bramble_and_j
Five years this month
- Posting sinceAug 2026
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- Mostly inLong term
Five years this month, which I only noticed because of a photograph coming up on my phone. Feels like a reasonable moment to write down what has actually shifted, partly for the newer couples reading and partly because I want to know if this is typical.
The jealousy went. Not gradually and not because I did anything clever. It arrived hard in year one, hung around for most of year two, and then one evening I noticed it had not turned up for months. I still could not tell you why.
The frequency dropped a lot. Year one we tried to make something happen every few weeks. Now it is perhaps four times a year and neither of us minds. It stopped being a thing we were doing and became a thing we do.
The talking increased and then levelled off somewhere far above where we started. That is the change I would keep if I could only keep one.
And the fantasy version of it faded almost completely. What I imagined at the start bears very little resemblance to what we actually enjoy now, which is calmer and more specific and much less dramatic.
For those further along: what did the second five years do?