"Much of the commentary on modern marriage is frankly terrifying. Miller describes “the marital ghetto” — the marital ghetto? — as “the human equivalent of a balanced aquarium, where the fish and the plants manage to live indefinitely off each other’s waste products.” Perhaps we’d been striving in raising children and not in marriage because child-rearing is a dictatorship and marriage is a democracy. The children do not get to vote on the direction of the relationship, on which sleep-training or discipline philosophy they like best. But with a spouse, particularly a contemporary American spouse, equality is foundational, assumed. A friend had recently told me that he thought I was the boss in my marriage. Did I really want to negotiate my marriage anew and risk losing that power? From the bathroom, Dan asked, “Do you really think this project is a good idea?”

I realized that my favorite books about marriage — Calvin Trillin’s “About Alice” and Joan Didion’s “Year of Magical Thinking” — included one spouse who was dead."
- Elizabeth Weil, "Married (Happily) With Issues." NYT Magazine.