Reversal of fortune: when Evan Fallenberg, a U.S.-born writer and translator living in Israel, split up with the mother of his children to live with the man in his life, he hadn't bargained on finding himself in a new role: wife.

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I WAS A HUSBAND FOR NEARLY 19 YEARS. Then suddenly two Septembers ago I became a wife.

No, it wasn't a sex-change operation; I'm perfectly happy with my penis and have no need for breasts. The change was that my wife and I finally split up after years of talking about it. And then I went to live with Yariv, the man I have been in love with for more than a decade.

Now, when you love a man for so many years, and spend as much time as your weirdly intersecting lives allow--midday trysts, reserve duty in the Israeli army, even the occasional trip to the Italian lake district or Sydney for a fantastic millennium party-you think you know him pretty well. You've seen him change a tire, rant about taxes and politicians, argue with his wife, console his children. You know his foibles and his weaknesses. You know what upsets his stomach and what makes him purr.

But living with him is something entirely different.

It was clear from the start that because of our personalities and our jobs, I--a work-from-home writer, translator, and teacher--would be the principal home manager while he would spend most of his day outside the house, running his plant nursery. This suited me just fine, and indeed, at first it was all bliss. I loved washing our laundry and pulling his clothes and mine from the line just a few hours later, sweet-smelling and stiff in the dry Israeli heat. I loved the clean, open spaces of our rented house; the paintings I chose for the walls; the linens for our bed. I loved having a nice dinner on the table when he rolled in after dark, his fingernails caked with earth, twigs and leaves hidden in the most impossible places: behind his ears, in the hair on his chest, in his trouser cuffs. It seemed to be the life I'd always wanted to live.

But after only a few weeks of conjugal life I was craving solitude, dreaming of a tiny spartan flat with no man in residence but me. After all those years of pining to be together, after all we had put our families through, were we destined to fail, and so quickly? What had gone so very wrong in so short a time?

I call it the wife's conundrum, and as a lifelong man I had not seen it coming. It was like entering the lives of a whole population you knew existed but had never had access to before. How was it possible to maintain a full-time job; run a household; find time for children, parents, friends; manage the finances; and keep track of at least 20 other crises of major and minor proportions every day, while remaining slim, attractive, and unharried, a smile on your face and a wholesome meal on the table each evening?

An example: One evening in those early days, after a meal he'd failed, like most others, to compliment me on, I did all the dishes-after all, he'd had a long, hard day once again-while he stripped to his underpants and plopped himself down on the couch in front of the television. This scenario-underpants, television-was new to me, having been a different kind of husband myself. I brought him the garbage, neatly bundled, to be dumped into the bin quite near the back door of our ground-floor home.

He glared at me and said nothing. A few minutes later, the bag of garbage still next to the couch, he disappeared into the bedroom.

"What about the garbage?" I called from the kitchen. There was a smile on my face, but my eyes were narrowed like those on a pouncing cat.

"I'm tired, I'm already in bed, and anyway, I don't even know where the garbage bin is," he said. I had a thousand snappy answers to this one, but I let them all go.

Suddenly the "miraculously fragmenting woman" in Jane Smiley's novella Ordinary Love made sense to me, a person who was "pulled apart every day only to be knitted together every night so that she could be pulled apart again in the morning."

However, the "rules" of my own knitting and unknitting were never set down-there were no lists of duties recorded anywhere. In fact, no one demanded anything of me; it was my own expectations that were ruining us. And yet, who else was there to hold it all together? If there were no wife in this relationship, how would we manage?

I was stunned into misery. Was this what I had overturned my life for, and the lives of the people I loved most in the world?

For an answer, I turned to the person who had been my source of wisdom and sanity for nearly two decades. "Did I fail to appreciate your efforts?" I asked my ex-wife over the phone, not quite sure if this conversation would lead to an I-told-you-so.

"A lot of times, yes," she said. I had memories of turning my nose up at her spaghetti sauce and often announcing "This is exactly what I ate for lunch today!" when she placed an evening meal in front of me. On the other hand, she had always praised my fathering skills, and the way I'd stood behind her to do things her friends couldn't dream of, like entering politics and taking part in a reality television show before we even understood what that was. In many ways we had been terrific partners, and have two wonderful sons to show for it.

These days my ex-wife is blossoming. Her career has taken off, and she is busy with things that interest her nearly every night of the week. She has steadfastly refused offers to be fixed up with some very nice men. "Men," she tells me, "are far too needy. I'm not sure I want to go through all that again. I'm enjoying my independence too much."

So she became a fun-loving bachelor, and I became a wife. She learned she can be selfish with her time, committing to what she wants and when without consultations and negotiations, while I ran head-on into male entitlement, blank-faced obstinacy, and that age-old contradiction of men-as both builders capable of erecting skyscrapers and flying spaceships, and babies in need of care and attention.

Still, I soldiered on, trying to understand, trying to find the proper balance. We had terrible fights. I found anger as hot and dangerous as lava inside me. I discovered insomnia.

And yet, through it all, two things were perfectly clear: First, this new life I had stepped into, flaws and all, was the right one for me, a life in which I finally felt, for the first time ever, completely at home in my own skin. And second, the pain and anguish I was feeling came from a single source--my love for this man. I still craved his company, the massive arms, the stubbly cheeks. I was still crazy about his easy masculinity, the lumbering grace of a large man Walt Whitman could have rhapsodized in poem after glorious poem. I still loved pulling our laundry from the line and making neat piles of clothing in the closets. And I savored those precious times when he showed me just how special I am to him.

In these past two years I have learned to store my anger for the big issues and get over the little ones quickly; to leave a big, wide space for him in the middle of our lives without squeezing myself to the margins; to cherish his compliments--they are always heartfelt and honest, never premeditated or designed to appease--while no longer needing his appreciation for every meal cooked and dish washed.

Our children-six in total-are watchful. They know it is for keeps, this odd and disturbing love that exploded its way into their lives. They see me pull a cake from the oven, help him fell a tree. They recognize roles when they see them, but they recognize love too, in all its warts and glory. And while they watch, I wish it on them, this terrifying plunge, this free fall that is love. But I find myself wishing just as earnestly that they will manage it all without being husband or wife, just partners through and through.

Fallenberg (www.evanfallenberg.com) lives in Israel and is author of the novel Light Fell.