We would like to leave that conversation regarding that couple here, thinking it gives you a good wireframe understanding of the particular personal walls that he and I collectively faced this year. We cannot stress enough that they were entirely based on our personal experiences, and they were built through no fault or action of your own.

We have a lot of fear and anxiety about having released such sensitive information into our current community. But, the truth is, you went out on a limb for us, and we owe the same to you for that leap of faith you took when we first moved here.

Overall,, we would prefer to keep this and most of our messy emotional baggage secured in the legal and hard-bordered container the state has granted us called “a marriage,” only released to people we trust on a need-to-know basis.

We will let you make your own decisions about this forked path on which we all find ourselves, but we hope you can view the confidences we’ve made to you this week as a token of our valuing your friendship and our earnest desire to see it continue.

I read in your original message a feeling of hurt from experiencing exclusion when you expected inclusion.

For what it’s worth, regardless of what they meant to you, our conversations in the hallway, by the park and on metro cars were incredibly important to me. It’s the closest thing I’ve had to a friendship independent of my husband in almost 11 years.

These days, my constantly shifting, increasingly digital personal, professional and academic schedules seem to structurally disallow me those of any kind, which, in turn, has made establishing a coherent group structure a struggle for me, for us, as well.

In terms of our offering inclusion, now that our life in dc is finally beginning to stabilize after a v rocky start, the most exclusive kind I can offer you personally is for you to be my friend alone. And maybe that’s all that any of us can ever offer right now in this excruciatingly atomized American moment.

Kev and I have just weathered a year comprising each of our seeing a layoff scare resulting in subsequent transitions into new jobs; my starting grad school; and only recently finishing unpacking from our move to this new-to-us city back in October.

Those crises were also occurring with the fear and anxiety of the situation I’ve just described to you this week, hovering over us, raw, in very recent memory—

We’ll respect whatever boundaries you set, but we hope that maybe, despite them, we can meet each other at the border and spend some time together every so often 🤗