Dating is poetry. Marriage is a novel. There are times, maybe years, that are all exposition.

My own parents have been married since 1974, weathering a how-much-time-do-you-have list of crises. I went to my mother for advice once when Neal and I were fighting. "How do you stay married?" I asked her. Her reply: "You don't get divorced.

Single women may still be marginalized or stigmatized even--some say especially--when they are happy about being single.

As married people, we dwell on a spectrum between happy and unhappy, in love and out of love, and we move back and forth on that line decade by decade, year by year, week by week, even hour by hour.

So what's the secret to staying together?" I asked her. "Be nice?" she offered. I laughed, but that may be it, the way a secret to losing weight is to eat less. Be nice. Don't leave. That's all.

The boring parts don't last forever. In retrospect, they aren't even boring.

The romantic fairy tales we grew up with -- where marriage is the happy ending rather than the opening scene -- are not useful for grown-ups.

To love somebody is not just a strong feeling -- it is a decision, it is a judgment, it is a promise," writes psychologist Erich Fromm. "If love were only a feeling, there would be no basis for the promise to love each other forever. A feeling comes and it may go. How can I judge that it will stay forever, when my act does not involve judgment and decision?

By staying married, we give something to ourselves and to others: hope. Hope that in steadfastly loving someone, we ourselves, for all our faults, will be loved; that the broken world will be made whole. To hitch your rickety wagon to the flickering star of another fallible human being -- what an insane thing to do. What a burden, and what a gift.