Ingrid Michaelson wrote a beautiful line.
"You take me the way I am."
Musicians love this line. Romantics love this line. People put it in their wedding vows and tattoo it on their forearms and play it at the moment they first realize they might be falling in love.
And they're not wrong to love it. It's true. Eventually.
But here's what the song doesn't tell you: eventually is doing an enormous amount of work in that sentence.
The first phase of marriage — call it the Romantic phase — lasts somewhere between nine months to two years. During this phase you are not seeing each other clearly. You are seeing each other through a very particular and very beautiful kind of distortion. You mirror each other. You finish each other's sentences. Everything they do is either charming and completely forgivable. The toilet seat, the dishes, the way they load the dishwasher wrong — none of it registers. You are too busy discovering that someone else exists in the world who feels the way you feel.
This is the announcement of love. Fragile. Sudden. The teaser before the film.
The second phase is the Separation phase and where most couples decide the love is gone.
It isn't. But it has changed form, and the new form is much less comfortable than the old one.
This is the phase where you start noticing that you married an actual person. Not a mirror. Not a projection of your best hopes. A person who leaves dishes in the living room. Who sets seven alarms and sleeps through all of them. Who speaks a love language you need a translator for. Who is, beneath every shared value and interest and physical attraction, fundamentally other.
This is also the phase where most divorces happen. Because we've been sold a story that love should feel like phase one. Forever. And when phase two arrives we conclude that something has gone wrong. That we chose badly. That the love has run out.
But the love hasn't run out. The love is just being asked to grow up.
The third phase is the one Ingrid is singing about, the Unity phase.
This is where you arrive — if you stay, if you do the work, if you resist the fantasy that there is someone else out there who will never drive you slightly crazy — at actual acceptance. Not tolerance. Not resignation. Sober acceptance.
He always leaves the toilet seat up. I know this about him. I love him anyway.
This is a completely different thing from the romantic phase where the toilet seat didn't register. In phase one you didn't accept the toilet seat — you didn't see it. In phase three you see it clearly, you've said something about it probably a thousand times, you know it will never change, and you love him anyway. That is acceptance. That is the thing Ingrid is singing about.
And it is earned. Slowly. Over years. Through the arguments and the silences and the nights when you wonder if you're too different and the mornings when you're grateful you stayed.
I wrote a song once about what that looks like from the other side of a lifetime.
This is true of bands too.
The mythology of great bands is that they found each other and everything clicked. That the magic was immediate. That they just knew.
But talk to anyone who has been in a long creative partnership and they'll tell you the same thing. The early years were electric and also terrifying. Everyone was performing their best version of themselves. The real work — the accepting of each other's limitations, the learning to write around each other's blind spots, the choosing to stay in the room when someone plays the wrong chord for the hundredth time — that came later.
Rush lasted forty years. Forty years of three people in a room making something together. You don't do that on romantic phase energy. You do that on phase three.
So, love the song. Put it in your wedding vows if you want.
But know what you're actually promising when you sing it.
You're not promising to take someone as they are on the day you meet them. That's easy. That's the trailer.
You're promising to keep taking them as they are on the day they forget to call, and the day they say the wrong thing, and the day they are so completely themselves that it exhausts you.
And then the day after that.
That's the whole song.
Most couples make it through phase two when they know there’s a phase three.