…A self-ordained professor's tongue
Too serious to fool
Spouted out that liberty
Is just equality in school.
'Equality,' I spoke the word
As if a wedding vow.
Ah, but I was so much older then
I'm younger than that now.

…Yes, my guard stood hard when abstract threats
Too noble to neglect
Deceived me into thinking
I had something to protect.
Good and bad, I define these terms
Quite clear, no doubt, somehow.
Ah, but I was so much older then
I'm younger than that now.

- Bob Dylan, "My Back Pages"

PROLOGUE
[Season 5, Episode 13]

"I'm not young enough to know everything." – Oscar Wilde

"We just don't want you to rush into it," Tami told her daughter as she and Eric sat across from Julie and Matt at the table of a fancy restaurant. "Because you don't need to."

Eric glanced at her, questioningly, as though to ask, Did you feel like you needed to?

Tami and Eric were fighting now, one of their worst fights in years. It was easy to second guess at a time like this.

"Right," Julie said, "We're not rushing into anything. It's not like we're getting married tomorrow. And you guys were our age when you got married."

"That was a different time," Eric insisted.

He said that as though they'd gotten married in the 18th century. Sure, it was a different time, Tami agreed, but it wasn't that different. Few of their peers had been married at their age.

"Well," Tami said, "we were a little bit older."

Tami wanted Julie to have her degree first, to be able to concentrate first and foremost on school, the way she herself never quite could. She wanted Julie to have something to fall back on. Matt was a good kid, but a woman needed to establish herself before marriage. If she didn't, she might end up following her husband around, subservient to his career.

Tami had never thought of herself that way before, as subservient. She'd always thought of herself as supportive. But lately, she was beginning to wonder. It was so easy to get stuck in a pattern, a way of doing things, and then when you tried to get out of the rut you'd dug for yourself, you just might pull an avalanche down on top. That's how she felt now: if she tried too hard to climb, their marriage might be buried. You couldn't bury a marriage that was almost two decades old. Not for a job in Philadelphia, no matter how much you wanted it.

"You were still in college," Julie insisted.

"It was a different time," Eric repeated, as though everyone around them had been getting married before graduation, as though anyone around them had been getting married. People did, sure, but not anyone they knew personally. They'd only met married people at college after they themselves were married and had moved into married family housing, and the vast majority of those couples had been graduate students, not college students like them.

"I love your daughter, I love Julie, and I want to marry her," Matt said. "That's it."

Eric was staring off in a partial daze. Tami had no idea what he was thinking. They'd sat at a dinner table very much like this once, with Eric's father, announcing their own engagement.

"Maybe you don't understand what I'm saying, Matt," Eric said. "Marriage requires maturity. Marriage requires two people, who for the rest of their lives" He emphasized that, Tami thought, as though to warn her against trying to get out of this marriage, as though to remind her that they were in this forever, no matter how much they fought - "are willing to listen. To really listen to each other."

Why was he saying that? Had he listened to her about this job? No. He was suggesting she should listen to him about the Panthers job.

"And that marriage requires the greatest of all things, which is compromise."

He was right. There was no way to follow two divergent paths while holding hands. One or the other or both had to compromise. Something had to be given up in order for something to be gained. But why did it seem Tami was always the one giving up her goals to gain stability in the marriage? She didn't doubt that Eric loved her, or that he appreciated her, or that he was a good and faithful man, but why couldn't he pay the larger price for once?

"We're willing to make it work," Julie said. "You guys were married at our age. How many different jobs have you had? How many times have you moved?"

How many indeed, Tami thought. How many times for Eric's career?

"And how many difficult things have you gone through?" Julie continued.

Eric looked at Tami. Memories may have been avalanching in his mind, the way they were in hers, mingled with the present disagreement. They had pulled through a lot over the years, loved each other through the challenges, stuck together while those around them divorced. They'd invested years in this marriage, countless fights and reconciliations, laughter and tears and sighs and moans.

Tami nodded, the tears pooling in her eyes. She wanted this job, but she wanted this marriage more.

Why couldn't she have both?

"And you guys pulled through," Julie said. "You guys are my inspiration."

What was Tami inspiring her daughter to do, precisely? To sign away her own goals on the dotted line of a marriage license?

She was about to burst into tears, and so she excused herself.

Eric came to her, as he always eventually did when they fought. He didn't apologize. He didn't tell her he would give up the contract for her dreams. He just held her. He was just there, a rock that was never going to go away. And there was some comfort in that. Some comfort in his arms around her.

Some comfort, but not enough.

"It's my turn, babe," she told him. "I have loved you and you have loved me, and we have compromised. Both of us. For your job."

At the moment, the scales felt terribly uneven to her. She wasn't thinking of her unwillingness to follow him to Austin, how she had kept her career in Dillon instead of following him, or how he had eventually given up that prestigious job to preserve the family. She was thinking instead of how she had, from day one, followed him to college, how she had quit her first good, post-college job to move for his, how, eventually, she had decided she might as well just be a full-time, stay-at-home mom, rather than keep starting over at the bottom of the rung. "And now it's time to talk about doing that for my job."

He pulled away from her. He couldn't listen to that, could he?

"Because otherwise, what am I going to tell our daughter?" That marriage was not really a union between two equals, because the man's career came first? That Julie had a choice between marriage or realizing her personal goals, but she could never have both?

Eric said nothing. He wouldn't fight with her, but he wouldn't bend either. She brushed the tears violently from her eyes. "You just can't…."

He was a rock, yes. Reliable, dependable - but also unmovable. He didn't change with the time.

"Let's just go back inside. Come on."

[*]

On the drive home, Eric had nothing to say, except, "Why does Julie keep saying you guys all the time now? You guys. You guys. She wasn't in Chicago that long. What's wrong with y'all?"

"I don't know, hon. That's just what she says." Tami turned her head to look out the window. "You can't always have the world the way you want it."

[*]

Tami gave.

There was nothing else to do but give.

The marriage was too old, too valuable.

And there could be no democracy of two.

[*]

Eric came to her again, as he so often did, only after a period of private reflection.

This time he ran down the escalator to her in the mall, to tell her he would compromise for her.

He would move to Philadelphia.

And as he kissed her, she thought of their long journey to this point, of the stops and starts, the leaps forward and the stumbles back, and of how, whatever his flaws or her flaws, they'd always found a way to love each other . . .