Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage Quotes

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Marriage becomes hard work once you have poured the entirety of your life’s expectations for happiness into the hands of one mere person. Keeping that going is hard work.

Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage

I had always been taught that the pursuit of happiness was my natural (even national) birthright. It is the emotional trademark of my culture to seek happiness. Not just any kind of happiness, either, but profound happiness, even soaring happiness. A...

Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage

This is what intimacy does to us over time. That's what a long marriage can do: It causes us to inherit and trade each other's stories. (p.237)

Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage

What time has ever been a simple time for those who are living it?

Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage

Real, sane, mature love—the kind that pays the mortgage year after year and picks up the kids after school—is not based on infatuation but on affection and respect.

Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage

In the modern industrialized Western world, where I come from, the person whom you choose to marry is perhaps the single most vivid representation of your own personality. Your spouse becomes the most gleaming possible mirror through which your emoti...

Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage

the great lack of parity between husbands and wives has always been spawned by the disproportionate degree of self-sacrifice that women are willing to make on behalf of those they love.

Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage

We invented marriage. Couples invented marriage. We also invented divorce,mind you. And we invented infidelity,too, as well as romantic misery. In fact we invented the whole sloppy mess of love and intimacy and aversion and euphoria and failure. But ...

Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage

Maybe the difference between first marriage and second marriage is that the second time at least you know you are gambling.

Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage

Marriage is a game. They (the anxious and powerful) set the rules. We (the ordinary and subversive) bow obediently before those rules. And then we go home and do whatever the hell we want anyhow.

Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage

The Silly Putty-like malleability of the institution [marriage], in fact, is the only reason we still have the thing at all. Very few people... would accept marriage on it's thirteenth-century terms. Marriage survives, in other words, precisely becau...

Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage

It is not we as individuals, then, who must bend uncomfortably around the institution of marriage; rather, it is the institution of marriage that has to bend uncomfortably around us.

Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage

every healthy marriage is composed of walls and windows. The windows are the aspects of your relationship that are open to the world—that is, the necessary gaps through which you interact with family and friends; the walls are the barriers of trust...

Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage

What all couples have ever wanted, a little bit of privacy in which to practice all manners of love.

Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage

The Buddha referred to married people as “householders.” He even gave clear instructions as to how one should be a good householder: Be nice to your spouse, be honest, be faithful, give alms to the poor, buy some insurance against fire and flood ...

Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage

ceremony is essential to humans: It's a circle that we draw around important events to separate the momentous from the ordinary. And ritual is a sort of magical safety harness that guides us from one stage of our lives into the next, making sure we d...

Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage

All too often, those of us who choose to remain childless are accused of being somehow unwomanly or unnatural or selfish, but history teaches us that there have always been women who went through life without having babies.

Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage

The philosopher Odo Marquard has noted a correlation in the German language between the word zwei, which means 'two,' and the word zweifel, which means 'doubt' - suggesting that two of anything brings the automatic possibility of uncertainty to our l...

Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage