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

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

...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.

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.

Life brings the layoffs of storms but what you do after is what makes your life a true blossom of reform.