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

by Harrison Scott Key

I think most divorces are merely a failure of imagination: you lose the capacity to conceive of a happy future. The two of you are like a wet pair of matches, hardly able to get the fire back. Why keep trying? The world is full of dry matches. All you need is a new one.

Banish sorrow by shining light on it.

Adoration: Tell God he’s awesome, which casts the heart in humility. Confession: Tell God what you’ve done wrong, because only the humble heart can. Thanksgiving: Thank God for everything he’s done for you. Supplication: Ask God to do maybe a little more if possible.

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?

“Compatibility is an achievement of love; it must not be its precondition.” That is marriage, in the end: two of you, being you, warring against the worst parts of you, making space for the best to grow, and learning to see that some parts of your spouse are not your favorite, and letting those parts be anyway.

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