V was the first Indian-American I’d ever met who actually liked to camp. I’d always associated camping with white people, along with sunbathing and being grounded, but here was V at REI — testing compasses, lusting after tents — with a thrilled, drifting look in his eye. I kept thinking about a term that a friend and hiking enthusiast had once taught me — “poop trowel” — two words that returned to me now with great foreboding.

But as I trailed along, I found myself vaguely infected by V’s enthusiasm. It was one of the things I liked best about him, his ready embrace of adventure. He had once done a seven-day solo hike through the Himalayas, sans guide, and slept at a tea house each night. Before I bought a bicycle, V got me to double on his and we rode all around New York City that way, though it took me a while to loosen my clench on his waist.

Ironically, it was that very sense of adventure that seemed to prove us incompatible. We were plagued by the question of where we would live for the next 10 to 20 years, if we were to get married. Prior to meeting me, V had spent a year in rural India and three years in Sierra Leone. He had always envisioned living and working abroad, either in India or Africa; I had never even entertained the possibility. The question of where led to a multitude of what ifs. We tried coming up with timelines and spreadsheets that would fulfill both our geographical needs. Google Docs became a primary form of correspondence.

I think we both believed that we would soon be parting ways, and that this camping trip would be some lovely, pastoral memory we would linger over, long from now, when we were married to other people. I agreed to go hiking, mostly because of his enthusiasm, and how much I would miss it.

Not 15 minutes into our hike, I was faced with a number of immutable truths — that my backpack was the approximate shape and weight of a mini-fridge, that my one prized possession, a king-size Hershey bar, was somewhere in his backpack instead of mine, that we had to first ascend a mountain in order to descend it. V went ahead of me, leaping from stone to stone, chatty and upbeat, immune to my slightly exaggerated mouth-breathing. The first bad sign came early on, when we were met by a hiker descending the mountain. He said that the weather, on his way up, had grown so chilly and cloudy that he’d decided not to go above treeline. We told the hiker where we were planning to go: up the mountain, along the ridge, through a ravine, along another ridge, and into a colony of shelters by sundown.

The hiker took one look at me in my oversize yellow poncho, bowed under the weight of my mini-fridge, and asked for our full names. “Just in case,” he said, leaving off the rest.

This is the point in the TV movie where you curse the foolish hikers and urge them to turn back. In our defense, a park ranger had initially approved our route, had even guessed that a yellow blob like me could tackle the whole journey without a problem. The views, he said, would be worth it.

But at the top of the mountain, the landscape turned lunar, drained of color, bereft of plant life. We stood among the gray rock, surrounded by cloud on all sides, a far cry from the turning leaves we had come to see, the livid orange and garnet that lavished the slopes at this time of year. This was a more desolate beauty, remote and isolating. But we’d been planning this trip for weeks, and after a mere hour of suffering and no sign of those magical, mist-clad mountains, we weren’t about to turn back around.

I decided to adopt a certain philosophy toward the hike, which was something like my approach to life at 26: I don’t know where I am but I’m keeping on. I was living in New York City, working as an assistant editor on a documentary film, writing my first novel in the evenings, and trying to negotiate with the mouse that lived in the bowels of my gas stove. Around that time, I read Rilke’s “Letters to a Young Poet,” in which I’d starred these lines: “Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question.”

As the hike went on, I found myself living a lot of questions. I kept waiting for the visual rewards that the White Mountains website had promised us — a sapphire lake, a giant, sleepy moose — but no. The uphill climb flattened out into a hostile field of gray boulders. Buffeted by wind and nearly horizontal rain, I struggled to keep my balance.

And I learned another word — “cairns” — cryptic little piles of stones that marked the trail. Those stone snowmen became for me tiny totems of authority and hope in our increasingly bleak surroundings. After we crossed the boulder field, we checked the map. We weren’t covering enough ground to stick to our original plan. We had no time to sit and eat. Instead we took turns shoveling mixed nuts into our mouths from a sweaty Ziploc bag, and though I hate mixed nuts, I nibbled with a feral intensity.

Cold and wet and miserable, I focused on composing a series of speeches, which I planned to deliver as soon as we found ourselves within reach of a proper toilet. Rhetorical questions included: Why couldn’t we have started with a day hike? Why didn’t we obey the several signposts that read, DO NOT GO PAST THIS SIGN? But the light was fading too quickly to pause and interrogate. The sun had begun to set by the time we reached the ravine, a steep descent among jagged rocks and a rather anemic stream. We had no choice but to strap on our headlights, like miners, and scoot from stone to wet stone on our rears. Propelled by resentment, I led the way.

At some point, I turned and noticed that V had fallen a good bit behind. When he finally reached me, he showed me his hands, which were pale and trembling slightly. His lips were going numb, making it difficult to talk. Hypothermia, he guessed. I could see he was scared. I pressed his wet-gloved hands between mine. It didn’t help.

We went on boulder-scooting, slowly now. Every so often, I called behind and he replied, but if his voice was too distant, I waited until he reached me. Soon, the dark engulfed us completely, and all I could see was the small tunnel of light from my headlamp, brightening the few steps ahead but nothing more. The snowman totems were lost to us. Our map had fallen apart. All we had was the sound of our names in the dark, or I’m here, or Go on.

It was pitch black when we reached the bottom of the ravine, and yet instantly warmer below treeline. We stumbled along what we thought was the trail and finally arrived at a group of rickety lean-to’s in which hikers could pitch their tents. Climbing into a lean-to, I felt an almost deranged euphoria. I didn’t even mind, later that night, when we realized that V’s sleeping bag had been soaked through by the rain. We stuffed ourselves into my lady-size sleeping bag, packed so tight that I couldn’t move my torso or legs, a sort of two-headed sausage. As was his custom, V fell asleep within minutes. Exhausted as I was, I lay awake, listening to him snore, never so content to be partially paralyzed next to another.

As I write this, I’m in New Delhi and V is in Mozambique, but usually we live in Washington, D.C. We got married two years after our White Mountains hike, and while we spend some months out of each year in different countries, I’ve come to believe that the question of where we’ll live 15 years from now is as foggy as who we will be. Ours is a marriage that some of my relatives call “modern,” and by modern, I think they mean inscrutable.

And as married folk do, we’ve recounted That Time We Went Hiking to our friends so often that we can call up the smallest details, like the squirrel scratching all night at the skin of our tent. (Another rodent negotiation.) What I don’t remember as readily is the growing panic, the uncertainty behind every step. The memory of that fear fades a bit with every telling.

In retrospect, the happy ending of our hike seems a fated eventuality, but logic — and a hundred other hiker horror stories — suggest otherwise. There is a multitude of other routes the story could have taken, that our story could still take, twists and boulder-scooting turns that no Google Doc spreadsheet could foresee. Such is the wilderness of marriage. We continue calling across the dark, across continents, and so long as the other answers, I’m here, we are safe; we keep on.

But one evening in March, I sent Nick an email. My hands were trembling as I typed. It was subject lined “things you may or may not remember,” and this is what it said:

“My friend Charlotte is getting married in New Orleans on May 13, and I will be going. May 13 also happens to be the day I met you, six years ago on Royal Street with a lump on my head the size of a lime. (Life is WEIRD, right?) I’d like to see you. Is that possible?”

I hadn’t seen Nick since he came to New York City in the spring of 2007. The morning he left, we woke early and watched an episode of “The Wire,” and then he walked me to the subway in my Brooklyn neighborhood. As I descended the steps he remained at the top, peering down and smiling. He did this whenever we parted, a habit that unnerved and delighted me at once. I’d wave him away while I stood in the security line at the airport – you can go now, I’m OK – but he would just stand there. Not going anywhere, he seemed to be saying, although that was clearly a lie. A few weeks after the New York trip, he called one Friday night and ended our relationship.

“You deserve someone who can be there for you,” he said.

I responded in the most articulate way I could muster under the circumstances. “Oh, fuck off.”

—–

The story of how I met Nick is one I have told many times. I have told it at parties, and in essays (even in this publication), and so I might as well tell you now.

It begins six years ago, when I was in New Orleans for a different wedding. I was walking along a quiet stretch of the French Quarter with two friends around 1 a.m. when a kid yanked my purse and, when I didn’t let go, clocked me above the left eyebrow with a pistol. Nick was the detective on the case.

“That’s so romantic,” people sometimes say, although I can assure you it was not. It was violent and horrible, and flirting was the furthest thing from both our minds that night as I rattled off a description of the kid while holding an ice pack to the side of my head. (OK, it was not the furthest thing from my mind. I did look for a wedding ring. He had one.)

It never occurred to me that anything would come of that case. This was a year after Katrina. Bodies were still being found in abandoned attics. But eight months later, I received a photo lineup in the mail, and I was surprised to discover that even after so much time had passed, I knew exactly who the kid was, knew it in my bones. Four months after that I was flown to New Orleans to testify at a pre-motion trial. I mean, life is WEIRD, right?

When I came back to New York, I was seized by a feeling that I should send a present to the recently separated detective who sat with me after the trial while I tried to shake off a grief I could not articulate. (I sent him the first season of “The Wire.”) That gift sparked a correspondence that lasted for six months. A few weeks after the kid pleaded guilty and got 15 years, I returned to New Orleans to see Nick.

“It doesn’t seem fair,” I told him once, sitting on his puffy leather couch in the nondescript one-bedroom where he’d moved after the split from his wife. “That kid gets a prison sentence, and we get each other.”

“That’s cute,” he said, threading his fingers through my hair.

“That I care about that kid?”

“That you think life is fair.”

Around the time we began corresponding, Nick moved to the homicide department. It was grueling, thankless work. Little romance in that, either, though I romanticized it anyway, besotted as I was by true crime and mafioso grandeur and David Simon. At the time, I wrote a blog about pop culture for a sex site. Of course I wanted to hear about guns and blood spatter. Nick, meanwhile, was happy to hear about pop culture and sex. We were the perfect escapes for each other, and we had both been searching for open hatches.

When people write about falling in love, I tend to cringe for them, because love requires a delusion that is deeply personal and impossible to explain to the world. So I’ll just say that I have doubted every relationship I’ve ever had, until that one. I was absolutely certain that Nick and I were meant to be together, and I was right. I just failed to specify how long.

When Nick broke up with me, I was devastated. Stunned. Nothing he said that night made sense to me, because it ran so contrary to the 500 conversations we’d had about how the other one was stitched into our DNA.

“The way I felt about you changed,” he said. “I don’t know why.”

If a duck calls you up one night, and tells you he’s an elephant, what do you say? How do you respond?

I responded the best way I knew how. “Oh, fuck off.”

In the five years that have elapsed since that conversation, we have spoken only a handful of times. We have tried to be friends – he missed me, I knew that – but then our conversations would lead me down the same sorrowful path, crying in my Stella Artois, and I’d grow incensed when he didn’t return an email or call me back.

I dated other men. Kind men, whom I quite liked. But in that eye-rolling way that is native to sensitive types, and writers, and alcoholics, and hoarders of memory and other people’s affection – of which I am batting a thousand – I held on to Nick, to the idea of Nick, to the hope represented by Nick through five years of recession woes, drinking problems and personal catastrophe. I did crazy things, which I can only admit now because I don’t do them anymore: I slept in his police shirt. I got insanely drunk one Sunday afternoon and called a dozen friends, begging them to convince me not to call him. Oh, the drama. Oh, the sturm und drang. Self-pity that could rattle the cupboards.

While I bled openly in public, he remained behind a fortress of stoicism. He is as much a cop as I am a drama queen. I don’t mean to say he is callous, because Nick is a tender person. His favorite movie is “Casablanca.” I have found this to be true of other cops, who manage to wall off some soft patch of sentiment behind the barbed wire fence. One night we were at the bar when I saw him talking with great passion to another detective. I figured they were discussing a case. Turns out, they were talking about their love for “The Notebook.”

But the few conversations Nick and I did have were a tangle of “do not cross” tape. I asked him things like, “How are you?”

He said things like, “Great.”

I said things like, “Great?” with a bit of eager anticipation, hoping he might sketch out a more detailed portrait.

Instead, he would say, “Yup.”

There was one thing Nick told me during the breakup that did make sense, and which I held on to with both fists. He said, “I met you at the wrong time.”

I’d be walking along the Hudson River one Saturday afternoon and those words would float up into my head. Well, what would be the right time? And when I moved from New York back to Dallas, a 90-minute flight between us, those words returned. Could the right time be now?

I scoured the landscape for signs that we were supposed to be together, or that he still thought about me. A New Orleans fleur-de-lys insignia at the restaurant where I was dining: What could that mean? A book about an NOPD murder crossing my desk: Why that, why now?

It was ridiculous, it was pathetic – let’s all agree as a group – but I could not stop clinging to the notion that the universe would bend itself so that our lives would entwine once more.

And then came Charlotte’s wedding.

I sent Nick an email late at night, when I suspected he’d still be at his desk, and by the time I woke the next morning, he had sent his response. Yes, he’d be happy to see me again. Lunch, drinks, whatever. It was exactly the answer I anticipated, which brought tremendous relief. But what came next blindsided me.

“If she’s free, can I invite my wife?”

So much can happen in five years. When I took those long walks along the Hudson, I used to wonder if Nick had remarried. I made up so many stories about him, and that was certainly one of them. What she might look like. Who she might be. I also wondered if he’d gotten back together with his first wife, the on-again, off-again high school sweetheart he married at the age of 22, three years after they had a baby together. Divorces take a year in New Orleans, and our relationship tracked exactly with that time period. He broke up with me the same week his divorce was final.

Even now I don’t know if the email he sent refers to his first wife, or his second wife, or his third wife or his 40th, because I could not muster the nerve to ask. The fact that I find it easier to write an essay on this subject is one of a thousand strange quirks that makes me who I am. The fact that he will not tell me any of that stuff until I ask directly is one of his.

In the days that followed his email, though, something shifted inside me. It calved like a glacier. It burst like the prick of a safety pin held up to the swirly rainbow curve of the world’s largest bubble. I would have told you this was impossible. I swear to God I thought I would spend the rest of my days clinging to that stupid blue police shirt, a modern-day Miss Havisham, but now I felt different about him, much as he had once felt different about me. I did not hate him. In fact, I adored him. But I did not want to see him again. The longing was gone.

I emailed Nick a week later. The subject line read, “on second thought.” I told him I thought it was a bad idea that we see each other. I told him I had been mistaken.

I had been mistaken about so many things. I’m not just talking about Nick now. I’m talking about the stories we tell ourselves about our lives: That it is absolutely going to be this way, or it is absolutely going to be that way. It is fated. It is doomed. It is destined. It is done. I have believed so many lies about myself, for so many years, and closed the lid to lie down inside those coffins. I thought I could never stop drinking, but I did. And I thought I could never be happy in the city where I grew up, but I am. And I thought I would go to my grave crying for the cop in New Orleans who didn’t love me back, but I don’t feel that way anymore. In fact, I feel kind of grateful. I’d be a horrible cop’s wife. Are you kidding me?

We don’t know how our stories end, and the greatest plot twists are the ones we never saw coming. There is a line that I love. “God is a first-rate novelist.” It’s from Richard Price’s introduction to David Simon’s book, “Homicide.”

So I went to New Orleans, six years to the day after I’d been pistol-whipped, but that date has a new significance to me. Charlotte’s wedding was so lovely. It was full of personality, and color, and the peculiar language shared by two people as their lives interweave. After the ceremony, we paraded through the French Quarter behind a brass band in a Second Line procession. As we passed crowds watching us on Chartres, I kept wondering if I might catch a glimpse of Nick. I did not. But somebody did run into Leonardo DiCaprio. (Life is WEIRD, you guys.)

The next afternoon I took one last stroll through the Quarter before heading out of town. I snapped a picture of the sign on Royal Street, the same street where I had been mugged, the street where I first told Nick I was in love with him. That street is a knot of complicated meaning to me.

I couldn’t help laughing at the big ONE WAY sign hanging right below it. I know it doesn’t mean anything. But I took it as a message from the universe that it was time to move on.

Over the next five years, I got that seat. I spent Hanukkahs, Passovers, even Purims in Judy’s plant- and music-filled home in Amherst, Mass., my picture hanging on her fridge alongside her children and grandchildren. To her, I was a done deal. I was family. To David, not so much.

After thousands of dollars spent on couples therapy, David still couldn’t make up his mind about me. He kept saying he “wanted to want to marry me.”

“What did I do wrong?” Judy asked me one day, in a stolen, private moment, not understanding why David was unable to commit to me.

I wished I understood. I wanted to blame his ambivalence on something specific. Yet the truth was he didn’t love me enough to make me his wife, and her love wasn’t enough to change his mind or heart.

When David and I broke up, Judy sent me a handwritten note in the mail telling me she was so very sorry and that she wished me everything I wanted for myself. And with one last “Love, Judy,” my picture was no longer hanging on her refrigerator. I no longer had a place at her table. I was no longer part of her family.

My mother, who by this time had moved to a house in Connecticut, came to live with me for a week. She yanked David’s nightstand and lamp from the wall and pushed my bed up against the window, so I wouldn’t be reminded of where he used to sleep. We repainted my living room, ordered in sushi, and she held me as I cried. Then my father invited me down to Florida. He took me out to expensive steak dinners and let me sleep late. We spent hours watching “Planet Earth” until I couldn’t think about anything other than stalactites and snow leopards. I was grateful to both of them for being there for me, but it didn’t erase a nagging aloneness I felt deep inside, the pain I still harbored over their divorce, over our broken family. I was 35 and mad at myself for still being hung up on a long gone childhood home. It was time for me to create my own home, start my own family. I just didn’t know how to do it.

All I knew is that I didn’t want to spend another five years with another mixed-message guy, only to get a “Dear John letter” from another almost mother-in-law. But like a crackhead who can’t shake her habit no matter how hard she tries, I was a goner the second I stepped foot into Susan’s kitchen.

Paper turkeys and streamers were strewn everywhere. Her house smelled of chocolate babka and apple cider. I could call this place home, I thought, sitting down, not wanting to get up.

It was only my sixth date with Jason. But it seemed longer since we’d spent four years of high school together and had been Facebook friends for the past year. I knew I shouldn’t get too excited, but the fact that he had invited me home for Thanksgiving and that I was meeting his mom so early on made me feel special, like he was really considering me as someone he could spend his life with. When he invited me back for Hanukkah a few weeks later, and my picture was hanging on the fridge, I knew I was in.

Susan and I spent hours in her kitchen frying latkes, bonding over how we both give too much and have short necks. She even confided in me that she had never seen Jason so happy. This was the real deal.

Jason and I didn’t end up making it past New Year’s.

Instead of a note, Susan picked up the phone. “It’s not you,” she said. “You’re wonderful, perfect, beautiful.” She was a poet, and explained to me that a poem isn’t possible if the writer isn’t open to the words in the ether. “I’m sorry Jason isn’t open to the poem.”

I dropped my head into my hands as soon as we hung up and burst into tears. I couldn’t believe I had let this happen. I had once again mistaken a mother’s love for the love of her son. I clearly had a problem and could not be trusted around mothers.

I should have been happy when Ethan didn’t introduce me to his mother immediately. He told me he wanted me to himself for a while before bringing me home to meet the family. But after six months of dating, I found myself fiending. When would I get to sit at Rena’s table? When would I see myself hanging on her fridge?

Rena, Ethan and I made plans to meet up for breakfast around the corner from me on the Upper West Side. I wore my favorite navy blue sweater and made sure to blow-dry my hair. I wanted to look pretty for her.

As we sat in a booth eating overcooked eggs, Rena told me about the Holocaust museum where she worked. I told her about the eighth grade girls I counseled on Fridays. Ethan made jokes.

Then the subject of our future came up.

Rena looked at me directly, and said,  “I’m waiting to love you.”

I almost choked on my toast.

Judy and Susan flew to mind. There had been no waiting with them. Just full on, “Let’s do this!” Then I thought back to something David had said at the end of our relationship that I never understood. “I feel like we’re more brother-sister than lovers.”

Sitting speechless in this poorly lit diner, something clicked.

David was right. By slipping into daughter role with his mother, I had become one of the kids. And while that felt good, to be part of a cohesive family, to feel like I fit in, I wanted to be a wife, not a daughter-in-law or sister.

Rena somehow knew this, that her love and approval couldn’t influence her son — and that if we had a shot, she should stay out of it.

I wanted to hug her and thank her for doing the thing I couldn’t do all these years: Wait, see and then fall.

Last May, Ethan and I exchanged vows under a brightly colored Chuppah that Rena had spent hours sewing together for us. But it wasn’t her love that got me there. It was Ethan’s.

As I stared into my soon-to-be husband’s warm blue eyes, smiling so wide my cheeks hurt, surrounded by a patchwork of friends and family, I no longer felt like a displaced kid looking for a seat at someone else’s table. I felt like a woman being claimed by a man.

Ethan made me his wife. And now, at almost 40, I am hoping he can make me a mother too. Our fridge is waiting.

After we said goodbye and got into the car, John sighed. “Well, that was a waste of 200 bucks,” he said. Then he reached over and squeezed my hand.

We’d been searching for another couple — people to hang out with and take vacations and trade stories about our three nearly grown children — for more than a year. Ever since our breakup with Sara and Greg.

- – - – - -

Those aren’t their real names. But the story is true: It’s about the wonderful couple we fell for and how we were happy for a while and then how our relationship died.

We met at a mutual friend’s and talked for hours. We were all in our 40s. Greg and I had both married — and divorced — young; we each had an adult son with disabilities. John and Sara were devoted stepparents, walking that awkward line between authority and friend. We were all weekend travelers and motorcycle riders. Our tastes overlapped on every level, from Eritrean food to Robert Downey Jr. films.

Things got intense really fast. Greg and Sara came by with takeout twice a week. We showed up at their place with wine every Saturday night. When we were apart for more than a couple days, the texts between us flew.

I based the sardonic-yet-loyal best friend in my  new novel on Sara and sent her the manuscript the moment I finished a draft. Then I waited a tense week for her to read it. I was ecstatic when she approved.

On our anniversaries, which happened to fall on the same autumn weekend, we rented adjoining cottages at a bed and breakfast. I’d been injured earlier that week, trying to help my autistic son get dressed. So I arrived with three cracked ribs and John, Greg and Sara took care of me, lifting me from the booth where we had our celebratory dinner and — when we got back to our cottage — settling me gently into a chair with pillows to support my aching side.

We stayed up that night drinking port and eating apple slices and sharp cheese by a slow-burning fire. Quite late, Greg began speaking in a broken voice about my injury and our afflicted sons. He wept.

“It never gets easier,” he said. “I wake up at night wondering what’s going to happen after I die. But then I think of you guys, in the same situation …”

Sara nodded, leaned over to kiss her husband and put one thumb to the tear rolling into his silver beard. “Finding you two has been … healing,” she said.

Then they hugged us both and left for their own cottage. John ran a hot bath and eased me into it, holding me carefully so I wouldn’t slip. We climbed into our pedestal bed that night, with Greg and Sara next door. And I felt as safe and cared for as I ever had in my life.

I assumed we would take this friendship to our graves.  But shortly after that weekend, small fissures began.

- – - – - -

Look back at any relationship that’s splintered and you’ll probably see a series of wrong turns leading up to the end.

My first marriage, for instance. There was no defining event: no affair, no beating, no fight so cruel it couldn’t be taken back. There were, instead, a number of bad decisions whose consequences we suffered together until there was simply too much difficulty between us. So it was with Sara and Greg.

We talked about everything, from condo association problems in the building where John and I lived to employee hassles at the cafe Greg and Sara owned to parenting decisions involving our five collective kids. Looking back, it’s clear this was a problem. We definitely overstepped and overshared.

Take the bitter fight that John and I had over a $12,000 plumbing bill. It was a horrible episode — the biggest rift ever in our marriage — that somehow escalated to a point where John stormed out of the house and stayed gone for several days.

While things were still heated, we made the colossal mistake of airing the fight to our friends. Sara immediately took my side; Greg was stoic, but it was clear he skewed toward John’s. Once the episode was over and our marriage repaired, Sara asked me over for dinner, alone, to talk.

“I still love you,” Sara said, “but I’ll never feel the same way about John. So far as I’m concerned, you never should have taken him back.”

Greg was quiet for a moment. Then he said simply: “Sara and I disagree about this. Please give John my best.”

We resumed as best we could, Sara bristling and John on edge. It wasn’t like before, but I was determined to get back that perfect foursome we’d been in the cottage on that dark September night.

- – - – - -

It was as if something invisible had broken. On the surface we looked the same, but now nothing quite worked.

It had long been our habit to meet for dinners where Greg and Sara would cook and John and I would supply the wine. But suddenly, the invitations were waning. So I tried switching it up, inviting them to our place and stirring risottos until my hand went numb. These were awkward events, full of silences; neither of them could hide their disappointment in my lackluster meals.

Also, now that they were coming to our house more frequently one of my teenagers had revolted, saying it was fine to have one stepparent but too much to have three. “Greg and Sara are your friends, not mine,” she said. “I don’t really want their opinions about my life.”

Gradually, our dates grew farther apart and we talked less in between. During a rare walk in spring, Sara told me they were cutting down their social circle. “We’re excising the B list,” she said. Then she paused. I felt an icy sense of dread.

There was one more dinner — a potluck that was weird and strained. Greg and Sara had decided to move down South, help take care of her aging parents, and start life afresh. They were leaving in a couple of months. They said they hoped we’d stay in touch.

But when I sent an email a few weeks later, it went unanswered. I followed with a text message, forgetting I was using a new phone. “Who is this?” Sara texted back. “It’s Ann,” I keyed. “Sorry. Forgot to give you new #.” Silence followed, reproachful and complete.

I thought about begging, calling their voice mail to say: “I miss you. I love you. Can’t we try again?”

I didn’t, for two reasons. The first was my pride — but I could have gotten over that. The second was that John no longer wanted to try; so far as he was concerned, the relationship was dead.

We limped through months of bad dates, with couples we found at John’s workplace and at mine. But some element of the four-way chemistry was always wrong. There was a brief relationship with an editor and her longtime boyfriend. We had hopes for them until the night they showed up for dinner, grim-faced, and told us they’d broken up earlier that day.

Meanwhile, I stalked Sara and Greg online, where they posted news of their going-away party, their older son’s wedding, and their new home. They looked so happy in the photos! Each time, I welled up with affection. But they were gone and our weekend nights were empty. I was sure we’d never find friends like that again.

- – - – - -

Shortly after our dinner with the boat captain, a close friend of mine who’d been widowed announced that she’d reconnected with her high school boyfriend and they were planning to marry within the month.

John and I went in wary. Expectations were very low and, sure enough, our first dinner as a foursome was strained. I don’t know what made us try again. But over the next year, something quiet and comfortable grew. Each of us is equally invested and every permutation works; in other words, no one’s taking sides.

We meet once a month or so to talk about almost everything: Our careers, our plans, the puzzlement and joys of our seven collective adult kids. But we don’t get emotionally tangled in each other’s intimate lives or occupy each other’s homes.

I still miss Greg and Sara, but in the way you do a youthful romance so fierce and consuming it burned itself out. We needed them too much; the power dynamic in our relationship was off. What we have now is less dramatic but more durable — much like the marriage John and I built when we came back together.

As a couple, we finally grew up.

Slovenia is a gorgeous country, lying just east of Venice and south of Vienna. Full of cliff-top castles, mysterious caves, waterfalls and alpine fields, it looks like the backdrop for Grimm’s fairy tales. The most culturally and economically advanced of the former Yugoslav Balkan states, it weathered the Balkan Wars unscathed, and thrived within the Habsburg and Napoleonic empires, under which it was known as Illyria. Slovenia’s prosperity earned it the EU presidency in 2008, and its adherence to tradition and government-protected industry makes it, both economically and socially, the sort of unprepossessing country that Western powers may come to envy.

But centuries-old traditions still lurk in the idyllic mountains, some more ominous than others. It’s not unheard of during prenuptial celebrations for one’s “friends” to tie the groom naked to a wooden cross and smear Tabasco sauce on his balls. Needless to say, I didn’t invite any Slovenes to my bachelor party. But on the morning of my wedding I was faced with an ordeal of my own, known by the menacing title of the šranga.

Šranga (pronounced “shranga”). The name conjures up some Polynesian tribal tattooing ritual or a horror movie involving saws. Neither image is far off.

Three hundred years ago, a stranger coming to a village, intent on marrying the local beauty, would have had to prove his mettle and competence as a provider. In the remote alpine settlements of the 18thcentury Habsburg Empire, that meant being a woodsman. I should say that I’m not particularly good with my hands, aside from typing, which definitely doesn’t count. As a soft-palmed American city boy, my idea of a big adventure is to order an extra shot of espresso in my mocha frappuccino. So I was pretty darn nervous, as I approached the scythe-wielding villagers blocking my path to the Baroque church, framed behind them by precipitous white-capped mountains.

My experience of Slovenian wedding customs began the week before our big day, when the next-door neighbor and a band of followers came over by tractor, dragging two enormous pine trees. They proceeded to shave the bark off the pines, with my help (my first tree-shaving experience, though not the last), then drilled holes in the earth and erected the shorn trees on either side of the driveway. The “Erection of the Pines” at the home of the bride is a long-standing, and almost certainly Freudian, tradition. As with most Slovene customs, it was followed by a long night of homemade schnapps-fueled revels, and the consumption of much illegally produced smoked pork, prepared by the next-door neighbor who, disconcertingly, always seems to be laughing maniacally.

On the wedding day, flanked by 100 wedding guests who watched from the roadside, and aided by my four groomsmen (none of them particularly handy with a hatchet) I stopped before the roadblock. Six burly villagers, all dressed in dark green hunting uniforms, their hats incongruously decked with flowers, stood with their arms crossed. They looked like a rugby team whose bender had been rudely interrupted. Behind them I saw the instruments of my impending tests, the ax and scythe and saw: the Slovenian equivalent of hot coals across which I would walk.

It’s easy to see the šranga as a sort of preparatory exam for the rigors of married life. Instead of ax wielding, maybe in this digital age we might swap in a test of word-processing, programming a Web page, and cheating on your taxes. But whatever I had to do, no matter how difficult, was a rite I was eager to endure, if it meant that I could marry the love of my life. The goal would be not to lop off any useful body parts in the process.

Bring it on.

I was led first to perform the žaga, “the sawing,” in which I would have to team up with my best man, a skinny Spanish lawyer, in splitting a thick log with a rusty saw. Testing our powers of observation, the villagers presented us with the saw upside-down. I may not be the sharpest tack in the box, but I could tell we weren’t going to get too far with the saw-teeth facing upward. We flipped the saw over and sunk it into the log, beginning the surprisingly difficult rhythmic sawing that was required. Those saws want to bend when we wanted to thrust (there’s an analogy to married life in there somewhere). The villagers lubricated our efforts with white wine, first poured over the saw and then into our mouths. I remembered wondering if wine stains and wood shavings can be dry-cleaned out of a $2,000 Ralph Lauren Black Label suit.

Whatever. I was in the zone. The first test was passed.

Now came the sekira, or “the chopping,” in which my ax-work was put to the test. As I am only slightly more coordinated than a drunken orangutan, this had both the villagers and the guests worrying. An ax was lodged in a tree stump in the middle of the road. I would have to whack the stump in half, preferably without losing any of my own limbs in the process. After five or six mighty hacks, the villagers decided to take it easy on me, and allowed me to move. Had I been obliged to cleave the stump in two, the wedding would have had to be rescheduled for the following Tuesday.

A pine tree had been felled across the road and suspended on two wooden horses, and I was next obliged to shave off its bark — good thing I had practiced during the “Erection of the Pines” a week before. A good 10 minutes of tree shaving, and I’d developed quite a sweat, which was almost certainly staining my Ralph Lauren suit. But it must be said that Ralph designed a surprisingly comfortable suit, with good freedom of movement, ideally suited for shaving pines. My confidence was rising. Three down, two more to go.

Bales of hay had been scattered across the road, beside a rickety horse-drawn cart. I was handed a wooden pitchfork, one of those diabolical two-pronged numbers that looks like it might’ve fallen out of a Hieronymus Bosch painting. One of the villagers hopped into the cart and began to push out the hay as I scooped it in. Feeling brash, I dumped my next load of hay onto his head. Then I froze for a moment, wondering if I had just made a faux pas that would result in him practicing the sekira on my clavicle. The villager turned beet purple and burst out laughing.

The hay back in the cart, I was faced with the last test: I had to sharpen a dulled scythe with a hammer and anvil. This might have proved a real challenge, but I had been given some covert training. A group of family friends pulled me aside at a barbecue some weeks before the wedding to give me the lowdown on scythe sharpening. Now I was totally in the groove, and even clanged the hammer down in rhythm to the live accordion polka music that provided a memorable, if not pleasurable, soundtrack to the morning’s events. Maybe I could make it as a Slovenian woodsman after all?

The final step before I could enter the church and wed my beloved was the barantanje, “the haggling.” I had to buy my bride from the villagers — easier said than done, when I had to negotiate in Slovenian.

I didn’t like the sound of this “wife buying” business from the start. Having to buy your wife brings to mind mail order catalogs and, of course, prompts the sticky question: Exactly how much is she worth? $12.99 per pound? That was the cost of the outstanding illegal smoked pork provided by the neighbor, who had been laughing maniacally throughout my šranga. It’s an awkward idea to fit a price to the love of your life, but it’s even weirder when you’re also expected to argue the price down.

At least my future wife didn’t seem to mind being considered a tradable commodity. So if the tradition called for me to buy my wife, then, darn it, buy her I would. But not before driving down the price. The trick was to convince the villagers to cut me a deal without belittling the bride in the process, and risking that she might shave my pine tree when we got home.

My best men and I developed a strategy. I brought a Lonely Planet guide to Slovenia with me that morning, and I began the negotiations by stating that, according to my guidebook, the villagers were obliged to pay the groom in order for him to take the bride off their hands. In my opening gambit, I said firmly that I would not marry her for less than 300 euros.

The best defense is a good offense, and this had the desired effect. Normally the groom is meant to squirm and argue about the sorry state of the village pavement or the odd odors from the fertilized corn fields or the fact that farmers are always laughing maniacally at nothing in particular, and thereby lower the price. But grooms regularly pay around 1,000 euros, despite their protestations. I insisted that my guidebook explained the tradition very clearly: The villagers were expected to pay me. When they tried to convince me that it was the other way around, I had two Slovene wedding guests step forward and say that everywhere else in Slovenia the villagers pay the groom — this local village must have had it backward for the past few centuries.

My ploy wasn’t going to work forever, but it did sow confusion among my opponents. In the end I relented and gave them the sum I’d intended to pay all along — exactly 300 euros, plus another 12 that I found in my trousers. Not a bad price, considering that I was acquiring the love of my life (and only $2.36 per pound, if you’re keeping score).

The barantanje completed, and a not insignificant portion of my wife’s grandmother’s homemade schnapps (first prize in this year’s village tasting competition!), I was carried in victory up to the church, in the cart I had so recently filled with hay. Having survived the šranga, a little tipsy, a little sweaty, and covered in a lot of sawdust, the wedding could proceed.

While finding true love and maintaining a happy marriage are certainly tricky, getting married in this modern era can be all too easy. We just pop down to city hall, or drive to Vegas on the spur of the moment to be married by someone dressed as Elvis. Gone are the days of earning a girl’s hand through valiance, chivalry and attrition: of the future King Charles I of England galloping incognito across bandit-strewn 17thcentury Europe to woo the Infanta of Spain, of slaying minotaurs and climbing through fields of poisoned thorns. While I’m not sure how well I would do if it came to minotaur-slaying, I am grateful that I could prove my love through sweat and feats of manliness, both to the villagers, who would finally accept me as one of their own, and to my beautiful wife.

Lots of people say that they would “do anything for love.” But there, on that alpine hillside, with a sharpened scythe in my hand and a freshly shorn pine tree at my feet, I can truly say that I did.