My ex-husband thought the hot tub was frivolous.
He said it wasn't practical for two people who worked all day and had no kids. He said we didn't use it enough. He said the monthly chemical-and-electricity cost was "unjustifiable." He said we could take the money and do something with it, by which he meant he had a slightly nicer car in mind.
Reader, I kept the hot tub.
It stayed in the divorce, on my side of the ledger. He got his slightly nicer car. I got a six-person cedar-sided deck tub in my backyard, eleven years old, which technically I paid for twice.
Here is how I use it now.
Most nights, between 9 and 10pm. Mostly alone. Occasionally with one specific friend. Never with a man I've known for less than six months — not because I'm rigid about it, but because the cost-benefit of my glass of wine and my quiet is high, and the cost-benefit of a new-ish man and his commentary is, statistically, lower than I'd like.
I turn the jets on. I turn them off about a minute later because I like it quiet. I face the back of the yard, which is where the aspens are, which have been there longer than the marriage and will be there longer than whatever comes next. In December it snows on my face and I watch the steam come off my shoulders and I think, for the first time in that day, nothing.
That is the part. That is the part I kept.
I had spent twenty years being a woman who thought constantly. About dinner, about the calendar, about his mother, about how the house sounded when he walked in, about whether I looked tired or just tired-in-the-relatable-way. My brain was a muscle that would not sit down. And in the hot tub, for the first time since I was in my twenties, it sits down.
The woman who wrote the original article telling me butthole sunning would rebalance my hormones would probably tell me that forty-five minutes in hot water at 104 degrees is not a substitute for a meditation practice. Fine. Sure. Call it what you want. Call it expensive bathwater.
But I came out of my marriage asking myself what I had been doing for two decades that did not actually feel like anything. And I came into my new life asking myself what actually feels like something. This one does.
He was wrong about the hot tub. He was wrong about a lot of things. This is the one he's probably still angry about, because, in the split, I got the thing that turned out to be load-bearing.