In economies in which women work, men and women in relationships make about the same amount of money, or women make more. Women are 40 percent of breadwinners in America, and that number's been rising.

Marriage is this black box which is the key to all social and political problems; the family is the unit.

The division [between how much housework men and women do] is declining across all advanced economies - not for the reasons that people want, which is men are doing more, but because women are doing less of it, but even then, the trend is getting towards equality.

Look at The Iliad, there's all this stuff about men loving children. The King of Sparta was the most brutal warrior of ancient Greece, and the only thing he liked to do was horse around with kids when he was back from slaughtering. One thing that feminism revealed is that being a distant patriarchal figure was not something men wanted to be. They want to be more involved in the lives of their children, and you can see that once they're allowed to have that connection, they crave it.

We have never been more detached from one another, or lonelier. In a world consumed by ever more novel modes of socializing, we have less and less actual society. We live in an accelerating contradiction: The more connected we become, the lonelier we are.

The wilderness within us is actually the best part of us.

Whenever I read a book about a marriage, I always feel I'm being lied to.