Couples who live together before marriage but after becoming engaged, who combine their lives after making a clear and public commitment, are not any more likely to have distressed or dissolved marriages than couples who do not cohabitate before marriage. They do not suffer from the cohabitation effect.

A braver form of self-definition dares to be affirmative. Ian needed to move from talking about what he wasn’t going to do to talking about what he was going to do. “Being against something is easy,” I said. “What are you for?”

something to remind them that life is going to continue on past their twenties, and that it might even be great.

crisis and capital can—and

confidence that overrides insecurity comes from experience. There is no other way.

“Oh, absolutely. Everything about it was fuzzy. That fuzziness ended up being the most frustrating part. I felt like I was on this multiyear, never-ending audition to be his wife. That made me really insecure. There was a lot of game-playing and arguing. I never felt like he was really committed to me. I still don’t, obviously.”

Real confidence comes from mastery experiences, which are actual, lived moments of success, especially when things seem difficult. Whether we are talking about love or work, the confidence that overrides insecurity comes from experience. There is no other way.

“borrowing an ego.” She was reaching out in a moment of need and letting someone else’s frontal lobe do the work. We all need to do that sometimes, but if we externalize our distress too much, we don’t learn to handle bad days on our own.

Be ruled by time, the wisest counselor of all. —Plutarch, historian To achieve great things, two things are needed: a plan, and not quite enough time. —Leonard Bernstein, composer