Bread and Honey
July 17, 2025 at 03:30PM
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Diana Saverin | Longreads | July 17, 2025 | (3,965 words)
For the first year after our wedding, David and I dipped challah in honey every Friday night, a Jewish tradition to remind newlyweds that marriage is sweet. When we approached our one-year anniversary, I asked David what it meant that this ritual would end.
We’ve been fortunate to publish Diana Saverin in the past. Read “Predator or Prey.”
“We no longer need artificial sweetener,” he said.
Honey’s not artificial, but I think he meant we had the sweetness we needed. We teased each other in the kitchen, shared lentil dals and roasted butternut at the table, took camping trips to alpine lakes with our two dogs, hosted lively potlucks with our friends. Not every moment was sweet, though; like most couples, we could have painful and bitter disagreements.
Take this one night: I don’t remember why we were fighting, but I do remember crying in bed. Beside me, David pinched the bridge of his nose, said, “I have to go to sleep,” then mentioned, of all things, our taxes. In my peripheral vision, I saw him putting in earplugs and turning away to sleep.
I spiraled. I lay awake that night, pulling the covers over my shoulders as I replayed past fights in my mind. Our happiness turned hazy, even though I knew that when I felt okay again, this sadness would turn foggy in memory, too—its source and power a mystery.
It’s possible that, before getting married, I hadn’t absorbed enough love stories that accounted for years of commitment and wasn’t prepared for the challenges we’d face. What I am looking for now is a story of marriage that includes both the sweet and the bitter, a narrative that twists the different strands of our lives together so that I can remember, even when things are hard, I’m still inside a love story.
A few years into marriage, David and I started seeing a couple’s therapist. At the end of one session, she taught us about the bias of state-dependent learning, explaining how, when we’re in a particular state (despairing, joyful), we have easier access to other times we’ve felt the same way. She suggested David and I tell loving stories to counter the tendency to generalize from hard times.
David told one about me planning a backcountry trip we’d just done. He called me vivacious and recalled a night when he watched me skate ski down an icy river, heavy backpack digging into my shoulders. He talked about my enthusiasm, my strength, my vision.
When it was my turn, I paused.
The therapist prompted me. “What about your origin story?” she asked. “How you first met?”
It was a fair question, but I didn’t want to tell that story again. There’s a propulsion to the tale of meeting, dating, getting engaged, getting married. In our case, there were grand gestures. Long letters. Recorded songs. Intercontinental flights. Breakups. A whirlwind engagement. I wanted a tale from the present, since it’s been harder to see the narrative since our lives became more consistent.
I eventually talked about how David supported me on the same trip, took weight from my backpack, cut ice from my bindings when my boots froze into them, remained sweet even when pain made me sour. I used words like “thoughtful” and “caring,” trying my best to coat them in honey to make up for my pause.
I’ve told our origin story many times—any couple does—and it is a love story. We met in college. I don’t remember our first conversation freshman year, but I do remember, two years later, salsa dancing. We had overlapping social circles, but that night, I noticed him: his brown eyes, his quiet confidence, his gentle but sure touch. A few months later, we both joined a group that met a couple times a week and had a policy against dating other members, which gave us free rein to flirt without consequence. We became closer, going on runs, studying together, meeting up for Chipotle burritos. One night, our group played a game of sardines. I hid behind a door for what felt like a long time. I could hear, in the distance, one of our friends suggesting the group give up trying to find me. Then, I heard a creak in the hinge; it was David. He pulled the door around us like a blanket and we held our breaths. My hands found his ribs; his fingers my hair. We kissed in the dark.
Our flirtation took the shape of a fling; anything more serious seemed unlikely. It was our senior spring and our plans post-graduation didn’t involve residing on the same continent. I was going to Alaska; he was going to the UK, with designs on living in South Africa after he finished graduate school. At the time, I was scared of what it would take to commit to togetherness. My independence was important to me, and I didn’t trust I could keep my identity intact if we knit our lives too tightly together. Still, what we had was too good to give up, so we gave it a try.
There were hiccups, like the time I broke up with him while reporting in Chilean Patagonia. He’d already purchased a ticket to visit me, so came anyway, hitching a ride down the Carreterra Austral in a truck bed he shared with a dead goat. Within hours of being physically together, it was obvious we did not want to break up. We went camping and talked about everything—including how to envision a shared future. David was always better at that. He, more than anyone I know, uses creativity and imagination to overcome what can seem like impossible hurdles. When I was losing hope—losing hold of our story—he helped me believe in the life we could build together.
Two years after we first kissed during that fateful game of sardines, we broke up a second time. I moved to Alaska and he moved to South Africa. We untangled ourselves quite thoroughly and didn’t see each other for another two years. One fall, though, we met up when we both happened to be in New York City. Within days, we kissed on a street in Hell’s Kitchen. Within weeks, we got engaged. By that point, I was more afraid of my drive for independence than the prospect of merging lives with someone I trusted and loved as much as David.
When I called a friend to tell her the news, she almost crashed her car. Her surprise was not unjustified: He and I had scarcely seen each other in years; the average flight time between our two cities was 59 hours, 35 minutes.
Our metaphor at the time was lightning. Borrowing an idea from Maimonides, we believed that our access to truth (and love) came in bright bursts, illuminating all that was possible. We thought that, a lot of the time, we’d live in the dark—take each other for granted, grow complacent. While still bathed in light, we wanted to braid our two lives together, let our existences grow so entangled that our joining would be irreversible.
I want more than our origin story, more than a marriage plot, though; I want a story that makes sense of our lives now, too, but the daily reality of commitment is harder to tell. Lightning still strikes, but not continuously. We also spend a lot of time cleaning out the fridge, checking our phones, talking about what size teapot to buy and when we need to put snow tires on the car and how to request a reimbursement for a health-care bill.
I want a story that makes sense of our lives now, too, but the daily reality of commitment is harder to tell.
I wouldn’t want lightning to strike continuously, anyway; the quietness of our love and shared life is a source of stability and calm. In many ways, marriage is more like challah than honey: humble, comforting, familiar. When separating pieces of challah dough to braid, it’s important to make sure no one strand gets too ample or spindly. And in our lives, it’s important that no one experience takes hold of the whole narrative. I don’t want only sweetness, or only lightning, but I do want to know how to fold sourness and shadow into the dough, too.
I bake two loaves of challah many Fridays. On Thursday night, I mix warm water, yeast, and honey in a glass bowl, whisk in eggs and oil, stir in flour and salt. Then, I knead with the heel of my palm until the dough is smooth and soft, its yeasty fragrance already like a mild beer. I stick the dough in the fridge, and by Friday morning, the ballooned mass lifts from the depths of the bowl and looks like it might pop. I push the dough down, my hand slick with oil.
Several hours later, I assemble the loaves by separating the dough into 12 balls, trying to make sure they’re the same size. Sometimes, one strand ends up too plump and dominant while others barely make it to the end of the loaf. I want the braids to form a woven texture, the six strands forming a whole so perfect their union seems inevitable.
I don’t want only sweetness, or only lightning, but I do want to know how to fold sourness and shadow into the dough, too.
The kitchen fills with a caramel aroma as the loaves bake, the egg wash giving the crust a golden sheen. When I take them out, I knock the bottoms to make sure they’ve baked through, then transfer the loaves to a plate and cover them with cloth. When we remove the cloth to bless them, David gasps in mock surprise, as if these challah were the manna from heaven they represent. We tear into the loaves with our hands, dismantling the bread. Sometimes, I am so eager for the taste of the warm loaf that I forget to marvel at the alchemy that’s happened, the way the disparate ingredients and strands of dough have coalesced to form this brief wholeness before the bites dissolve on our tongues.
When I first told my mom David and I were seeing a couple’s therapist, she blinked. I could see her trying to rationalize why we—young, happy, newlywed—would need a marriage counselor.
“I guess your lives are kind of unusual,” she said.
She may have been referring to the fact that, in the summer, I worked as a field instructor leading backcountry expeditions, which meant I sometimes spent up to a month away from David. One student expressed surprise when she found out I was married.
“How do you still work as an instructor?” she asked.
Perhaps she saw marriage as something you couldn’t escape from for 30-day stints. Maybe she saw marriage as something that smoothed out the inconsistencies in life, replacing scattershot adventures with a stable routine and home.
Before I left one May, I braided and froze enough mini challah loaves for David to bake every Friday night I was gone. He didn’t ask me to, but I wanted to offer him something sweet, even though I’d be absent for most of the summer. I occasionally made challah in the backcountry, too, using powdered egg, brown sugar, yeast, and flour, mixing the dough in a plastic bag, keeping the bag warm inside my puffy jacket, then baking the bread in a frying pan over a camping stove. But mostly, being in the field meant retreating from the rhythms of my everyday life: I led students over steep passes and through crevassed glaciers in the Chugach and Talkeetna Mountains of Alaska, carried a backpack that often weighed more than 70 pounds, wore the same sun shirt and hiking pants for 30 straight days.
I missed David. We sent satellite texts most nights and exchanged a few letters. When I returned, we always shared a memorably long hug in the dusty parking lot, me still clad in the unbearably grubby sun shirt and hiking pants. But there was something easy, too, about escaping the house meetings, the check-ins, the shopping lists. The escape I enjoyed in the field wasn’t from David; it was from the repetition of daily life.
I wouldn’t want to be in the backcountry all the time, though. The same domesticity I sometimes flee can also be nourishing, grounding. I often go through stretches when I make toasted farro bowls, citrus fennel salads, black sesame mochi cakes.
These selves—at home and in the field—sometimes feel at odds, like the inconsistency in my life makes it hard to know what kind of person, and what kind of wife, I am.
When I keep track of my menstrual cycle, it becomes clear that the story I tell about my life—about our lives—changes depending on the time of the month. During the follicular phase, between the start of my period and ovulation, I often believe my life is perfect. I look at David with a loving gaze and no longer care if he doesn’t walk the dogs or help with dinner. I flirt, exercise, work long hours. I identify with this version of myself; I believe this person is me.
But the story doesn’t last. In the second half of the month, I get sensitive, moody, insecure. Once, I felt so worthless I told David he should put me in a trash heap with the rotting orange peels. I don’t want to accept this weepy, clingy version of myself as the “real” me. But I still don’t know: Which story do I tell if I want to describe my life, our lives?
David often suggests not taking life too seriously. Sometimes I wonder if he means I should create space between what I feel and what I believe, treat my moods, and the stories they spin, like they’re as pliable as flour, water, and salt—something I can knead and roll out, braid and shape, fluff up and smooth.
I once read an article describing that the way a couple tells their story predicts their future, from how satisfied they are in their relationship to whether they stay together in the years to come. In the study, couples who told their meet-cute as if a stroke of fate and luck had led them to each other, who were enthusiastic and loving in their recollections of the past, were much more likely to remain married.
The idea stuck with me, that the stories we tell create—or at least reflect—the lives we live.
The study, conducted by John Gottman, points out that couples who “glorify the struggle” are among those who stay together. Those pairs say things like, “Marriage is the hardest job in the world, but it is well worth it.”
That is exactly what I’ve wanted: a narrative that captures not only our courtship, but also incorporates what has filled our relationship since then. There are the small joys of making each other a mug of licorice tea, hosting music nights where we sing “Cornbread and Butterbeans” and “The Fox” with friends, planting kale and nasturtiums in our garden, sharing a meal of miso-ginger salmon and catching up about our days. And there’s the harder stuff, too: our arguments before bed when I want to stay to finish the conversation but he insists on going to sleep. Our recurring conversations about who does more around the house. Our negotiations about how much to compromise and sacrifice in order to meet the other’s needs around place, work, and community.
The idea stuck with me, that the stories we tell create—or at least reflect—the lives we live.
When we fight, David says he remembers that we are uniquely suited to each other. That’s the kind of thing I’m looking for: some kind of story that helps me move more gracefully through sadness or anger, one that helps me remember other states of being and the fact that the one I’m in will pass. The other night, after we’d had a little row, David and I joked about my need for such a story as we brushed our teeth.
“You should Google how to remember that you love your husband,” he said. I laughed, then said I probably would.
Google didn’t offer much help, but lately I have been finding myself, when frustrated or in pain, trying to avoid the thought, it’s not supposed to be like this, and instead saying to myself: Love can feel like this, too. But that doesn’t work all the time. On a given night, I am not sure: Is this too much pain? Is this outside of the scope of “normal?” I try my best to trust, to remember that, even when I feel hurt, our happiness, joy, and love are still real, too.
One evening when David and I were lying in bed, I read a New Yorker profile of Wendell Berry. In it, Berry described his old-fashioned view of marriage as “a state of mutual help” rather than the contemporary idea of “two successful careerists in the same bed.” These two ideas didn’t seem like they needed to be at odds, but it got me thinking: What role was I asking marriage to play in my life? And what about David? I put the magazine down, turned to David, and asked what he wanted out of marriage. He tensed, stared at his Kindle, and asked if we could talk about it tomorrow.
I remembered how, when I was in my mid-20s and single, I lived with a woman who reminisced about a needlepoint pillow she was gifted that read, One flesh, one heart, one soul. She told me it described marriage. At the time, I bristled: I didn’t want to merge flesh, heart, and soul. Back then, I preferred Rilke’s description of marriage, one in which spouses guarded each other’s solitude and appreciated the space between them—a “marvelous living side-by-side,” he called it.
I hadn’t realized then how hard it would be to decide how much space to maintain between me and my spouse. David and I spent years dating long-distance, during which time we frequently passed months without seeing each other. We rarely occupied the same time zone. I was the one scared of being tied down, the one wanting to preserve space to roam. Now, we often both work from home, which means the span of topography between us is the distance between kitchen and couch, my desk and his, one side of the bed and the other. Now, I’m surprised by the role I’ve assumed: In our current lives, I often pursue as he pulls away. I often request more special time together—regular date nights, shared camping trips—while he wants me to appreciate all the time we already spend together.
I no longer want a marriage of two solitudes. I want a marriage like a braided loaf, one in which the fragments of our lives weave together, each strand retaining some individual integrity but allowing the line to blur sometimes, too. I want each part of our story, the highs and lows, the togetherness and distance, the daily life and electric moments, to form something solid I can hold in my hands, put on a plate, and bless.
David and I started keeping Shabbat together soon after getting engaged. A few of our early ones took place at a remote cabin in Alaska.
On Friday afternoons, we blasted the wood stove and put a flimsy Coleman oven on top, trying to preheat it to 400 degrees, which required, it seemed, heating the cabin to 100. We grabbed a broomstick to knock the stovepipe when it blazed red, creosote shimmering back into the barrel. We caramelized onions, sprinkled cashews into spiced rice, assembled pies with wild berries, braided challah, and spread egg wash on the dough with a soggy paper towel.
After dinner one evening, we walked down to the river, where small waves lapped against the gravel bar; a few ravens gurgled from the spruce forest; birch leaves shimmied in the breeze. We interlaced fingers, swung our hands back and forth, and sang a few songs into the silence.
“That was low-key one of the best days of my life,” David said later that night.
In Jenny Offill’s novel Dept. of Speculation, a rabbi says that three things in life give us a hint of the world to come: the sun, Shabbat, and married love. On days like that, I believe it—days when we put away our phones and bask in the sun and eat challah and are really with each other.
Today, I wrote a list of happy things:
- The moment after the alarm
- Laughing in the dark before sleep
- Hosting dinner parties
- Lighting a candle and taking a bath
- His knee under the table (after all these years, still, that)
The thing about happy memories, though, is that they disappear like a good meal; in the moment, the sensory pleasure is consummate, but the specificity of goodness soon evaporates. On the other hand, I can vividly recall every food I’ve ever puked (blueberry-muffin batter, cranberry juice, trout). This bias takes active work to resist. As meditation teacher Rick Hanson describes, the brain is like Velcro for bad experiences, Teflon for good ones. Our evolutionary ancestors needed to remember scary times so they’d know how to dodge saber-toothed tigers. But what I need is different: a way to remind myself that even when things are difficult, I am safe.
David and I call stretches of particularly happy times Super Love Moon after a supermoon that happened when we were apart for a few weeks. He was climbing on a glacier with two friends while I was navigating family conflict at my parents’ house. When we reunited, we ran toward each other. He lifted me off the ground, still wearing mountaineering boots. That afternoon, we lay in bed, told stories, shared that when we both saw the moon, we’d thought of the other, and how it represented the scale of our love for the other.
Those fleeting stretches still happen cyclically, often summoned and dispelled by my own waxing and waning cycle. When we’re in a sweet phase, David urges me to remember it. “Write it down!” he said the other week, my head resting on his chest. “You need to journal about this.”
He worries I write more about challenging times, which is probably right. After we fight, he often stumbles on me journaling furiously in the kitchen. As Naomi Shihab Nye writes, “When the world falls in around you, you have pieces to pick up, / something to hold in your hands, like ticket stubs or change.” Happiness slips away, all those hours spent wrapped in limbs, running fingers through hair, smiling so hard the back of our skulls hurt. It’s like trying to describe altered states—it never sounds as good as it felt.
But that’s why I am here, writing this down. It’s why I keep coming back to this story. I want to braid together the threads of our days and give both the happy and hard times their due. It is a form of deep dependence, this woven-together existence, living alongside each other through every shared domestic task, every stage of the moon, every state of despair and euphoria. Separate the balls of dough, roll them into strands, press them together at the end, braid them, press them together again, fluff up the loaf. I want to see the variation of our days not as inconsistencies but part of what forms the texture of the weave. There are nights when I cry as he turns away to sleep, nights when we tear into challah, nights when we host raucous dinner parties, nights when we share our deepest feelings and fears, nights when we read magazines next to each other, nights when David says with excitement, “I’m going to listen to a podcast and scrub our baking sheets.” A story, even a coherent one, is never just one thing. These days, I’m trying to do what the therapist says: learn how to tell our ongoing love story so I can learn how to live it.
Diana Saverin is a writer and outdoor educator who lives in Anchorage, Alaska. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, Outside, The Guardian, and others.
Editor: Krista Stevens
Copyeditor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/07/17/marriage-relationship-introspection/
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