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

by Harrison Scott Key

She gives you so few words. I have to study them like a paleobotanist trying to divine an entire ecosystem from a shard of petrified conifer.

Nobody ever told me that every marriage comes to this cataract in the river many times over, that every marriage goes over the falls. The two of you go tumbling across the smooth mossy rocks of time, and down you go and some couples die and some don’t, but everybody goes toppling.

This is a chronic theme of my life, obediently agreeing to be somewhere and upon arrival very much wishing my head would miraculously burst into flames so that I could be hauled away by medical professionals.

Love is never a bad call. It might seem impossible. It might even seem silly when every atom in your body screams for blood. But how else, other than with love, can a broken thing be made whole again?

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

A few days later, after I’d mowed the lawn to within an inch of its life and edged every edge and cleaned out the garage and emptied out my closets and bought fragrant and manly candles to reduce the barnyard quotient of my office, all the while considering how I might have given Lauren a thousand million reasons to hate me over the years, I sent her a text: “I don’t know much. But I know this: I’m an assface.” And the wildest thing happened. She said, “I am, too.” Nobody told me fighting for my marriage would be less a fight than a kneeling in humiliation at the feet of my enemy. In those delicate days in the autumn of 2017, our marriage motionless in the critical care unit of the burn center, this admission of such an obvious truth, that we were both deeply flawed assfaces, was the first thing we’d agreed on in a long, long time.

April and May proved oddly magical. The virus, for all its chaos, established in my house a peace that passeth understanding, every event canceled, the booming parade of busyness hushed and halted, and for that I was deeply grateful.

By June, the virus was no longer a terrifying mystery from the deep, less the phantasmagoric beast who might devour everybody you ever loved than an invisible houseguest who wouldn’t leave. All the markers of season and ritual had been deleted from the document of experience. The school year ended with the ceremonial closing of a laptop. No convocations, no parties, no recitals: anti-pomp, noncircumstance. These customs shape time and set your feet in history, but all that was gone and the effect was dizzying and dark. The workday never started nor ended. Wednesdays felt like Fridays and Fridays felt like Mondays. All those distinctions of Genesis 1—God defining heaven and earth, day and night, land and sea, sun and moon—got scrambled. Consciousness was formless and void. The only marker of a week’s passing was church.

When the very architecture of being is called into question, when the most important structures of your life turn out to have been constructed over marshland and the tide of suffering rolls in and sweeps everything away, it becomes nearly impossible to reply warmly to emails. The very concept of Microsoft Outlook becomes a cruel joke. Zoom transmutes into a muted nightmare. Oh, you want to brainstorm ideas with the team? Sorry, I’m currently experiencing a soul tsunami. Can we reschedule?

Maybe the only people who believe in miracles are the people who have no other option.

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

He didn’t want our girls to be wimps. I wanted them to keep their skulls in one piece. He loved tying ropes to one end of skateboards and one end to the bikes. He’d throw the kids as high as he could in the air. Why do dads do this? It’s a global problem.

The weight of my leaving is almost impossible for me to comprehend, even now. I’d hardly even left our girls to go to Walmart, for crying out loud. I’d always believed I was a good mom, the best, just like my own mom said I would be. Advice: maybe go to Walmart alone more often and it won’t come to this.

I’ve had to rethink romance. I’ve had to rethink love. It’s romantic to steal away for forbidden kisses and text for hours into the night. But maybe love is more than that. Maybe love is loyalty. Forgiveness. Trust. Not running away.

We reply, “Thanks be to God.” I used to cringe when saying that. But now it feels different. Now it feels like (deep breath, exhale): THANKS BE TO GOD Body of Christ, broken. My heart, broken. My life, broken. I think I had to let myself be broken, to be broken and die, to let the best parts of me live. These days, I’m okay with sweating in church. I’m home. Home with Harrison and our girls. Home in a church where I can tell people who I am, and they love me anyway. Home in a church where sweating is normal. It’s not a cold sweat. It’s not fearful. It’s just real. Because the people are real. Because I’m no longer hiding. Find those people. Thanks be to God I did.

Parents are like arms. You can swing it with one but two work best and three would be weird.

People who don’t have children don’t know that they’re missing the pleasure of watching a concert where half of the children appear never to have heard of music at all.

Back in olden times, our ancestors didn’t need so much therapy because when invading armies are burning your village, sexual chafing seems trivial. But now armies rarely burn villages, I am told, leaving more time for our egos to do the pillaging. Therapy and wise counsel from friends and the friends of friends can keep your village from being reduced to ash before it’s too late.

What will you do with the fact that one in four marriages experiences infidelity? If you’re a man, you’re more likely to commit infidelity than you are to play a musical instrument. If you’re a woman, you’re more likely to have an affair than you are to have bangs. These odds are not great. All you can do is get your own heart in order. Ask God to help.

Marriage has changed over the millennia, and that’s a beautiful thing, but the prophets of this present age would have us believe marriage should exist solely for the benefit of the people in it, for their emotional, psychological, and carnal empowerment, as though matrimony is merely an extended couple’s spa experience featuring orgies and explosive self-actualizations that you can exit whensoever your heart desires. What if the prophets are wrong? Are we not freer than ever in human history, and sadder, and more anxious, more wretched? 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?

One of my favorites, Alain de Botton, once wrote, “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. Hating those parts is no grounds for divorce.

They hug us. They feed us. We feed them. They feed our children and we feed theirs and they feed Gary when we’re out of town and when they’re out of town, we feed their cats. All we’re doing is feeding each other, basically, with hymns and prayers and sermons thrown in there to remind us why.

Audacity, therapy, honesty, intimacy, nudity, a belief in transcendent profundity, a loving community that does not bless the whims of your ego but loves you anyway: You need all these to stay married, and a thousand million other mercies besides, including perhaps the most obvious and impossible of virtues. You need comedy.

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.

but he that is of a merry heart hath a continual feast.” Our days have so often been evil. We have so often lived in utter affliction, you, me, Lauren, the lot of us. This cannot be denied. But the darkness has been overcome, is being overcome, by shining what light we have into the places where you don’t always want to look and laughing at the absurdity, the audacity, of life, and our audacity to carry on. The merry heart so often seems ridiculous to the afflicted because it is a heart of flesh, not stone. Stone hearts cannot laugh. Only soft ones, loose and alive, do that.