Marriage is not a noun; it's a verb. It isn't something you get. It's something you do. It's the way you love your partner every day.
Interpretation
Marriage is an active commitment rather than a static state.
This quote emphasizes that marriage is not merely a title or status; it is a continuous action that requires effort and dedication. It reflects the idea that love should be actively expressed and nurtured each day through actions and decisions that strengthen the partnership.
In practice
During a wedding speech, one could echo this sentiment to emphasize the work involved in marriage.
You can't ask for what you want unless you know what it is. A lot of people don't know what they want or they want much less than they deserve. First you have figure out what you want. Second, you have to decide that you deserve it. Third, you have to believe you can get it. And, fourth, you have to have the guts to ask for it
If you aren't good at loving yourself, you will have a difficult time loving anyone, since you'll resent the time and energy you give another person that you aren't even giving to yourself.
Everything he'd done with regard to her in the last three years had been calculated to foreclose the intensely personal sort of talks they'd had when he was younger: to get her to shut up, to train her to contain herself, to make her stop pestering him with her overfull heart and her uncensored self. And now that the training was complete and she was obediently trivial with him, he felt bereft of her and wanted to undo it.
I've learned that we all change constantly. It's rare to find that person who is growing with you in the same way at the same time, who encourages you to grow.
If we stop believing in a future, if we stop doing things for something else but start doing them for now, some fundamental things change. Retirement becomes less about how much money you can squirrel away now and much more a matter of participating and contributing to your own community now so that they want to take care of you. … We’re going to move into a world where your retirement will be more secure if you’ve made lots of friends with young people rather than collected lots of dollars.
Sanity and clarity are more important for me and I'm willing to give up a lot of shimmer for it. I'm willing to have more boring friends, who are sane.
The unfortunate need people who will be kind to them; the prosperous need people to be kind to.
With soldiers, their wives are so fundamental in their relationships, and yet there's this kind of other war happening back in the States, where wives of soldiers don't quite understand what their husbands have been through, because their husbands won't really talk about it, and that's really the hidden war.
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