All the couples therapy and communication seminars in the world won't save you if you aren't prepared to close your eyes and hug the mainmast through a storm.

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.

I want to say that at various points in your marriage, may it last forever, you will look at this person and feel only rage.

...there is so much beauty in the trying, and in the failing, and in the trying again.

The romantic fairy tales we grew up with -- where marriage is the happy ending rather than the opening scene -- are not useful for grown-ups.

(Personally, I have avoided many fights by going to bed angry and waking up to realize that I'd just been tired.)

By staying married, we give something to ourselves and to others: hope. Hope that in steadfastly loving someone, we ourselves, for all our faults, will be loved; that the broken world will be made whole. To hitch your rickety wagon to the flickering star of another fallible human being -- what an insane thing to do. What a burden, and what a gift.

...even good marriages sometimes involve flinging a remote control at the wall.

People who don't marry miss both the pelting hardships of marriage and its warm rewards.

As married people, we dwell on a spectrum between happy and unhappy, in love and out of love, and we move back and forth on that line decade by decade, year by year, week by week, even hour by hour.

Failure is part of being human, and it is definitely part of being married.

...that's part of what marriage means: sometimes hating this other person but staying together because you promised you would.

Dating is poetry. Marriage is a novel. There are times, maybe years, that are all exposition.

Forsaking all others means going deep with one person -- exhaustingly deep.

Wherever you go, there you are. You would just have different problems. Are the problems you have now so bad that any other problems would be better?

The boring parts don't last forever. In retrospect, they aren't even boring.

To love somebody is not just a strong feeling -- it is a decision, it is a judgment, it is a promise," writes psychologist Erich Fromm. "If love were only a feeling, there would be no basis for the promise to love each other forever. A feeling comes and it may go. How can I judge that it will stay forever, when my act does not involve judgment and decision?