One advantage of marriage is that, when you fall out of love with him or he falls out of love with you, it keeps you together until you fall in again.

Growing up means letting go of the dearest megalomaniacal dreams of our childhood. Growing up means knowing they can't be fulfilled. Growing up means gaining the wisdom and the skills to get what we want within the limitations imposed by reality - a reality which consists of diminished powers, restricted freedoms and, with the people we love, imperfect connections.

Our early lessons in love and our developmental history shape the expectations we bring into marriage.

Just as children, step by step, must separate from their parents, we will have to separate from them. And we will probably suffer...from some degree of separation anxiety: because separation ends sweet symbiosis. Because separation reduces our power and control. Because separation makes us feel less needed, less important. And because separation exposes our children to danger.

we love as soon as we learn to distinguish a separate 'you' and 'me.' Love is our attempt to assuage the terror and isolation of that separateness.

Not listening is probably the commonest unkindness of married life, and one that creates - more devastatingly than an eternity of forgotten birthdays and misguided Christmas gifts - an atmosphere of not loving and not caring.

Living with golden fantasies of an endlessly nurtured infancy can be a neurotic refusal to grow up.