My wife and I agreed to stay married until our youngest finishes high school. She's a sophomore. Three more years.

We made the deal at a kitchen table in 2022, soberly, like two people negotiating a lease. There was no fight. There hasn't been a real fight in six years, which is how you know.

The terms: we're kind, we don't date, we don't tell the kids, and we reassess in June of the year she graduates. We even talked about money, roughly.

It was the most honest conversation we'd had in a decade and I remember driving to work the next morning feeling almost good.

Three years is a long time. I'm forty-nine. My wife is forty-seven and she's beautiful and she should be with someone who looks at her like she's new, and I'm the reason she isn't, and she's the reason I'm not, and we both signed.

What I didn't account for is how performing affection is different from feeling nothing. We hug in front of the kids. We hold hands at my nephew's wedding. And in the car afterward there's a silence that has a specific texture to it now.

And I've started to wonder whether we're protecting the kids or whether we're protecting ourselves from being the people who broke the family.

My son is nineteen and home from school in May. He said something in June — "you guys are weird lately" — and we both laughed and changed the subject at the same time, in sync, like we'd practiced.

Has anyone actually done the countdown version of this? Did the kids know anyway? And was the day after as clean as you'd planned.