“Falling in love for us meant falling into talk. We talked about our memories, broken bones, broken hearts and one broken marriage. We talked about our mothers, one Jewish and one Italian, constantly cooking and feeding. We talked about our fathers, neither of whom cooked or fed.

We talked about friends, come and gone. We talked about our careers, climbing the ladder of success, falling off the ladder, leaning in and leaning out.

We talked about our dreams: of traveling, of marriage, of how many children we would like and what we would name them. With those subjects addressed, we turned to smaller details and anecdotes, the stories about getting drunk, getting lost, crashing the car, stealing a candy bar and falling down a flight of subway stairs before a job interview.

Finally, we talked about the nonstories, the quirky facts and facets of personality: our favorite movies, what we liked to eat, what we wouldn’t eat. He hated Kalamata olives. He could do without cucumbers. I hated capers and marshmallows (and the end of ‘Ghostbusters’). He talked about rivers and rocks. I quoted Frank O’Hara and Mayakovsky. We compared 5K running times.

There was never enough time and so much to discuss. We talked about the colors of leaves, the shapes of clouds and why the word ‘warmth’ has a hidden ‘p.’

We talked about sex.

We talked about our wedding.

We talked about our new house.

We talked about furnishing it.

We talked about pregnancy.

We talked about the child.

Then the second.

Seven years into it, our marriage was different. After the machinations of getting the children to sleep, we would sit side by side in bed with computers on our laps, surfing the internet. We were not talking, not sleeping, so close and yet so far apart. This dynamic — of being physically together but emotionally disengaged — had also bled into the mundane of the everyday, with too much silence and space between us on the couch and with us cooking on opposite sides of the kitchen island.”