Wedding Toasts I'll Never Give

You can’t plan for grace. These moments are like shooting stars: you see them only if you’re watching, and you see them more clearly when it’s dark.

“I learned that you have to pay for indulgence.”

Why have you been playing with fire when you could have just kept it as a fantasy?”

“you are in for a bout with the unknown. Even that person has no idea what is in store for him and where he will be asked to go next. So when we agree to share lives, we are offering to be part of a dynamic, unpredictable adventure.”

The soul mate ideal appears in Plato’s Symposium. Zeus, seeking to humble humankind, split us in half, condemning us to wander in search of our other half: “So ancient is the desire of one another which is implanted in us, reuniting our original nature, making one of two, and healing the state of man.”

This time around, he’s grateful for boredom, seeing it as a challenge rather than a burden: “When you’re bored, you’re forced to figure things out, to be creative.”

“Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within,” writes James Baldwin in The Fire Next Time. He uses the word “love” “as a state of being, or a state of grace—not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.”

How do you stay married?

These other men—did I ever really see them? Or were they just projection screens onto which I could shadow-puppet my own desires?

In 1894, Edward Carpenter (called “the gay godfather of the British left”) wrote, “Love is fed not by what it takes, but by what it gives, and that excellent dual love of man and wife must be fed also by the love they give to others.”