It was early 2009, President Obama was in the White House, and optimism was in the air. I’d just turned 30 and knew something good was about to happen to me. At a barbecue in Los Angeles, where I was living and missing New York, I met a gregarious man in flip-flops and a seventies ski jacket, with a promise of adventure in his eyes. Ben turned out to be an actor in town from the East Coast. We bonded over our love of sketch comedy and marijuana. A couple of nights later, we were sitting on his friend’s porch, watching the night sky and dreaming up a television pilot about a grown man still living with his parents. Within months, we were sharing a Brooklyn apartment, living in a blissful cloud of pot smoke and domesticity.

We got married quickly. I adored his irreverent humor, and our creative synergy held my tendency toward anxiety at bay. I felt a sense of security with him, a sense of family—though we were in no hurry for children. It was working together that gave us joy and excitement. We made a couple of low-budget shorts, and one day, on a bike ride across the Williamsburg Bridge, we came up with an idea for High Maintenance, a series about New Yorkers connected by a weed-delivery guy, played by Ben. I’d been working as a casting director and immediately roped in friends as well as actors we’d seen perform in plays and wanted to know better. I’ll never forget the rush of hearing an actor speak the words I had written when we shot the first episode in a Brooklyn hotel room.

Before long, critics were paying attention—even as our married life began to lose its footing. Ben and I were now spending nearly all our waking hours together, and there was an airlessness between us, a sense of codependency, which brought strain. We started bickering, falling into a loop of arguing and crying and making up. Then we’d smoke pot to numb the pain and return to goofing around and writing scripts.

Sometimes we would take camping trips and have a magical time, only to find ourselves fighting again back home. Our coping mechanism was to treat our discord as fodder for the show. Everything is copy, as Nora Ephron said. We were happiest on set, when we were creating together.