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

by Harrison Scott Key

Books cannot grant you vengeance against your wife’s lover. That’s what baseball bats are for.

I know a respected scholar who believes electromagnetic energy can cleanse her breast milk of impurities, but I don’t tell her I think she’s nuts, because Jesus says I have to feel compassion for crazy people.

Sermons on hell can scarcely offend someone who’s already seen the Devil.

We were happy enough in our marriage,

we die, you die,” I said. “Dying would give us all something to do,” Mom said.

It was the peace of surrender. I no longer felt an obligation to “win.”

It felt as if God himself had laid in my hands a coat of mail. Here, wear this. This is love.

It would be years before I fully understood the meaning of the miracle in Yazoo, which wasn’t about the sudden, unexpected materializing of a double wedding that nobody had paid for because an entire town pulled it out of their hearts, but rather about what becomes possible when people run toward one another and not away.

Find a church where your pastor texts back, “On my way.”

I found a hundred thousand readers to adore me. She found a neighbor.

every circling of the sun a reminder of the battles where we bled and died.

It was shocking how good I was at keeping this secret life a secret. But then, I was good at keeping things inside. A pro. Been doing it all my life.

Everybody likes to talk about how money can end a marriage. Nobody talks about how money can help save one.

We’re not perfect for each other. We merely are each other.

All I really know is this: the most powerful force in the universe is love and the strangest is forgiveness.