The thing about the narrator in "Marital Problems" by Robin Romm is that she doesn't have any

Organizing a story around the search for an item is both an ancient practice and also still a ubiquitous one in modern times. Jason looking for the Golden Fleece or Perseus seeking Medusa's head.  King Arthur and the Knights of the Holy Grail. To the best of my ability to understand their plot, nearly every Avengers movie between 2012 and 2018. There's something very satisfying and centering about the quest for an item. Every book on writing will tell aspiring authors that if they want their audiences to care, they have to make their characters want something, and the quest for an item makes that something very easy to identify. 

Right from the first sentence of Robin Romm's "Marital Problems," we have a MacGuffin driving character action, a thing the narrator Paige and her husband Victor are looking for. It won't appear until the story's closing act, and when it appears, we'll realize, as one often does with MacGuffins, that it wasn't about the thing itself.

What they're looking for is a dead bird buried in the binoculars case of Victor's dead father. Their flibbertigibbet daughter has used the case to bury it, but being a flibbertigibbet, either doesn't remember where or simply won't say. Victor never knew his deadbeat dad, but recently, a half brother who found Victor through a DNA database brought him their father's binoculars so Victor could have something of their father. Their father, it turned out, was a birder, which is to say one of his favorite pastimes was looking for things. Which makes their MacGuffin sort of circular: they are looking for something that encases the thing you use to look for something. Add to this the fact that the daughter and her babysitter buried the bird while the parents were at an actual funeral, and you've got a good deal of circularity going on here.

You could say that there is yet another layer of circularity to the search, because Paige knows that for Victor, his missing father has made him feel like he's been missing something his whole life. So they're looking for the thing that represents the thing he's always been looking for. When Victor rages about wanting to beat up their terrible contractor Marco, Paige knows what he's really doing is expressing his "ancient, private rage" against his father. 

Along with the search for the MacGuffin, Marco's kitchen remodel forms a good deal of the tension in the story. Marco is terrible, but Portland is an expensive city, so they're kind of stuck with the only contractor who will do their kitchen for what they can afford. Paige is attracted to Marco, but seems in control of her attraction, enough to make fun of herself for having it. 

The narrator's own, private desire

Paige believes she knows about Marco's marriage and that it is unhappy, although he hasn't said so explicitly. She notes that although she can figure out what's going on in the marriages of other people, she's not sure what's going on in her own. In her marriage to Victor, there has been a loss of sexual desire that comes with age, and she's not really up to doing the work to get it back. In her imagination, Paige contrasts her own sex-less marriage with the life of her friend Danielle, whom she envies. Danielle is wealthier than them, and last night Danielle just left her daughter Madeline with Victor and Paige in order to have sex with her new boyfriend, sex Paige imagines in satisfying detail. So in addition to the physical object of desire in the binoculars case serving as a casket that the couple wants to find, Paige has her own mental object of desire, which is the life of her friend Danielle. 

This could be the makings of a tragedy, but instead, the story is a rom-com. Paige's willingness to follow her own fantasies and note the lack of reality in them allows her to survive the things that typically doom a marriage. She describes Marco as "Hansel all grown up, a fairy-tale boy," meaning she knows that her imagination of him isn't real. Paige also is conscious throughout of the things she has, even when envying the things she lacks. She knows her husband is still attractive and that other women envy her the way she envies Danielle. Paige recognizes that although Danielle's daughter has things their daughter Lucy lacks, Lucy is bright and quick-witted and much prettier than Madeline. 

Paige is just doing what all good wives and mothers do when she indulges her fantasies a bit.

The story's tension is released in a climax as satisfying as the sex Paige imagines

All three sources of tension--the missing binoculars case, the bum of a contractor, and Paige's envy of Danielle--come together in an explosive climax. Madeline and Danielle come to Paige's house to help locate the missing binoculars case. Marco is there, and it turns out, he was the guy Danielle had sex with the night before. Victor, fed up with Marco, spills the beans about Marco being married, and Marco, fed up with Victor making him actually do what he was paid to do, punches Victor. At the same time, the girls show up with the bird, which turns out to have just been the dead bird. There never was a binoculars case. 

The climax is not the fulfillment of fantasies, but their dissolution. There never was a binoculars case. The father wasn't worth getting to know. Marco isn't a god with muscles carved of soap. Daniele's life isn't perfect. Victor has reasserted his position as a good partner, because he uses Marco's sudden outburst to threaten to call the police, thereby extracting promises from him to finish the kitchen at last. In the story's final lines, Paige considers the dead bird. It's some common backyard bird, one so "close at hand, you wouldn't need binoculars to find it." It's one of the most common endings to a MacGuffin story, the ending that what you were looking for was there all along, but it manages to do it without being in the least bit trite. 

In reality, there was never a moment in the story when Paige didn't know she had what she wanted. This isn't the familiar story of the young person who dreams of going off to find adventure only to realize adventure was right under their nose the whole time, but more of a person who suspected her life was good in spite of its growing weight and difficulty, who finds at the end that her suspicions were correct. 

My blogging pal Karen Carlson jokes sometimes about how "sensitive portrayal of a marriage falling apart" is a lit fic cliché. A story called "Marital Problems" could have become that story, but it isn't. It's about how to make a marriage survive its issues, not a meditation on how it falls apart. That's because it's a comedy, not a tragedy. Ultimately, it's Paige's own self-effacing sense of humor that helps her marriage to survive. She refuses to take her own feelings too seriously, contrasting them with people like Daniele, "so quick to feel their feelings, as if they curate and file them carefully so that whenever they think a thought, they can find the corresponding emotion." We often speak as though being in close touch with one's feelings is emotionally healthy, but it's Paige's own ironic distance from hers that helps her to arrive at her recognition of the good thing she has going.