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

by Harrison Scott Key

I’ve known many teenage mothers who are virgins. They’re called Baptists.

Miracles are easy to believe when you need one yourself.

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

Noah’s groin is practically the protagonist of Genesis 9.

much.

an unfinished Wikipedia entry at best.

I can’t say why I suddenly felt capable of marriage, the way you wake up one day and start ordering salad for lunch. One moment, words mattered most of all, and the next moment, they dimmed in the light of this very real woman.

idea of great big churches. But then one afternoon,

Writer Anne Lamott once said that there are only two prayers: “Thank you, thank you, thank you” and “Help me, help me, help me.” To that list, I would add “Stop it, stop it, stop it” and “Die, Tiny, die.”

This, I believe, is how you heal. Banish sorrow by shining light on it.

If you want your marriage to survive, you need people in your life who believe in the idea of it.

That’s the thing they don’t tell you about love. You can love somebody, really love somebody, while being totally okay with their unfortunate mauling by an escaped Siberian tiger.

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

Best friends remain best friends because you can take breaks, but a marriage is the sleepover that never ends.

The good news of the Old Testament, as far as I could tell, was in the frailty of its heroes. You’ve got to appreciate a world religion that does not attempt to make the good guys look too good. Name some grotesque character trait of Barack Obama or Dolly Parton. You can’t. You know they’re probably jackasses in specific ways—we all are—but the official narrative won’t allow for it. Too much is at stake. Maybe Eleanor Roosevelt was secretly cruel to family pets. Albert Einstein probably had some weird mustard fetish. Tell me, where do we openly declare that even the greatest among us are flawed and broken, other than on the stages of comedy clubs and in the Holy Bible, with its gallery of liars and rogues stripped of everything, at which point they throw themselves across the altar of their defeat and find, in their weakness, grace?

They found us a cheap condo and we ate baskets of fried shrimp and emptied bottles of bourbon and played darts in bars where you could smoke, because Tybee is where dreams go to die of tuberculosis.

The reality is that every marriage is a partnership of two broken assholes with good intentions and varying degrees of ability to deliver.

the human equivalent of Diet Mountain Dew.

Christians love to talk about sin and struggle, but we look past the many nightmares of marriage like an army of the blind.

All I really know is this: the most powerful force in the universe is love and the strangest is forgiveness. I will never fully understand either but then I still don’t know exactly how elevators work and I enjoy elevators all the time.