How to Stay Married: The Most Insane Love Story Ever Told

by Harrison Scott Key

It would take me years to understand this, but the understanding began in that church hallway, that a good person is a temporary and imaginary creature, as make-believe as unicorns and fire-breathing cows, because the best of us are often the worst, full of proud and viperous snakes, believing ourselves gods. The dragons did not just live in history and myth. They lived inside me.

I dated many Good Christian Girls who allowed me to see them naked, or mostly naked, in exchange for my attending Bible studies with them, a reasonable offer, though when they pulled out their crucifixes, I often hissed and fled back to the coffin of my solitude.

Nobody told me fighting for my marriage would be less a fight than a kneeling in humiliation at the feet of my enemy.

We won’t be traumatizing our children with our divorce. We’ll traumatize them with our marriage, as God intended.

This is the joke and the surprise of marriage. You promise the impossible and then have the audacity to attempt it.

What if marriage, at its very best, exists to remake us into beautiful new creatures we scarcely recognize? What if, in some cosmically weird way, escaping a hard marriage is not how you change? What if staying married is?

That’s all faith is, an enthusiastic maybe. A passionate probably. A hopeful hopefully.

“If you have understood God, then what you have understood is not God.”