"How to Be Good" Nick Hornby
I read this Book awhile ago, and have kept this quote on my computer.
“What you don’t ever catch a glimpse of on your wedding day- because how could you?- is that some days you will hate your spouse, that you will look at him and regret ever exchanging a word with him, let alone a ring and bodily fluids. Nor is it possible to foresee the desperation and depression, the sense that your life is over, the occasional urge to hit your whining children, even though hitting them is something you knew for a fact you would never ever do. And of course you don’t think about having affairs, and when you get to that stage in life when you do (and everyone gets there sooner or later), you don’t think of the sick feeling you get in your stomach when you’re conducting them, their inherent unhappiness. And nor do you think about your husband waking up in the morning and being someone you don’t recognize. If anyone thought about any of these things, then no one would ever get married, of course they wouldn’t; in fact, the impulse to marry would come from the same place the impulse to drink a bottle of bleach, and those are the kinds of impulses we try to ignore, rather than celebrate. So we can’t afford to think about these things because getting married- or finding a partner whom we will want to spend our lives with and have children by- is on our agenda. It’s something we know we will do one day, and if you take that away from us then we are left with promotions at work and the possibility of a winning lottery ticket and it’s not enough, so we kid ourselves that it is possible to enter these partnerships and be faced only with the problem of mud removal, and then we become unhappy and take Prozac and then we get divorced and die alone. “
“What you don’t ever catch a glimpse of on your wedding day- because how could you?- is that some days you will hate your spouse, that you will look at him and regret ever exchanging a word with him, let alone a ring and bodily fluids. Nor is it possible to foresee the desperation and depression, the sense that your life is over, the occasional urge to hit your whining children, even though hitting them is something you knew for a fact you would never ever do. And of course you don’t think about having affairs, and when you get to that stage in life when you do (and everyone gets there sooner or later), you don’t think of the sick feeling you get in your stomach when you’re conducting them, their inherent unhappiness. And nor do you think about your husband waking up in the morning and being someone you don’t recognize. If anyone thought about any of these things, then no one would ever get married, of course they wouldn’t; in fact, the impulse to marry would come from the same place the impulse to drink a bottle of bleach, and those are the kinds of impulses we try to ignore, rather than celebrate. So we can’t afford to think about these things because getting married- or finding a partner whom we will want to spend our lives with and have children by- is on our agenda. It’s something we know we will do one day, and if you take that away from us then we are left with promotions at work and the possibility of a winning lottery ticket and it’s not enough, so we kid ourselves that it is possible to enter these partnerships and be faced only with the problem of mud removal, and then we become unhappy and take Prozac and then we get divorced and die alone. “
Obviously we're in the midst of Dirty Realism here. The glass is half empty. And perhaps as much as we need to hear the truth about Marriage- it's hard, it's difficult, some days you will wake up and hate your spouse- we also need to hear about the magic. We need to know that some nights our husband w i l l bring home flowers. We need to know that some nights our husband w i l l hang up his coat and put his shoes away. Sure, it's not always rainbows and butterflies, but it's not always unahappiness and Prozac. We get to have both. The rainbows tide us over until the rain comes again.
Girl Number One
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