Tag: marriage

Today, Brian and I have been married fifteen years— fifteen years of living life, raising kids, cleaning kitchens. Typical married things. But one thing we do together might not be quite as typical: we make music.

That’s the part of our marriage I’ve been dwelling on these past several days.

Sometimes making music together comes easily— we go through patches of inspiration and productivity and cohesive collaboration. Songs come at a rapid pace and the lyrics and the music seem to write themselves. It feels natural and exciting and fun. A gift.

Other times though? We still work together to accomplish things, but it feels clunky. Our vision for what we are doing together doesn’t align. I want the song to lean toward one style— he wants another. He wants me to change a word to fit his vision for the measure. I want him to change the music for the precise meaning I created. The songs aren’t fast. They can be a bit… debated.

Sometimes, they are put aside.

Music during that time feels forced. Not fun. But, eventually, the music comes back out and compromises are made. The songs still get written.

But then… there are times where the act of making music just feels exhausting, let alone trying to find the time to do it together. Sometimes, we simply don’t have any songs to work on. We both feel dried up. Maybe even irritable. Maybe too sad to have songs. Too tired to find melodies and harmonies.

Maybe, for less committed people, others would have moved on. Agreed that the collaboration just wasn’t working anymore.

Sitting in silence is a hard thing to do.

The past few years have been full of a lot of things to stop our music together.

We’ve had long bouts of silence. Sadness and grief and incessant things taking up our time and energy and emotions left it hard to be creative together. To have both the space to find songs and the capacity to work together on them has felt impossible. And with that, it is easy to wonder if maybe we aren’t meant to make music together anymore.

But music, like marriages, are worth fighting for. Are worth sitting in the silence for. Are worth debating lyrics and tempos and dynamics for.

Because at the end of the day, we believe that music, like marriages, are worth the friction.

The silence and struggle to find the right notes ends up creating a movement that we never would have imagined on our own… but we recognize that we aren’t really the ones composing it all anyway.

I think it is easy to think of ourselves as the ones writing the songs. Sitting at the piano, choosing the key, deciding which line gets the melody and which gets harmony. But somewhere in the last few years— in the seasons with no songs in us at all— I’m beginning to suspect we have the roles backward. Brian and I, we aren’t the composers.

We’re the instruments.

The marriage itself is the piece being written, with us inside it, playing the parts set in front of us without always being able to hear how the measures we are in fits into the whole movement.

That changes what the silence means.

A rest isn’t a blank space where nothing happens. It’s written with the same precision as a note— it has a duration, a place in the measure, a reason for being there. A composer doesn’t write a rest because the music ran out. He writes it because the piece needs it: to let the previous phrase finish ringing, to build breath before what comes next, to make the re-entry of sound mean something it couldn’t have meant without the quiet first. The seasons where Brian and I had nothing— no melody, no energy, barely language for each other— felt like failure from inside them. But if He is the one composing, maybe those weren’t gaps in our song. Maybe they were measures He wrote on purpose, and we just couldn’t read the rest for what it was while we were sitting inside it.

The friction makes more sense this way too.

The counterpoint between two voices isn’t built on staying uncomfortable— it’s built on two voices each keeping their own line, their own pace, their own shape, while still moving toward something coherent together. Brian’s line and mine were never meant to always move in lockstep; that’s the whole point of two independent voices. And because they’re independent, they cross at times. A note held over from one chord lands as dissonance against the next— suspension— and that ache is what makes the resolution, when it finally comes, feel earned instead of cheap. The friction isn’t a sign the voices have stopped working together. It’s a sign they’re still moving independently enough to need resolving at all.

There’s also a place in music, when it begins to shift, where it feels and sounds wrong for a beat or two. The ear isn’t sure what is happening. But the disorientation isn’t an accident. It’s simply how a piece moves from one part to another without completely stopping the song. Grief, illness, the slow grinding seasons that ate our creative and emotional bandwidth— maybe those were simply… modulations. Moments we couldn’t hear correctly while we were inside them, because we just hadn’t landed in the new key yet.

Truth doesn’t have to be comfortable. And the truth is music doesn’t require us to feel inspired, or even to feel like collaborators, for it to still be composition. A player can be exhausted, run out of breath, barely find the next note, and still be playing exactly the part written for them. Faithfulness to the measure in front of us was and IS the whole job, even— maybe especially— when we can’t hear the rest of the score.

We don’t have to author the resolution.

We just have to keep playing our part.

So fifteen years in, I don’t think we’ve written a song together so much as we’ve been played— two instruments under one Hand, given a piece neither of us could have composed alone and wouldn’t have chosen, in places, if we’d been left to choose. The beauty and the tension and the long silences aren’t separate categories of our marriage. They’re movements of the same work.

And if it’s His piece, then the only thing that matters is whether it sounds, in the end, like it was written by Him and through Him and to Him all along.

(Here’s to many more years of making music together, Brian. I love you and am excited about our new burst of music creation together. Look at this measure in the piece we are working on, at those next words rubbing right against that rest. God with us… All along.)