Wedding Toasts I'll Never Give

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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?

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

One woman married for twenty-five years said, "Many times, it simply seemed easier to stay than to figure out how to divvy up the books. And then we broke on through to the other side...like playing a video game where you suddenly hit a new level that you didn't even know was there. "When I wanted to leave, it didn't seem like a good time for various reasons," a woman married for fifteen years told me, "and then when it was a convenient time, I no longer wanted to. And so you sort of stagger on and then you think, "He makes me crazy sometimes, but what would it be like not to have him around? I wouldn't like it.

Sometimes we can thank our feelings for sharing and ignore them. Maybe wanting doesn’t have to perfectly coincide with getting. Maybe sometimes not-getting has a value of its own.

I want to say that one day you and your husband will fight about missed flights, and you’ll find yourself wistful for the days when you had to pay for only your own mistakes. 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. You will gaze at this man you once adored and think, It sure would be nice to have this whole place to myself.

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?

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

I packed Oliver's snack, woke him up, and started making breakfast - doing the work of keeping our family going, hoping that these little actions will help us have a good day, a good week, a good life.

I was being a selfish teenager and it was hurting my mom and making my dad angry. He sat me down and said, "I need to remind you: you are not the reason we got married. You are a wonderful by-product. But you need to know that I loved your mom before you were even a thought. And after you've left this house, I will still love her." I was shocked. It was like, "You are a blip on the screen of our relationship.

He stayed, and he loved me, a broken person with a broken brain.

There is probably a better feeling than hearing your child praised, but I doubt it can be obtained legally.

Marriage is one game where the second you start keeping score, you've lost.

He gets water out of the fridge in the morning, and when he does he brushes past me in our tiny kitchen while I'm making myself coffee, and how hard is it to wait two minutes?

I think of being married as being in the Bon Jovi song "Livin' on a Prayer." Or a dodgeball game where you're together on one side and the whole world is on the other. Feeling exhausted or...being broke or having a sick kid - it's all just another ball aimed straight at your face.

...I decided that it's true: marriage is not only the talking to each other, but also the silences, which are also expressive. After people are together for a long enough time, it is perhaps the silent communication that becomes more meaningful and also more cherished. That's something that I don't think not-married people or newlyweds can understand.

There are moments in my life that from the outside looked like nothing but that I will never forget until I die

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. We have to keep living after the credits roll, navigating our way through broken appliances and aging parents and temptation-filled business trips.

I wouldn't want to trade in my current problems for new ones with someone else.

With kids, we see them at their worst and keep loving them. They yell "I hate you!" and you have to be the grown-up and say "You're mad. I still love you."...Why is it so much easier to do this with children than with adults? At our worst, why can't I just think of [my husband] as my sometimes-awful pet cat?

Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they're finished.