marriage
If people were to bring their marriages in for a checkup on an annual basis, would that provide the same sort of benefit that a physical health checkup would provide?
“Seeking to Pre-empt Marital Strife,” by Tara Parker-Pope, Well Blog, The New York Times, June 28, 2010.
You may depend upon it, that a slight contrast of character is very material to happiness in marriage.
The Table Talk and Omniana of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (London: Oxford University Press, 1917), 59.
Another thing we have in common was good, solid, loving, and companionate marriages. On one of our car trips, I complained over the useless, trivial hyperactivity of my eyes gazing at women. At any conference, or in an airport on the way, I find myself continually checking out the beauty of young women, dwelling on figures and faces. It disturbed me that I wasted time and energy evaluating quarries I would never mine. Wendell agreed explosively, as if he had been waiting for someone to bring up the subject. He suffered from this idle habit himself, and found himself in lecture halls doing inventories of the female audience. One day, he told me, he saw one face that was absolutely perfect and irresistible to him. It was a few seconds before he realized that his eyes had lighted on his wife, Tanya.
“The Best Noise in the World,” in Wendell Berry: Life and Work edited by Jason Peters (Lexington, KY: The University Press of Kentucky, 2007), 46.
I soon realized I had made no mistake in my choice of a wife. I was helping her pack an overnight bag one afternoon when she said, ‘Put in some tooth twine. I knew then that a girl who called dental floss tooth twine was the girl for me. It had been a long search, but it was worth it.
Letters of E. B. White, rev. edition edited by Martha White (New York: Harper Perennial, 2007), 81.
I’d get an idea and wouldn’t know how to make it work, and she’d figure out how to make it work.
describing his wife, in “Toshi Seeger, Wife of Folk-Singing Legend, Dies at 91,” by Douglas Martin, New York Times, July 11, 2013.
Never let the sun go down on an argument.
The Woman Upstairs (New York: Knopf, 2013), 49.
I feel, sometimes, like I have a map in my pocket that folds up, and I pull it out, and it’s bigger than the table, and there’s a thousand places to go with her.
Interview with Terry Gross on Fresh Air, NPR, October 31, 2011. [full transcript here]
I’m extremely happy with her, and part of it has to do with the fact that she is at once completely familiar to me, so that I can be myself and she knows me very well and I trust her completely, but at the same time she is also a complete mystery to me in some ways. And there are times when we are lying in bed and I look over and sort of have a start. Because I realize here is this other person who is separate and different and has different memories and backgrounds and thoughts and feelings. It’s that tension between familiarity and mystery that makes for something strong, because, even as you build a life of trust and comfort and mutual support, you retain some sense of surprise or wonder about the other person.
“A Couple in Chicago,” interview by Mariana Cook, The New Yorker, January 19, 2009.
I have always lived violently, drunk hugely, eaten too much or not at all, slept around the clock or missed two nights of sleeping, worked too hard and too long in glory, or slobbed for a time in utter laziness. I’ve lifted, pulled, chopped, climbed, made love with joy and taken my hangovers as a consequence, not as a punishment. I did not want to surrender fierceness for a small gain in yardage. My wife married a man; I saw no reason why she should inherit a baby.
Travels with Charley: In Search of America (New York: Penguin, 1997), 17.
For marriage find somebody that was born near the time when you were born.
Jan.? 1842 entry, Emerson in His Journals, selected and edited by Joel Porte (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 277.
The joy of my life with Harry is coming home from a fancy dinner with Harry—and Harry always hates the dinner, whatever it is—and him making himself a marmalade on toast standing in the kitchen and him ranting, “How the hell could it have gone on as long as it did?”
“Tina Brown Is Still Hungry For Buzz,” by Peter Stevenson, The New York Times Magazine, May 6, 2011.
I believe that I have a spiritual connection with my husband that is beyond any explanation. We are two absolutely totally different people that come from different backgrounds, different cultures, races, language, everything. And yet I feel him inside me. We won’t part, I know. I know positively that nothing will separate us. Ever. Because we’ve found something that is very spiritual and has nothing to do with being sick or in good health, young or not. Poor or rich. No. It works on another level. So, I’ve relaxed for the first time in my life and I don’t care about the tall blondes any more. The world is full of tall blondes.
Writers Dreaming by Naomi Epel (New York: Carol Southern Books, 1993), 23–24.