We end up back with each other. There’s nowhere else to go. People! You've a very important, early decision to make in your life: are you going to be alone, or are you going to be with somebody else? Are you going to be sane, or not lonely? A couple is a strange thing; it’s an organism that’s half as intelligent as the most intelligent member. And you both know who it is! ‘Cause you’ve got two people walking around together all the time trying to remember all the different shit they have to lie about to each other!

Marriage has taught me that it is just a union of two imperfect persons seeking perpetually to make sacrifices and understand each other.

In the absence of understanding, that was a good a reason as any for living together and making babies and raising them up and throwing them out of the house and then going through the long slow decline together until one of them died and left the other alone again, understanding as little as ever about what their spouses really wanted, who they really were. Was that tragedy? Or was that comedy? Was there really any difference?

"This isn't a spotless life. There is much ahead, my immaculate little peach. And there is no way to say it other than to say it: marriage is indeed this horribly complex thing for which you appear to be ill prepared and about which you seem to be utterly naive. That's okay. A lot of people are. You can learn along the way. A good way to start would be to let fall your notions about "perfect couples." It's really such an impossible thing to either perceive honestly in others or live up to when others believe it about us. It does nothing but box some people in and shut other people out, and it ultimately makes just about everyone feel like shit. A perfect couple is a wholly private thing. No one but the two people in the perfect relationship know for certain whether they're in one. Its only defining quality is that it's composed of two people who feel perfectly right about sharing their lives with each other, even during the hard times."

A couple in love is like a pair of scissors. Two useless pieces of metal, until they are inextricably connected at the core so that they can move together as one and accomplish great things.

It was as if they had leapt over the arduous cavalry of conjugal life and gone straight to the heart of love. They were together in silence like an old married couple wary of life, beyond the pitfalls of passion, beyond the brutal mockery of hope and the phantoms of disillusion: beyond love. For they had lived together long enough to know that love was always love, anytime and anyplace, but it was more solid the closer it came to death.

According to this rule, a man or woman or large combativeness should select a partner equally inclined to antagonism; then we should have what? The elements of a happy contented, harmonious life? No, instead, either a speedy lawsuit for divorce, or a continual domestic broil, the nearest approach to mundane purgatory possible. The selfish, close-fisted, miserly money-catcher must marry a woman equally sordid and stingy. Then together they could hoard up, for moths and rust to destroy, or for interested relatives to quarrel over, the pictorial greenback and the glittering dollar, each scrimping the other down to the finest point above starvation and freezing, and finally dying, to be forgotten as soon as dead by their fellow-men, and sent among the goats at the great assizes. A shiftless sprendthrift must choose for a helpmeet (?) an equally slovenly, thriftless wife. A man with a crotchet should select a partner with the same morbid fancy. A man whose whole mental composition gravitates behind his ears, must mind a mate with the same animal disposition. An individual whose mental organization is sadly unbalance, is advised to seek for a wife a woman with the same deficiencies and abnormalities. Any one can see at a glance the domestic disasters which such a plan of proceeding would entail. Men and women of unbalanced temperaments would become more unbalanced. An individual of erroneous tendencies, instead of having the constant check of the example and admonitions of a mate of opposite tendencies, would be, by constant example, hastened onward in his sinful ways. Thus, to all but a very small proportion of humanity, the married state would be one of infelicity and degeneration. And what would be the progeny of such unions? The peculiarities and propensities of the parents, instead of being modified and perhaps obliterated in the children by corresponding difference sin character, would be doubly exaggerated. The children of selfish parents would be thieves; those of spendthrifts, beggars; those of crotchety parents, monomaniacs; those born of sensual parents, beastly debauchees. A few generations of such a degenerating process would either exterminate the race of drive it back to Darwin’s ancestral ape. It must not be inferred, from our strictures upon the theory mentioned, that we would advocate the opposite course, that is, the contraction of marriage by individuals of wholly dissimilar tastes, aims, and temperaments. Such alliances would doubtless be quite as wretched in their results as those of an opposite character. It is with this as with nearly all other subjects; the true course lies between the two extremes. Parties who are negotiating a life partnership should be careful to assure themselves that there exists a sufficient degree of congeniality of temperament to make such close and continued association agreeable.

Life with another person is always difficult.

A wedding is and event, but marriage is a life.

Let us be dreamers, thinkers, speculative philosophers, or as our spouses would have it: Idiots

If you choose to try to make a life with another person, you will live by that choice. You'd find yourself having to choose again and again to remain rather than run. It helps if you enter into a committed relationship prepared to work, ready to be humbled and willing to accept and even enjoy living in that in-between space, bouncing between the poles of beautiful and horrible, sometimes in the span of a single conversation, sometimes over the course of years. And inside of that choice and those years you'll almost certainly come to see that there is no such thing as a 50-50 balance, instead it will be like beads on an abacus, sliding back and forth, the maths rarely tidy, the equation never quite solved....

Look round at the marriages which you know. The true marriage — that noble union, by which a man and woman become together the one perfect being — probably does not exist at present upon earth. It is not surprising that husbands and wives seem so little part of one another. It is surprising that there is so much love as there is. For there is no food for it. What does it live upon — what nourishes it? Husbands and wives never seem to have anything to say to one another. What do they talk about? Not about any great religious, social, political questions or feelings. They talk about who shall come to dinner, who is to live in this lodge and who in that, about the improvement of the place, or when they shall go to London. If there are children, they form a common subject of some nourishment. But, even then, the case is oftenest thus, — the husband is to think of how they are to get on in life; the wife of bringing them up at home. But any real communion between husband and wife — any descending into the depths of their being, and drawing out thence what they find and comparing it — do we ever dream of such a thing? Yes, we may dream of it during the season of "passion," but we shall not find it afterwards. We even expect it to go off, and lay our account that it will. If the husband has, by chance, gone into the depths of his being, and found there anything unorthodox, he, oftenest, conceals it carefully from his wife, — he is afraid of "unsettling her opinions."

Here, a man and woman unite for life, but they include in their union all the loves they will live through in their lifetime. But over there, it’s all about changing wives and changing husbands, searching for that one perfect amor.

We were at the age when a friend's conversation seems like oneself talking, when one shares a life in common the way I still think, bachelor though I am, some married couples are able to live.