It's lonely. That's why, in many ways, the CIA is the world's

In the annals of hidden labor, a witness speaks with a wry tenderness about the weight of secrecy: “It’s lonely. That’s why, in many ways, the CIA is the world’s biggest dating agency, I think. I imagine it’s much like two actors that get married because they understand that universe. You know, I’m pretty sure the agency’s divorce rate is rather high.” So says Valerie Plame, and her words ring like a bell struck in a vault—clear, enclosed, echoing on stone. The saying teaches first of isolation: that work done behind veils can render the heart veiled as well, and that those who spend their days guarding truths often find their nights guarded from ordinary love.

To name the CIA as a “dating agency” is half jest, half lament. It confesses that only those initiated into the same rituals—cover stories, sudden departures, rooms without windows—can readily read one another’s silences. As two actors share a language of auditions, late calls, and borrowed lives, so do operatives share a grammar of absence and ambiguity. They recognize in each other the fatigue that comes from carrying lives in parallel: the public one that smiles, the private one that cannot explain. Thus proximity becomes courtship; comprehension becomes comfort; and the workplace, by the gravity of shared burden, arranges hearts as a subtle matchmaker.

Yet within this comfort lies the seed of fragility. The line ends on divorce, and wisely so. For a life of partitions asks of lovers an art beyond the ordinary: to trust when evidence cannot be shown, to forgive when explanations must be partial, to accept that duty may outrank dinner, that the phone may ring and the train of intimacy be left standing at the platform. Even those who “understand that universe” can be consumed by its orbits. The very skills that preserve the nation—compartmentalization, detachment, practiced calm—can corrode a marriage if never once set down at the threshold.

History offers both warning and hope. In the days before the CIA, the OSS gathered kindred spirits in a crucible of war, and there Julia and Paul Child met. Their union—born in the shadow world—survived because, after the secret work, they built a vivid, shared life of letters, food, and art. They carried forward the discipline of service but refused to let service be their only music. Theirs is a parable for every clandestine house: if you do not compose a second melody together, the first—however noble—will drown the room.

There is another parable, quieter, told in many unnamed homes. A pair of officers wed beneath the flag and the unspoken. At first, relief: at last, someone who knows why birthdays are missed and why stories stop mid-sentence. Later, strain: two schedules yoked to separate storms, two souls too skillful at not saying what they feel. One evening, they attempt what the old sages prescribe: they speak not of operations but of ordinary hunger—plants for the balcony, the ache in a parent’s knee, the poem one of them kept as a talisman in training. In such small confessions, they begin to reclaim a life not curated by the mission. The work still calls; but the home, newly furnished with humble words, calls as well.

What, then, is the lesson to pass down like a sealed letter entrusted to a friend? First, admit the lonely truth of high-secrecy vocations; denial twists the soul more surely than danger. Second, do not let the workplace be the only matchmaker: choose companionship for virtues beyond shared jargon—patience, play, humor, reverence for the ordinary. Third, practice deliberate declassification of the heart: even when facts must remain locked, feelings must not. To guard the state with steel and the hearth with stone is wisdom; to guard the heart from its partner is ruin.

Take these counsels as provisions for any life lived under relentless duty. (1) Establish rituals that are non-negotiable—weekly meals, device-free walks, a standing hour for unhurried conversation—so that presence becomes liturgy. (2) Keep a shared altar of the ordinary—a hobby, a garden, a recipe book—reminding you that you are more than your badges. (3) Learn the craft of translation: if you cannot tell the story, tell the feeling—fear, pride, sorrow, relief. (4) Invite wise third parties—counselors, elders, chaplains—who can hold confidences and teach repair. (5) And honor the red lines: when signs of harm or drift appear, seek help early; courage is often the willingness to ask. Do these, and even in the stern corridors of the CIA or any exacting universe, love need not be a casualty. It can be, as in all heroic ages, the home to which the warrior returns, the lamp that proves there is life beyond the mission, and the vow that outlasts the echo in the vault.