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

by Harrison Scott Key

I knew if I wrote a book about my marriage, I would also be compelled to write about all the garbage unearthed in my own heart by the marriage. If this book is a hit job, my pride is the true target.

I wanted to know everything, and yet, with all these facts in my hands, I knew nothing. If this ever happens to you, be prepared not to know things. You will never feel as ignorant as you do after you know. Questions only lead to more questions. The answers will never satisfy, though you need them, desperately. You need answers like a beach ball needs air.

Quirks become customs, customs become habits, habits become punishable by death.

I think most divorces are merely a failure of imagination: you lose the capacity to conceive of a happy future.

It wasn’t the nonsense that did me in: it was my community’s absolute inability to address the questions with anything approaching a healthy Socratic disposition of free thought.

when you grow up in a system of belief that presumes to explain every jot and tittle of existence, and then you find a bag of tittles and jots in a chest buried underneath the church, you wonder why nobody told you about them. I found myself reading just about any book that promised the kinds of answers my church wouldn’t give me,

I had so often wanted to believe God imaginary, but suddenly I wanted him to be very real, so I could ask him a few questions.

if ten years in higher education taught me anything, it’s that everything can be doubted, even your doubts.

At first, I was highly impressed by these nineteenth-century orations, the hierarchy of clauses and subordinate clauses, but week by week I became quietly enraged at this incomprehensible appeal to divinity. Even in smaller groups, like Sunday school, which often began with a short prayer led by the teacher, you’d be hard-pressed to hear genuine expressions of specific human suffering. “Are there any prayer requests?” the teacher would ask. Sometimes, a hand would go up, but it was always a prayer request for somebody’s great-aunt who needed a hip replacement, a biopsy, a cornea transplant. We could not bear to hear about the suffering of the people in the room, Good Lord, no: too real. We never prayed for our marriages, our children, our interior lives. The fable of our being respectable taxpayers would be shattered by anything real. I needed prayers.

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?

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.

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

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.

They say God is love. I’d heard this remarkable axiom all my life, and I think I finally understood. Heaven and hell and smitings and virgin births and fishes and loaves, it was all a story to celebrate and make sense of the strangest fact of all: love is what saves you. Love, love enough to confess your failures, love to forgive the failures of others, is always what saves your life, your soul, your family, your marriage.

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?

All of life is a miracle—I believe this now—and maybe to see this fact, maybe you have to have everything burned away.

I have tried willing forgiveness from the deepest parts of me, pulling it out by the tail and handing it to Lauren, but this doesn’t quite work. Letting go of the past is about as hard as Taylor Swift says it will be. These last few years have been about as fun as giving your cat a haircut with garden shears. Our new church has helped us hold the cat.

If you want to stay married, the first thing you’re going to need is to be insane. Because staying married is insane.

Staying married is not fun. Staying married is like being kicked repeatedly in the head by a mule who loves you, and the mule is God.

we’re here, all of us: a nuclear family, detonated but not destroyed. We won’t be traumatizing our children with our divorce. We’ll traumatize them with our marriage, as God intended.

This is the joke and the surprise of marriage. You promise the impossible and then have the audacity to attempt it.

Avoid the idiots if you can. The world is full of bad advice from bitter and hopeless wretches who don’t even know they’re not helping. Avoid those who urge you to vengeance or say you deserve better. The only thing you deserve is better advice from people who have a rudimentary grasp of the nightmare of marriage for both people in it. Run far and fast from those who say different.

One of your greatest misconceptions, the one you must jettison as soon as is convenient to you, is that you’re easy to live with. You’re not. You’re a monster. Marriage reveals this to you, though you’d prefer to blame your partner, your parents, SCOTUS.

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?

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

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. The only thing worth divorcing, in most cases, is the hatred itself, and your inborn desire to shape the world to your will like some kind of Marvel villain.

It was this church of friends who showed us the third way I had always hoped for: joyful, weird, curious, honest, fearless, and full of reckless love for the broken and a willingness to enter darkness with them.

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.

I now understand that to comprehend the immensity of someone’s pain is to comprehend the full breadth of the soul.