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.

Now I have those things, and only sometimes do I catch glimpses of how good I have it.

No, the marriages that thrive are the ones between people who appreciate grace. Such grace appears in those moments when you suddenly see the person you’ve always known just as you’ve always known them but also as someone surprising, someone brand-new.

What does it mean to say you’re present? It’s defiance: Elaine Stritch singing, “I’m Still Here.” It’s what you say when you arrive after being somewhere else. It’s reassuring. It means you’ve come back, or that you haven’t left. And maybe eventually it means “I’m here now, so you can let go.”

Our abilities narrow, our worlds narrow, our lives narrow, until we are a person whose life is not full of infinite potential but, instead, is teeming with memories of things done and left undone. At forty, I am slowly coming to terms with the elementary notion that being in this world means giving up on other worlds.

“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.”

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.”

“When you fall in love, it doesn’t feel like a choice,” a friend of mine says. “It feels like fate. And so then when the passionate love cools in your marriage, it’s hard to feel like that’s not fate, too. It’s hard to remember that letting yourself fall in love with this person and marrying them was a choice, and loving them again can be a choice,

“So what’s the secret to staying together?” I asked her. “Be nice?” she offered. I laughed, but that may be it, the way a secret to losing weight is to eat less. Be nice. Don’t leave. That’s all.