First Comes Friendship,
Then Comes Marriage
By Aurelie Sheehan
Author of History Lesson for Girls

4. A secret language

Jenny and I made one up and used it whenever necessary. It was an offshoot of a language she used with her dog, a waddling little Pekinese called Tammy.

“Hey, Beeyoqueen, I sib suddo,” one of us would say. It was cool to have our own secret code. We felt it would be useful should we ever get arrested, for instance, which we, well, were. (It wasn’t quite as fun to chat in the back of the cop cruiser as we’d imagined it would be.)

But even a simple interaction -- asking for a match or a sip of Seven-Up -- changed if we spoke our own language; it became consecrated, wholly our own thing.

My husband and I have our own language too. Sure, we’ve got your classic marital grunts and shorthand expressions to get us through before the second cup of coffee. But we’ve also developed a fascinating franglish to deploy when trying to baffle our seven-year-old.

“Success a la Target purchase? Le puzzlement de la petit Potter?” he might ask, to which I’ll gesture in a quite Parisian fashion. (The kid is catching on, by the way.)

5. A place to stash my (proverbial) cigarettes

I had secrets then and I have secrets now. Back then, they were easy -- externalized, something to hide in a drawer. I don’t smoke anymore, and so I’d say my secrets now are more in the lines of character flaws.

Not that I’m completely and utterly flawed, but still. These flaws or weaknesses insist upon themselves, seem tricky enough to keep coming back, and my husband knows them as well as I do.

He also knows my strengths, as I do his. But I like to know that I can safely store my pack of bad habits in his house, and he won’t throw me out for it.

6. An undying, forever-feeling, all-or-nothing, Us vs. Them conviction

It may not be at the forefront of my consciousness every single time I pour a jar of Trader Joe’s marinara into a pot for a hasty dinner while he’s lying face down on the couch before a televised golf tournament. But put us at risk and it’s right there.

When the doctor told my husband about his predilection for heart disease, for instance. Or when we had to find our way through the crowds in New Delhi during the Republic Day parade.

Or even at certain unending dinner parties at which new theories on why there’s no such thing as global warming are being explained.

We band together then, as Jenny and I did when we were teenagers. Back then, every day felt like running the gauntlet, filled with new threats and drama and confusion.

We were trying to step up to the plate; trying to explain, to articulate, who we were. We were able to succeed, sometimes, because we knew we had each other.

7. An apparently untiring audience for the first draft of my poems

And this was a heck of a lot easier for Jenny, because I only wrote one or two poems a week. And they were poems. But now I write novels. And I want him to read not just this draft but that draft and then that draft, also?

The man is incredible as a reader and editor. The poems Jenny and I shared were in our handwriting, in our journals, and I’ll always love her careful square letters, whimsical and reluctant both.

8. A person who will tell me if these black shoes look better than those black shoes (she was a little better at this)

Well, never mind about this one. Forget it.

9. Mad Magazine, or something similar

We were very, very funny. We had a repertoire. We had an arsenal. We especially liked to use it during class, or when describing the personal style of various sinisterly athletic classmates or the Spanish teacher who just gave us a C+.

My parents thought Jenny was too critical, too sarcastic, and her parents thought I was an oddball, out of touch. It didn’t matter what they thought, as long as we could laugh.

I remember dating a guy who was nice in every way, but our senses of humor didn’t quite match up, and that was it: we were history. Thankfully, my husband is in the other room with a big red ball on his nose right now, about to launch into morning limerick, so I think we’ll be okay.

10. Changes, yes, but some things that stay true

She changed a lot, during those years, and so did I. It was not always easy. And there have been stretches in our adult lives when we’ve fallen out of touch, when it’s not been possible to explain life changes, new mates, rapid decisions.

We weather these dry spells -- in part, I believe, because we remember how our friendship was a ballast we could find nowhere else in our young lives.

Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments. My husband and I used Shakespeare’s famous words at our wedding, as have many other plucky English majors.

The quote is also a decent definition of friendship.

The director of the creative writing program at the University of Arizona, she has received a Pushcart Prize, a Camargo Fellowship, and the Jack Kerouac Literary Award. She lives in Tucson with her husband and daughter.