While you are planning and plotting you will probably make some lists. You will make a list of all the happy marriages you have seen in your life and, after careful thought, strike your own parents, grandparents and all your aunts and uncles off of it. The only pair of names you will be left with are the couple you know who were born to be together. Maybe, you will remember how they met at a school dance when all of you were just fourteen. Maybe you will remember hearing, how, after fifteen minutes of nerves and nervousness and the second slow dance, they had decided they’d found it forever. Everything for them was happy. It went slowly, but the trajectory was traditional. You know that now she nags him a little and he rolls his eyes at her nagging but mostly does what he is told. He teases her about nagging him, about being his old lady. She teases him back about being lazy. It is light and funny and constant, but never mean and it never sounds critical. You know that he mows the lawn and takes out the garbage. She shops and cooks the dinner. They wash the dishes together every evening when the children are in bed and talk softly of work and the day and the people they know. They worry about money, but they are driven by the ideal of being rich in love. You know that ideal. You were raised with it, but it’s too late now. Maybe you were born too cynical or not cynical enough to recover from that first disappointment of not finding it right away. Now you have too much experience to believe in finding it, but not enough to come full circle and go back to the values you learned from your mother’s words and your father’s protection.
Josephine Close, “Now, Voyager”