I'm a pleaser. That's my character.

I think a lot of people who feel as though they desperately want to be married oftentimes simply desperately want to have a wedding.

We invented marriage. Couples invented marriage. We also invented divorce,mind you. And we invented infidelity,too, as well as romantic misery. In fact we invented the whole sloppy mess of love and intimacy and aversion and euphoria and failure. But most importantly of all, most subversively of all, most stubbornly of all, we invented privacy.

The best we can do then, in response to our incomprehensible and dangerous world, is to practice holding equilibrium internally - no matter what insanity is transpiring out there.

Then my mother shocked me. She said, " All those things that you want from your relationship, Liz? I have always wanted those things too." [She] showed me the handful of bullets she'd had to bite over the decades in order to stay happily married (and she was happily married...) to my father. "You have to understand how little I was raised to expect that I desired in life, honey. Remember- I come from a different time and place... and you have to understand how much I love your father.

Whatever this feeling is - this is what I have been praying for. And this is also what I have been praying to.

Maybe the difference between first marriage and second marriage is that the second time at least you know you are gambling.