This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage

by Ann Patchett

whisper in her ear, “Honey, I know. Things happen that you never thought were possible.”

My mother used to say the more lost you are, the later it got, the more you had invested in not being lost. That’s why people who are lost so often keep heading in the same direction.

It isn’t just about them, it is how we want to see ourselves. It says that we are good people, patient and kind.

I came to see that there was something liberating about failure and humiliation. Life as I had known it had been destroyed so completely, so publicly, that in a way I was free, as I imagine anyone who walks away from a crash is free. I didn’t have expectations anymore, and no one seemed to expect anything from me. I believed that nothing short of a speeding car could kill me. I knew there was nothing I couldn’t give up.

I want to learn to love people like this, the way I love my dog, with pride and enthusiasm and a complete amnesia for faults. In short, to love others the way my dog loves me.

I imagine there are people out there who got a dog when what they wanted was a baby, but I wonder if there aren’t other people who had a baby when all they really needed was a dog.

I’ve discovered in life is that no matter how vastly different our experiences are, the emotional responses to those experiences are often universal.

Love the short story for what it is: a handful of glorious pages that take you someplace you never knew you wanted to go.

I did not have the smallest twinge of guilt about lying on the sofa for days at a time, reading. Could there be anything better than that?

the house was on fire and I jumped out a window instead of going through the front door. How I left is not important to me now. I got out.

My mother shrugged, so what. “I’ll die, you’ll die, he’ll die, you’ll get tired of each other. You don’t always know how it’s going to happen but it’s always going to happen. So stop trying to make everything permanent. It doesn’t work. I want you to go out there and find some nice man you have no intention of spending the rest of your life with. You can be very, very happy with people you aren’t going to marry.”

Well, that’s not entirely true: I remained serious about love; I just gave up the notion that marriage was the inevitable outcome of love.

I wondered if any divorce ever really came as a complete surprise, and if it did, well, that was probably your answer as to why someone was divorcing you.

Sometimes love does not have the most honorable beginnings, and the endings, the endings will break you in half. It’s everything in between we live for.