Why did my friends drop me just because I got married?
When they talked about shanah rishonah, they never told me about the quiet.
They talked about adjustments and compromise and the First Fight. They talked about cooking his favorite meals and getting along with his mother (or not getting along, as the case may be) and reminding him about your birthday. But no one ever told me about those long, boring, empty stretches of time — Shacharis and Minchah and Maariv, first seder and second seder and night seder, all that time listening to the clock tick slowly on in your gleaming kitchen and wondering how you never noticed how loudly your shoes slap on the floor .
The evenings were the hardest. I had a part-time secretarial job in a real estate office and I was getting my degree online. It’s not like I was bored. But I had no social life. I was the only secretary in the quiet office, and while I’d gotten my BA in a local frum program together with friends, my master’s program was totally online. If I didn’t count the cashier in the grocery or my visits to my parents, I had no social interaction to speak of. I used my free afternoons to cook supper and fold the little laundry we had, and when Meir left for night seder, I usually had coursework to do, but sometimes, when I looked at the computer screen, I thought I would scream.
“Why don’t you get together with friends?” Meir asked me one evening, on his way out the door. “Chill a little, relax, enjoy yourself… what about your whole chevrah? Or Estie?”
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