An American Marriage

by Tayari Jones

home isn’t where you land; home is where you launch. You can’t pick your home any more than you can choose your family. In poker, you get five cards. Three of them you can swap out, but two are yours to keep: family and native land.

If you have a woman, you recognize when you have said the wrong thing. Somehow she rearranges the ions in the air and you can’t breathe as well.

It was a wonderful feeling to be grown and yet young. To be married but not settled. To be tied down yet free.

A woman’s only human. . . . She’s flesh and blood, just like her man. No more, no less.

“If you lose it every time he tries to come clean, you’re encouraging him to lie.”

“Love is the enemy of sound judgment, and occasionally this is in service of the good.

“Sometimes when you like where you end up, you don’t care how you got there.”

I believed that our marriage was a fine-spun tapestry, fragile but fixable.

“If girls like this are having all the kids, and girls like you stay childless and fancy-free, what’s going to happen to us as a people?”

When a man wails like that you know it’s all the tears that he was never allowed to shed, from Little League disappointment to teenage heartbreak, all the way to whatever injured his spirit just last year.

Love makes a place in your life, it makes a place for itself in your bed. Invisibly, it makes a place in your body, rerouting all your blood vessels, throbbing right alongside your heart. When it’s gone, nothing is whole again.

If you’re a grown woman and you have more than ten dollars in the

bank, nobody understands why you can’t have a baby.

You don’t know how demoralizing it is to be a man with nothing to offer a woman.

None of this proposing via billboard or at halftime at the Rose Bowl. Marriage is between two people. There is no studio audience.

A marriage is more than your heart, it’s your life. And we are not sharing ours.

The truth would remain true for a week, for a month, for a year, ten years, however long it was before I felt like talking to Big Roy about Walter, if I ever did.

“Even a dog can make a bunch of puppies, but a real man raises his kids.”

She explained that convenience, habit, comfort, obligation—these are all things that wear the same clothing as love sometimes.

But someone was going to pay for what happened to Roy, just as Roy paid for what happened to that woman. Someone always pays. Bullet don’t have nobody’s name on it,