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

by Harrison Scott Key

When you trim your own hedges, you learn a lot about your home, and what you learn is that your property is aggressively and continually doing the opposite of what you would prefer: gutters stop, eaves rot, crabgrass runs riot, feral cats colonize crawl spaces for their fun cat orgies. A mowed lawn on a midsummer’s morning is a thing of beauty, but doing it yourself won’t let you ignore all that has gone sideways in your little world. Every time I cut my grass, I dream of selling, or perhaps torching, this home. But now I had a home to save. I could start with the landscaping.

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

So much comedy is a kind of redeemed mourning, turning the dross of pain into gold, just as visiting Disney World in matching HIS BEAUTY and HER BEAST tank tops is a kind of psychosis. I stopped mocking those lucky people who pretend to be married to their best friends, even though I worried they were pretending marriage isn’t an impossible riddle only solved by breaking both of you in half. I thank those weirdos for reminding me that a good marriage often looks like a joke to those outside it.

Our greatest enemy was us: we were the people who had killed our marriage, and we, with the help of beings both divine and mortal, would have to be the people to make it live again.

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?