Marriage is a relationship far more engrossing than we want it to be. It always turns out to be more than we bargained for. It is disturbingly intense, disruptively involving, and that is exactly the way it was designed to be. It is supposed to be more, almost, than we can handle. —Mike Mason, The Mystery of Marriage, 1985

think of all the men I’ve liked over the years, a new crush pretty much every month when I was single, and now every few years I’ve been married, and how each time I’ve thought, How novel! This is delightful and new! When really it’s the same, over and over again. I look at old diaries and I see a pattern going back to sixth grade: attraction comes

Their marriage is full of tragedy and chaos and mystery and triumph, and it lasts until death. It’s one of the great love stories of all time.

There is perfection only in death.

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.

When we marry, we still find ourselves looking down rows of appealing people, having to choose the same one, year after year. I’ve begun to suspect that fidelity is less a problem you solve than a chronic condition you manage with willpower and strategy—a decision to skip drinks, to tell the body no, or not again, or definitely only twice more.

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.”

Each of us must live with a full measure of loneliness that is inescapable, and we must not destroy ourselves with our passion to escape this aloneness.

was the poster child for optionality. I could have all the freedom in the world, and look how well I managed it. But my friends in AA quote a line about why you shouldn’t go to bars if you want to stay sober: “If you hang out in barbershops, eventually you’ll get a haircut.”