It's Okay to Laugh (Crying Is Cool, Too)

by Nora McInerny Purmort

The only thing I know for sure is that it is okay not to know everything, to try and to fail and to sometimes suck at life, as long as you try to get better.

child. I’m writing a book about it—the good stuff and the terrible stuff—because I know I’m not special. This stuff happens to everyone.

Not every life lesson comes from death and tragedy: sometimes it comes from flipping off your high school principal because he was illegally driving in the carpool lane.

This is for people who have been through some shit—or have watched someone go through it. This is for people who aren’t sure if they’re saying or doing the right thing (you’re not, but nobody is). This is for people who had their life turned upside down and just learned to live that way. For people who have laughed at a funeral or cried in a grocery store. This is for everyone who wondered what exactly they’re supposed to be doing with their one wild and precious life. I

No, wait. Marry someone who thinks you’re funny, especially when you’re really, really trying to be. There’s nothing worse than teeing up a really great joke and having a person who allegedly loves you give you nothing but a polite chuckle when you were aiming for a guffaw.

Marry someone who likes the same things, sure, but, more important, hates the same things. Someone who will catch your eye in the middle of the conversation to telepathically let you know, Yes, I heard that jackass at Starbucks try to brag to this poor barista that he is personal friends with The National and that he lives in Brooklyn like it’s some far-off exotic land. We will laugh about it later until one of us pees. And that someone will be you, because you just had a baby and things are still a little out of control down there. Marry someone who has seen you ugly-cry.

the one who prank-called boys with them in middle school and poured a beer over another girl’s head in college for looking at her wrong? Did she suddenly and tragically die, or did she just get left in the dust once you found the partner of your dreams? I cannot stress this enough, folks: You are going to need to have an actual best friend because sometimes the person you marry won’t agree with your DVR choices. Or, even worse, he will click on the wrong Hulu ad experience and you’ll be stuck watching commercials about bone density medication when you could have been watching a commercial about lotion featuring your future best friend Jennifer Aniston.

Marry someone brave. “For better or for worse” means promotions and babies and cancer and loss. It means having the bathtub leak into the basement because one of you didn’t know you aren’t allowed to fill a bathtub to the very top because that little metal thing on the side? That’s an emergency drain. And it’s broken.

Marry someone patient. Let’s face it, you’re not always a walk in the park. And when you throw a fit because you can’t find your keys and he says did you check your purse? and you say of course I checked my purse, do you think I’m a moron?? and then you really check your purse, and there are your keys, you want a person who will just shake his head and smile, and call you an idiot under his breath. But lovingly.

Marry someone you admire, but more important, who admires you. If you are like me, you spent much of your twenties pursuing people who needed convincing that you were awesome. I am sorry to say that was a waste of our collagen-rich, blazing-metabolism years and that those people were never worth our time. Not when there was someone out there who would wake up every day thinking, Fuck yeah, I married this human!

I’m not stronger than anybody. I mean, physically, I can do three pull-ups, so I’m stronger than some people, but emotionally, I’m the same as anyone else. This strength isn’t superhuman. It’s the most human thing of all, a muscle we’re all born with but need to exercise rarely at best. And lucky for us, it’s a tenacious little thing that bounces back from atrophy as soon as you need to flex it.