Your marriage goes to a whole new level. You not only fall in love with your wife in a new way, but you're forced to pull together. You have to become a united front.

It lies in human nature that where you experience your first laughs, you also remember the age kindly.

Grief can take care if itself, but to get the full value of a joy you must have somebody to divide it with.

Marriage is the most natural state of man, and therefore the state in which one is most likely to find solid happiness.

Part of the puzzle, surely, lies in the disconnect between official rhetoric and lived realities. Americans are constantly extolling “traditions”; litanies to family values are at the center of every politician’s discourse. And yet the culture of America is extremely corrosive of family life, indeed of all traditions except those redefined as “identities” that fit in the larger patterns of distinctiveness, cooperation, and openness to innovation.

I began to see why woman-haters could make such fools of women. Woman-haters were like gods: invulnerable and chock full of power. They descended, and then they disappeared. You could never catch one.