happiness needs nothing but itself; it doesn’t have to be validated. “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way” is the opening sentence of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. All I could hope to add to that is that unhappy families—and within those families, in particular the unhappy husband and wife—can never get by on their own. The more validators, the merrier. Unhappiness loves company. Unhappiness can’t stand silence—especially not the uneasy silence that settles in when it is all alone.
