"We'd been married nearly a decade, yet we knew so little. Nobody else seemed to know much, either. When I looked around my block or my city, among my family and friends, I found many happy marriages, filled with qualities I envied, but not a single one for which I'd want to trade. Some had combustive chemistry but cycled through burnout and renewal. Others had financial security but had traded footloose selves for traditional roles, and that seemed hard, too. Becoming parents had helped nobody, and the standard remedies - the date nights, the weekend getaways - often felt cosmetic and under-gunned, like opening a beautifully wrapped and ribboned box to find one's own clothes. I felt changed by marriage, shaped by married, mostly for the better. But it also scared me."
