Happy marriages are alive and well. The cries of their demise have been highly overrated, and couples happily married do indeed exist.

In that conversation with Richard, Kris did precisely what she'd done before offering her tennis quitting advice from years before. She paid attention. Instead of getting swept up in a reaction--regardless of how legitimate it would have been--she unseated herself and chose to focus on what Richard was saying. That kind of awareness is rare. It's rare in a person and even more so with a couple.

If you can figure out how to choose happiness in your marriage daily, and stop sweating the small stuff, it'll take ten years off your life.

When you give a happy couple the opportunity to talk about what makes marriage great, it's like a water spigot you can't quite turn off.

A good marriage is different to a happy marriage.

For those who are gifted for the soteriological pathway of marriage, it, like every such pathway, naturally offers not only trouble, work, and suffering but the deepest kind of existential satisfaction. Dante did not get to Paradiso without going through the Inferno. And so also there seldom exist "happy marriages".