What if I mess this up?" I murmured. Clark’s hand tightened over mine. "It’s not going to be perfect because no marriage is. You’re going to fight, clash, say things you don’t mean... When you love someone, these things can happen. But, Joss"...
Still it is true that many same-sex couples want nothing more than to join society as fully integrated socially responsible family-centered taxpaying Little League-coaching nation-serving respectably married citizens. So why not welcome them in Why n...
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...
I was struck - not for the first time in my years of travel - by how isolating contemporary American society can seem by comparison. Where I came from, we have shriveled down the notion of what constitutes 'a family unit' to such a tiny scale that it...
Encounter Jesus. Suffer with him to experience his life more fully. Be holy in your love for God and his church as God is holy in his love for you and his church. Imagine what awaits those who now walk by faith, when faith and hope give way to the fu...
Leonard and Virginia married in August 1912. Virginia was 30. Soon after her marriage she suVered another breakdown and her mental health declined sporadically over the following year, culminating in a suicide attempt in September 1913. They were adv...
Oh, why did nobody warn me?" cried Grimes in agony. "I should have been told. They should have told me in so many words. They should have warned me about Flossie, not about the fires of hell. I've risked them, and I don't mind risking them again, but...
How miserably hypocritical, you might say, but no sooner am I offered a chance to flee Hell than I yearn to stay. Few families hold their relations as closely as do prisons. Few marriages sustain the high level of passion that exists between criminal...
Upon their meeting in New York in 1958: “We didn’t want to live together. We didn’t have any examples of what a good love relationship between two men could be. And there was always the problem of hiding so no one would know we were gay. There ...
Although love could grow in times of peace, it tempered in battle. Daddy told me once - when I'd said something about how perfect his relationship with Mom was - that I should have seen the first five years of their marriage, that they'd fought like ...
Marriage and family life give us constant opportunities to deny ourselves for the sake of others. And yet self-denial is not a mask for self-contempt, but the necessary means for achieving self-mastery; for self-mastery makes possible our self-giving...
How dull would it be to consume my meat with only one variety of sauce? My body and spirit would whither, being fed on such limited fare. To sample the delights of a great many women is considered right and healthy for a man, yet the opposite is held...
And then of course there was her opinion to consider. Would she ever care to entertain the thought of kissing him, let alone marrying him? He was willing to bet his life that she wasn't. Not yet anyway. Therefore, he had made up his mind. He had devi...
It took nearly a year to finish the ever-changing [marriage candidates] list, with the assistance of his sister and his aging spinster aunt, who lorded over their affairs as the self-appointed voice of cultivated reason. During this time, Gabriel str...
The longing for improvement and the fear of waste and worse - it is a pattern still with us, and maybe it speaks to the medium's essential marriage of light and dark, or as Mary Pickford put it in her autobiography (published in 1955), Sunshine and S...
I don't agree with you in the least," said Temple— "about marriage, I mean. A man ought to want to get married—" "To anybody? Without its being anybody in particular?" "Yes," said Temple stoutly. "If he gets to thirty without wanting to marry any...
Why is it that at a bachelor's establishment the servants invariably drink the champagne? I ask merely for information. I attribute it to the superior quality of the wine, sir. I have often observed that in married households the champagne is rarely ...
Oh, dear child. You've got a lot to learn about marriage. Any food can choose the boy who send her heart into a flurry. But there's a big deep divide between desire and devotion. You better not choose the boy who makes you dizzy. No ma'am. You have t...
With an ashamed sigh, I confessed, “You have seen nothing but the worst of me since then, Aeron. I’ve been a bitter, defiant, irrational shrew…and now I’m selfishly dragging you into a hopeless situation against your better judgment. What wou...
Do you know, I began to see what marriage is for. It’s to keep people away from each other. Sometimes I think that two people who love each other can be saved from madness only by the things that come between them—children, duties, visits, bores,...
She was in a terrible marriage and she couldn't talk to anyone. He used to hit her, and in the beginning she told him that if it ever happened again, she would leave him. He swore that it wouldn't and she believed him. But it only got worse after tha...
