Most women would rather have someone whisper their name at optimum moments than rocket with contractions to the moon.

Anger is a passion, so it makes people feel alive and makes them feel they matter and are in charge of their lives. So people often need to renew their anger a long time after the cause of it has died, because it is a protection against helplessness and emptiness just like howling in the night. And it makes them feel less vulnerable for a little while.

The romantic myth is so strong that it survives the wear and tear of marriage by simply detaching from it and floating up on ahead, and women who are rather fond of the men they married, as well as ones who are not, go through life with a bag packed for the day when the shining knight on a white charger arrives, just in case he does.

I'm not sure there can be loving without commitment, although commitment takes all kinds of forms, and there can be commitment for the moment as well as commitment for all time. The kind that is essential for loving marriages - and love affairs, as well - is a commitment to preserving the essential quality of your partner's soul, adding to them as a person rather than taking away.

But who would rush at a benighted man, and give him two black eyes for being blind?

No marriage is one person's failure any more than it's one person's success, so it works best to see a marriage that has ended simply as something that didn't work out.

Loving can cost a lot but not loving always costs more, and those who fear to love often find that want of love is an emptiness that robs the joy from life.