There is a rhythm to the ending of a marriage, just like the rhythm of a courtship — only backward. You try to start again but get into blaming over and over. Finally you are both worn out, exhausted, hopeless. Then lawyers are called in to pick clean the corpse. The death has occurred much earlier.
I’m not upset about my divorce. I’m only upset that I’m not a widow.
The real killer was when you married the wrong person but had the right children.
These are the passengers of the future, and we want them to have a good experience the first time they fly.
Divorce is only less painful than the need for divorce.
Being married was like having a hippopotamus sitting on my face. . . . No matter how hard I pushed or which way I turned, I couldn’t get up. I couldn’t even breathe. . . . Hippopotamuses aren’t all bad. They are what they are. But I wasn’t meant to have one sitting on my face.
After forty years of marriage, we still stood with broken swords in our hands.
The goal of our life should not be to find joy in marriage, but to bring more love and truth into the world. We marry to assist each other in this task. The most selfish and hateful life of all is that of two beings who unite in order to enjoy life. The highest calling is that of the man who has dedicated his life to serving God and doing good, and who unites with a woman in order to further that purpose.
To love is to suffer. To avoid suffering one must not love. But then one suffers from not loving. Therefore, to love is to suffer. Not to love is to suffer. To suffer is to suffer. To be happy is to love. To be happy, then, is to suffer. But suffering makes one unhappy. Therefore, to be unhappy one must love, or love to suffer, or suffer from too much happiness. I hope you’re getting this down.
If you can’t live without me, why aren’t you dead yet?
I suspect that in every good marriage there are times when love seems to be over.
It is as absurd to say that a man can’t love one woman all the time as it is to say that a violinist needs several violins to play the same piece of music.
Husbands are chiefly good as lovers when they are betraying their wives.
Many divorces are not really the result of irreparable injury but involve . . . a desire on the part of the man or woman to shatter the setup, start out from scratch alone, and make life work for them all over again. They want the risk of disaster, want to touch bottom, to see where bottom is, and, coming up, to breathe the air with relief and relish again.
A bulging portfolio of spiritual experiences matters little if it does not have the power to sustain us through the inevitable moments of grief, loss, and change. Knowledge and achievements matter little if we do not yet know how to touch the heart of another and be touched.
The night before their marriage, they held a ritual where they made their “shadow vows.” The groom said, “I will give you an identity and make the world see you as an extension of myself.” The bride replied, “I will be compliant and sweet, but underneath I will have the real control. If anything goes wrong, I will take your money and your house.” They then drank champagne and laughed heartily at their foibles, knowing that in the course of the marriage, these shadow figures would inevitably come out. They were ahead of the game because they had recognized the shadow and unmasked it.
A successful marriage requires falling in love many times, always with the same person.
