Harrison Scott Key’s How to Stay Married will, presumably, make the year’s top ten list for me, despite the fact that the closest I’ve come to being married is being confused with someone’s fiance. It’s the story of a marriage, and an affair, and….an affair that came back, and of mercy and self-loathing and all kinds of things. Simultaneously funny and wretching all at the same time, and written with consent (and assistance) by the architect of the affair.

SELECTED QUOTES

It is early afternoon. She holds a McDonald’s Coke. I would like to be holding a bucket of wine, but this seems bad form for our first session of marriage counseling. She is here and I am here but we are not here together.

What happened was, my wife for a billion years—the mother of our three daughters, a woman who’s spent just about every Sunday of her life in a church—snuck off and found herself a boyfriend. Not cool. Her boyfriend, I mean. He has a decorative seashell collection and can’t even grow a beard. I am not making this up.

Books cannot grant you vengeance against your wife’s lover. That’s what baseball bats are for.

I spent mornings trying to write a book, and we spent nights trying to make a baby. We made three people before I made a single book

When it comes to her interior life, she gives nothing away. You want to know how I feel? Just ask. You’ll wish you hadn’t. Ask me how things are going, and thirty minutes later you’re just hoping for an aneurysm so I’ll stop. I have to be funny just so people won’t run away when they see me coming, and many still do.

It would take me years to understand this, but the understanding began in that church hallway, that a good person is a temporary and imaginary creature, as make-believe as unicorns and fire-breathing cows, because the best of us are often the worst, full of proud and viperous snakes, believing ourselves gods. The dragons did not just live in history and myth. They lived inside me.

Some churches, they sign you up for the faith before you even have a chance to think it through, but in our church, it was DIY Jesus. You had to compare your life to the various rules and guidelines of the handbook, discern exactly how you’d effed things up, and then, once you were fully aware of your effedness, step forward during the altar call in front of everybody and politely request to be dunked. If you didn’t want to, well, fine. Burn in hell if you want. It’s a free country.

Growing up, I was taught to say my prayers at bedtime: If I die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take. You have to admire a religion that has the balls to remind children they might die in the night.

 I’ve prayed for my wife more than just about anyone else, because God says to pray for your enemies, and marriage can sometimes be a war of attrition and one of siege, sometimes cold, occasionally hot. But at the prayer breakfast, I could not pray the prayers I needed to pray, even though I knew Lauren was already drifting away from me. I hoped God could hear those prayers trying to break free of my heart, tight as a gorilla fist. Maybe that’s all prayer is: wanting to pray and hoping God sees you wanting. And that’s when I let go.

Love is never a bad call. It might seem impossible. It might even seem silly when every atom in your body screams for blood. But how else, other than with love, can a broken thing be made whole again?

I once attempted to flirt with her our freshman year of college, complimenting her sandals before class. She didn’t respond, just glared at me with a scowl that would’ve liquefied helium, for which I repaid her many years later by marrying into her family and sitting next to her every Thanksgiving.

In grad school, I was dumped by a seminary student, who explained that God did not want us to be together.
“Did God tell you this?” I said.
“Yes.”
“Does he have a deep voice, like Barry White? I’ve always wondered.”

You can’t help but laugh at these people, who behave exactly like people. When Adam and Eve break the rules and eat the fruit and their eyes are opened and human history begins and God shows up and asks if they did the One Thing He Asked Them Not to Do, Adam, the first man, paterfamilias of all humankind, the archetype for every loving husband in human history, rats out his wife and disappears into the shrubbery.

Was I so strong as my father, my grandfather, to refuse bitterness?

Did Chad deserve mercy? Is it possible to express mercy with a pitching wedge to the skull? How does one walk humbly while dragging a dead body into a gully?

When you get to the end of hope, comedy is all you have left.

We talked for a good two hours about everything: the sad state of matrimony today, their marriages, mine. Jason asked me not to shoot myself.
“I’m not sure it’s me I want to shoot.”
“Don’t bang your secretary,” Soren said.
“I don’t have a secretary.”
“Good.”

“I think I’m going to start seeing other women,” I said to my best friend, Mark, one day, over the phone, updating him on the magical adventure of my marital separation.
“Are you sure that’s a good idea?”
“No. But I need some way to get Lauren off my mind.”
“Have you tried alcoholism?”

No one really talks about marriage struggles. Not Christians. Not the real struggles. Sex, pain, anger, loneliness. Not a word. You’d think they would. Christians love to talk about sin and struggle, but we look past the many nightmares of marriage like an army of the blind.

If you want to stay married, the first thing you’re going to need is to be insane. Because staying married is insane. Getting married is not. Getting married is fun. In the weeks and months before the wedding, you’re in passionate love with this glorious gift of a human: the ring, the announcement, the engagement photos where you hold hands and close your eyes and lean in and touch your foreheads together like a pair of telepathic freaks, that part is fun. Staying married is not fun. Staying married is like being kicked repeatedly in the head by a mule who loves you, and the mule is God.

Parents are like arms. You can swing it with one but two work best and three would be weird.

People who don’t have children don’t know that they’re missing the pleasure of watching a concert where half of the children appear never to have heard of music at all.

Who are we? What is our duty to each other in this nasty and brutish life?

One of my favorites, Alain de Botton, once wrote, “Compatibility is an achievement of love; it must not be its precondition.” That is marriage, in the end: two of you, being you, warring against the worst parts of you, making space for the best to grow, and learning to see that some parts of your spouse are not your favorite, and letting those parts be anyway. Hating those parts is no grounds for divorce. The only thing worth divorcing, in most cases, is the hatred itself, and your inborn desire to shape the world to your will like some kind of Marvel villain.

They hug us. They feed us. We feed them. They feed our children and we feed theirs and they feed Gary when we’re out of town and when they’re out of town, we feed their cats. All we’re doing is feeding each other, basically, with hymns and prayers and sermons thrown in there to remind us why.

The human heart is a terrain that cannot be mapped by reason alone. Virtue cannot solve the riddle of marriage. All I really know is this: the most powerful force in the universe is love and the strangest is forgiveness. I will never fully understand either but then I still don’t know exactly how elevators work and I enjoy elevators all the time.