As married people, we dwell on a spectrum between happy and unhappy, in love and out of love, and we move back and forth on that line decade by decade, year by year, week by week, even hour by hour.

The romantic fairy tales we grew up with -- where marriage is the happy ending rather than the opening scene -- are not useful for grown-ups.

Dating is poetry. Marriage is a novel. There are times, maybe years, that are all exposition.

...there is so much beauty in the trying, and in the failing, and in the trying again.

People who don't marry miss both the pelting hardships of marriage and its warm rewards.

The children of violently unhappy marriages, like my mother, are often hamstrung for life, but the children of happier marriages have problems too - all the worse, perhaps, because they don't have virtue on their side.