See? You're using the stoic glacier method." "Remind me, what's the stoic glacier method?" "It's the slow process of shaping someone's behavior by force of one's own personal stoicism.

Veblen, you may not know it now, but marriage affects everything that happens to you. Your mate becomes the mirror in which you see yourself. If he doesn't see you as a beautiful pearl, you'll wither.

According to Adolf Guggenbuhl-Craig, the Swiss analyst and author of Marriage: Dead or Alive, a wedding is more than a party or a legality. It's not less than a boxing ring, two people facing off, acknowledging their separate identities rather than their union, in the company of all the people who lay claim to them. A wedding is the time and place to recognize the full clutch of the past in the negotiation of a shared future.

Was this the stuff married life would be made of, two people making way for the confounding spectacle of the other, bewildered and slightly afraid?

The sharing of simple meals and discussing the day's events, of waking up together with plans for the future, things that feel practically bacchanalian when you're used to being on your own.