Fais Do-Do

There’s a season of marriage that doesn’t look like what anyone sells you.

Not the early one, where you go out too late and sleep in too long and think you’ll always be that version of yourselves.

And not the far-off one, where the house is quiet again in a different way.

This one sits right in the middle.

The years where the house is full and loud and someone always needs something. Where the days are accounted for before they even begin, and by the time the last light clicks off, you’re not wondering what to do with the night—

you’re wondering how much of it you can survive.

You tell yourselves you should go on a date.

You talk about it in passing, like responsible adults.

“We need to get out more.”

“We haven’t had a night to ourselves in a while.”

And you mean it.

But then the evening comes and the idea of getting dressed, leaving the house, making a reservation, speaking in full sentences to other adults—

it feels like a performance you no longer have the energy to give.

So instead, you stay.

And somewhere along the way, without really deciding to, you start building something else.

Small dates.

Unofficial ones.

The kind no one photographs.

A trip to Costco, just the two of you, walking the aisles a little slower than usual. Not because you need anything in particular, but because for a moment no one is asking you for anything at all.

You split up and meet back by the produce like it’s some kind of rendezvous.

You circle back for something you forgot and neither of you minds.

You debate olive oil like it matters more than it does.

You linger.

At night, after the house finally settles, you sit down next to each other and watch your shows.

My husband wants something cinematic. Slow, deliberate, a little dangerous—something that feels like it could’ve been made by Tarantino on a quiet day.

You want Bravo. Or, if the night calls for it, The Great British Bake Off—which, in your opinion, counts as emotional regulation.

And somehow, you watch both.

There might be a cocktail.

There is almost always a cookie.

No one is dressed for company.

No one is trying to impress anyone.

You’re just there.

Together.

In Louisiana, they have a phrase—fais do-do.

It started as something parents would tell their children.

Go to sleep.

So the adults could stay up.

Music playing, drinks poured, life continuing just a little longer after the children had closed their eyes.

It wasn’t elaborate.

It wasn’t curated.

It was just… theirs.

That’s what this feels like.

Not a night out.

Not a grand effort to “keep the spark alive.”

Just a quiet, stubborn refusal to let the day take everything.

Because the truth is—

this version of love isn’t built in the big gestures right now.

It’s built in the decision to sit down, even when you’re tired.

To stay up a little longer, even when you could go straight to bed.

To share something small and unremarkable and let it count anyway.

It’s not glamorous.

But neither is anything that lasts.

Fais do-do.

Let the kids go to sleep.

We’ll pour something we didn’t measure, sit a little too long, and call it a night we “should probably do more often.”

We won’t, of course.

Not consistently.

There will be days where we pass each other like coworkers on different shifts.

Where the only thing we share is a calendar and whatever’s left of dinner.

But then there will be nights like this again.

Unplanned.

Unremarkable.

Enough.

And that’s the part no one really advertises—

that a good marriage, in the middle of it all, isn’t held together by grand gestures or perfectly executed date nights.

It’s held together by two people who are tired…

and still choose to sit down anyway.