Marriage can’t always be about living your best lives in sync. Because some of the peak moments of a marriage are when you share in your insecurities, your anxieties, your fears, and your longing. That commitment, the one that can withstand and even revel in the darkest corridors of a life, grows and evolves and eventually transcends a contract or

Maybe this is a feature of that rock-bottom feeling you sometimes get when you’re married: All bad emotions come packaged with other bad emotions. No sadness is just sadness. No weakness is just weakness. Sadness is desperation is shame is weakness is grief is desolation is longing is abandonment is death.

Over time, marriage itself starts to feel like a slowly unfolding apocalypse. Your marriage will die or you will die. Which ending seems happier?

Contrary to popular wisdom, growing older does not make you less conflicted. In fact, you become more and more conflicted by the second. You can see all sides of any given thing. It’s all stupid bullshit and you want all of it, everything, and you also want none of it, it can all go fuck itself.

I didn’t realize how much internalized misogyny was wrapped up in my perception of women of all stripes, not just mothers. The truth was, I found fault with most of the women I encountered in the world. Every single one of them looked like a cautionary tale of what not to become. I didn’t realize yet that I was huffing the patriarchal spray paint t

That’s life in the suburbs: pretending that nothing is bothering you while you eat something shitty.

Why is this person always the same, and always in the way—a mumbling roadblock, a pointy Lego brick underfoot, a smelly heap of laundry blocking the bathroom door—and also, somehow, the only path back to sanity?

That’s the irony of escaping urban elitism: the consistent mediocrity of the suburbs will make you into more of an elitist.

I wanted a cross between a therapist and a cowboy.