Written By: Jordannah Elizabeth Graham-Mayer

Photo by Tom Falcon . John Mayer  — 2023-2024

A year arrives, creating a number demonstrating a collection of moments on Earth, and everyone makes a joke about getting older. To me, it’s more the quiet aging that occurs in front of you while a person is busy living. The gray that appears at the temples and then stays. The slight change in the face after a long night. The way the body asks for more recovery than it used to. The way sleep becomes precious. The way a person who once seemed almost indestructible begins, occasionally, to remind you that he is made of the same temporary material as everybody else.

I notice these things in John.

Of course I do.

When you love somebody, you become a student of small changes. You know the difference between tired and exhausted. You know the silence that means concentration and the silence that means something is wrong. You know when somebody needs to be alone and when they are hoping you will sit beside them without asking why. You know the look that comes over a person’s face when they are thinking about something they haven’t figured out how to say.

Sometimes I worry about him.

Not because I think something is necessarily wrong. Worry is not always a prediction. Sometimes worry is simply what love becomes when it realizes that another person’s life is precious and finite. I worry about whether he sleeps enough. I worry about how much he carries in his head. I worry about the strange burden of being a person who has spent so much of his life being watched while still needing somewhere to put the private parts of himself. I worry about what happens when the body begins asking questions that ambition cannot answer.

And I know he worries about me, too.

This is one of the things nobody tells you about marriage: eventually you become responsible for knowing the shape of another person’s fragility.

Not responsible for fixing it.

That is different.

You simply learn where it lives.

You learn which days require tenderness and which require laughter. You learn that sometimes the person you love needs to be reminded to eat, and sometimes she needs to be left alone with a book. You learn that a question can be an act of care, but too many questions can become another kind of pressure. You learn the difference because you have lived together long enough to know that love is not one behavior repeated forever.

Love is adjustment.

It is a language that keeps changing its grammar.

When we were younger, I thought love was mostly about recognition. Finding the person who understood you. Finding the person who could see through your defenses. Finding the person who made the world feel larger.

Image above: John in his youth.

Now I think love is also about witnessing.

You watch someone become.

You watch them become a parent. You watch them become more tired. You watch them become more patient in some ways and less patient in others. You watch old ambitions lose their urgency and new ones take their place. You watch the person you married discover that some of the things he thought he needed at thirty are not the things he needs now.

And if you are lucky, he watches you do the same.

There is something beautiful about watching John move more deeply into music without needing music to prove anything about him.

I don’t mean that he has stopped caring about excellence. He cares too much for that. But there is a difference between needing to demonstrate what you can do and wanting to understand what the thing itself can teach you.

I hear that difference in the way he talks now.

There is more listening in him.

More curiosity.

More willingness to let another musician explain something.

More interest in why a song works than in making sure everyone knows that he knows why it works.

Maybe that is age.

Maybe it is grief.

Maybe it is fatherhood.

Maybe it is simply the accumulation of enough years that you begin to understand the difference between being impressive and being good.

The older I get, the more I think the second one matters.

I don’t need him to be extraordinary at home.

I need him to be here.

That sounds almost embarrassingly simple, but marriage has taught me that simple things are rarely small. Just be here.

Sometimes the most romantic thing a person can do is become available.

There are days when I can see how much the world wants from him. There is always another room, another conversation, another song, another expectation. There are people who want the musician, the guitarist, the public person, the man who can make something beautiful appear out of six strings and a little silence.

But I want the man who comes home tired.

I want the one who takes his shoes off.

I want the one who sometimes doesn’t know what to say.

I want the one who is funny when he is exhausted.

I want the one who knows which child is about to wake up before I do.

I want the one who can sit beside me without filling the room.

And I think he wants the same kind of thing from me.

Not a version of me that is always articulate.

Not the woman who always knows what she thinks.

Not the writer who can turn every complicated feeling into a sentence.

Sometimes he wants the woman who is quiet.

Sometimes he wants the woman who is angry about something she cannot yet explain.

Sometimes he wants the woman who has spent the whole day caring for everyone else and has nothing left except her body beside his.

Sometimes he wants to make me laugh.

Sometimes he wants to remind me that I don’t have to solve everything tonight.

This is what reciprocity looks like after romance grows up.

It is less cinematic.

It is better.

There is a photograph I imagine sometimes—not because it exists somewhere, but because it could.

It is late.

The children are asleep.

The room is not especially clean.

Neither of us is dressed for a photograph.

John is looking down at something in his hands, and I am looking at him instead of the camera. 

Somebody has taken the picture too quickly. It is not flattering. It is not composed. There is no reason to post it.

And yet, if I saw it years from now, I would know exactly what I was feeling.

I was looking at my husband.

That is all.

Maybe that is why selfies and little photographs have become so meaningful to me. Not because they prove that we are happy. Happiness is too temporary to prove. They prove proximity. They prove that on some ordinary afternoon, we were in the same place. That we were laughing. That one of us had our arm around the other. That the children were there. That the light came through the window a certain way.

Marriage creates an archive nobody else can fully read.

To be continued…