“She said quietly: 'Did you love your wife?'
It was, he saw, a serious question, not a retaliation, and he gave it a serious and truthful answer. 'I convinced myself I did when I married. I willed myself into the appropriate feelings without knowing what the appropriate feelings were. I endowed her with qualities she didn't have and then despised her for not having them. Afterwards I might have learned to love her if I had thought more of her needs and less of my own.'
He thought: portrait of a marriage. Perhaps most marriages, good and bad, could be summed up in four sentences.”
―
P.D. James,
The Children of Men
