Wedding Toasts I'll Never Give

It reminds me of the saying “Feelings aren’t facts.” 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. “To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow,”

Inspiring just the right amount of jealousy is a time-tested strategy for marital satisfaction,

“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 de

No, the marriages that thrive are the ones between people who appreciate grace. Such grace appears in those moments when you suddenly see the person you’ve always known just as you’ve always known them but also as someone surprising, someone brand-new.

After people are together for a long enough time, it is perhaps the silent communication that becomes more meaningful and also more cherished.

Marriage was a collaboration that let them do all these things for other people, that let them find their purpose.

“Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within,” writes James Baldwin in The Fire Next Time. He uses the word “love” “as a state of being, or a state of grace—not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.”

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. One of the best skills you can cultivate in a marriage is, ironically, stubbornness.

every minute of making out with that man had been paid for in hours of processing at home.