I like the way we talk to each other. It feels honest. It was different with Manuel. One of us always had to win. Husbands and wives do that, worry more about being right than being truthful.

I don’t know if this happens in all relationships, but I just got so sick of his all too familiar stories. I had heard these stories so many times that I could have recited them myself.

I could not count the times during the average day when something would come up that I needed to tell him. This impulse did not end with his death. What ended was the possibility of response.

And her soul died in her for fear: she knew she had never seen him, he had never seen her, they had met in the dark and had fought in the dark, not knowing whom they met nor whom they fought.

Two people can only live as one when each is prepared to give and receive trust and understanding. Above that lies respect. Without respect for how the other feels, no marriage is worthwhile.

Kent Ornado marries Sarah Urricane. One won’t take the others last name; instead, they’ll merge their entire names together to come up with Natural Disaster 1 and 2, respectively.

Our culture says that feelings of love are the basis for actions of love. And of course that can be true. But it is truer to say that actions of love can lead consistently to feelings of love.

Perhaps I won't marry then. Instead, you and I shall live as spinsters in a cottage by the sea. We'll burn our corsets, eat chocolate morning, noon and night and grow fat as hedgehogs.

We tell ourselves that intimacy (and marriage) takes two people who are willing to work at it-but, unfortunately, we rarely have the slightest inkling of our "job" assignments in this project.

A good marriage is good because one or both of them have learned to overlook the other's faults, to love the other as they are and to not attempt to change them or bring them to repentance.

الذين أسكرهم الحب أيقظهم الزواج

Finding her meant that I could move forward unabashedly, without fear of rejection, without the endless need for acceptance from my husband or from anyone else. My worth was decided by me, now.

Once when he was still young, I saw a bit of his scalp showing through his hair and I was afraid. But it was just a cowlick. Now sometimes it shows through for real, but I feel only tenderness.

Above all, we pray that they will make the journey from selfishness to true love. Whether together or single, this is a journey we all have to make. In a sense it is the real journey of life.

And as they gave themselves to each other on the smooth, cedar-scented planks, they made something older than time and newer than tomorrow. They made love—pure, fresh, timeless, and true.