small outfit that has somehow collected 4.7 stars across more than 7,500 reviews, and they give you 120 days to decide, which is four months. Four months is not a gesture. Four months is a company saying try it properly. I keep a spare bag in the cupboard now, which is the loudest review I can give anything. The guarantee is genuinely the whole policy. Give it a fair go, tell them nothing happened, they send the money back. No argument, no form, no clever conditions. So the actual risk here is one month of ordinary evenings, which you were going to have anyway. If you do try it, do it the boring way. One each in the evening, and give it a real month before you decide. Do not sit there auditing each other on night one. Put them in the fruit bowl and forget they are a thing you bought. And here is the permission I would have liked somebody to hand me about four years earlier, so I am handing it over for free. You are allowed to want more when nothing is wrong. A good marriage is not the ceiling, it is the floor. Wanting one different evening is not a complaint about the fourteen years. It is a thank you to them. The comic is still on our fridge, by the way. Same four panels, my son will not let me take it down. I have never told him he was right, and I am never going to. I have just quietly started giving us a fifth one. K. Try it here: https://lunoregummies.com/products/lunore-spicy-cubes-cc Individual experiences vary. These statements have not been evaluated by the FDA. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.

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