It was not like that at first

Fiction, about two adults over 18. She asked for it, she wrote half the rules herself, and she would tell you honestly that it works. This is eighteen months of it, kept in her own dates.

Fiction. Every character in this story is a consenting adult over 18.

A story by the editor.

He asked me at the start to write the dates down, so that when we came to review it there would be something to look at. So I have all the dates.

March

We did it at the kitchen table on a Sunday with the radio on, because he had decided not to make a big thing of it, and I was grateful for that. It had taken me nine weeks to send him the article. It took another two days after that to stop apologising for having sent it.

Three rules. He wrote them on the back of a takeaway menu and I made him do them again on proper paper, because I wanted to keep it, which he found funny.

In bed by half eleven on a work night. No cancelling the Thursday because I was tired, on the grounds that being tired was most of the reason I had asked for any of it. And if something went wrong at work I had to say so on the day rather than on the Sunday, by which point it had always gone stale.

Six weeks, he said, and then we sit down and go through what is working.

I told Dee in the pub that Friday. Dee is difficult about everything and has been since we were nineteen and I love her for it, so I had a whole speech ready. She said, "Right." Then she said, "Is he all right about it?" and I said he was considerably more all right about it than I was, and she laughed and said that was about what she had expected, and then we talked about her sister for an hour.

April

The review happened on the sofa and he had made notes, actual notes, on the pad we keep by the phone.

Half eleven came off, because it had started making me anxious in a way that was doing nothing for anybody. And I added one. I wanted to be told the reason, in a sentence, at the time, and I wanted it said once and then left alone. He turned that over for a while and then said yes, on the condition that he would never afterwards argue the point with me.

I walked out to the car that evening feeling about nine feet tall.

June

Five now. Two of them mine.

The new ones are nothing much. I let him know when I am going out and roughly when I am back, which we did anyway, except now it is written down so it counts for something. And I do not argue about a consequence at the time, which was his idea, and which I fought for about a fortnight before conceding that he was right about it. If I want to argue I can have the whole of Sunday.

The Sunday clause has genuinely made us better at arguing. I would recommend it to anybody.

August

He asked to see my phone.

There was a reason, and it was a fair one. A man from the course I did in the spring had messaged me a couple of times, about nothing, and I had been odd about it for a week without noticing that I was being odd, and he had noticed.

He said he did not want to turn into a man lying awake inventing things, and that looking would take four minutes and put a stop to it.

So I gave it to him at the kitchen table and made the tea while he did it. There was nothing in it, because there was nothing in it. He handed it back and said thank you and I said any time, and I meant it, and I remember feeling oddly close to him for the rest of that evening.

September

We did not do the September one. His mother had the fall at the end of the month, and then there was the entire business with the carers and the discharge letter, and by the time any of that had settled it was nearly December.

November

I used the word.

Nothing had gone wrong. I was not hurt and he had not done anything he had not done fifty times before. I had gone into it in a foul mood and about two thirds of the way through I found that I could not be in the room, and I said it, and he stopped on the syllable. Put it down and got the blanket and did every part of it exactly the way he had always said he would.

Then he went quiet.

He was not angry, and I want to be fair to him about that, because there was no scene and no sulking that you could have pointed at in a court. He was polite. He made the tea. He asked about my day and waited for the answer. It went on for two days.

On the Tuesday I asked him if he was all right and he said, "I am just thinking about what it means. That is all."

I apologised about six times over those two days, and each time he told me there was nothing at all to apologise for.

By the Thursday it had lifted and he was warmer than he had been in a month, and we had a lovely weekend.

I have not needed it since.

January

I typed them up, because the paper one had gone soft along the folds and you could no longer read two of them.

Nine.

He had not asked me to. I did it on a Sunday afternoon with the football on in the other room, and I printed two copies, and mine lives in the drawer by the bed. I was pleased with it. Some of them are barely rules, they are just how the house runs, but seeing it laid out as a list did something to me that I did not expect and cannot really account for.

February

The money thing was sensible and I would do it again tomorrow. My account was earning nothing whatsoever, the mortgage came off its fix in the January, and moving it all into the joint one took about sixty pounds a month off us straight away. He built the spreadsheet. I checked the spreadsheet.

March, again

A year, and he gave me a card, which he has never once done for anything else. Inside it he had written out the three original rules in his handwriting. I cried in a Pizza Express, which he has been dining out on ever since.

I said we ought to do one of the proper sit-downs again, the ones with the pad, and he said yes, definitely, we should. Then the puddings came.

May

The second car went. It was costing more in garage bills than it was worth and his does everything anyway, so I get the bus in now, which takes eleven minutes longer and is honestly less stressful. If I need the car in the day I ask him the night before, and he has never once said no.

June

The phone is a Sunday thing now. Two minutes, usually less, and half the time he hardly looks at it. It is more like putting the bins out than anything else.

I said to him once that it was strange how normal it had got, and he said, "It only feels strange when you imagine describing it to somebody."

August

I have not seen Dee since some time last summer, and that is at least half mine. She was being difficult about a couple of things and I did not have it in me, and then the not-ringing turned into its own thing, the way it does. I keep meaning to ring her.

I stopped numbering the list at some point, because a few of the newer ones are not really rules.

September

Karen at work asked me on the Thursday whether I fancied coming to hers on the Saturday. A few of them, nothing formal.

And I said, "Oh, Saturdays are a bit sacred in our house. We keep them clear. It sounds mad, I know, but we are quite structured people and it works for us, honestly, it is the best thing we have ever done."

She said that sounded lovely and that she wished she and Rob had anything like it, and then she told me about the extension, and I stood at the printer for a while afterwards.

Because I did not build that sentence. It arrived whole. The small laugh landed in the right place and the "honestly" landed in the right place and I got all the way to the end of it without choosing a single word.

I have said it before. I know I have said it before, because of how smooth it was, and I could not tell you when, or who to.

That afternoon

I had the car, for the click and collect, and I got to the retail park twenty minutes before the slot and sat in it with the engine off.

I looked something up on my phone. It took two goes to get the words into an order that gave me anything back, and then I read about a page and a half of it, and then I closed the tab, and then I took it out of the history as well, the way I do with everything.

Two spaces along, a man was losing an argument with a trolley that would not go back into the rack. I watched that instead.

It is a good arrangement and I would say so to anybody who asked me. I asked for it. I wrote half of it myself, on a Sunday, with the football on in the other room.