Maybe Your Parents Were Married Once

I am cribbing another link from Gawker. Every once in a while, the folks at Gawker stop being snarky and show some genuine, un-ironic human emotion. Today they led me to this article about couples therapy (and marriage in general), because somehow this unaffected comment on the website slipped through the cracks: “Did you read that article in the Times magazine about couples therapy? Poignant, right? I cried at the end. And I had to wonder: is the dream of finding lasting love hopeless?” Reading the article, I got teary too. Perhaps because I was eager to sympathize with the Gawker staff. Perhaps because my own ideas about marriage are still somewhat nebulous. Perhaps because I want to have evidential trust in concepts that probably just come down to faith and work. I wanted to believe that science could heal any marriage, but love transcends science in a really frustrating way. A while ago the Times also did this little piece about “Questions Couples Should Ask (Or Wish They Had) Before Marrying.” And CNN linked to this similar one from Oprah. Journalists (unhappily married?) are obviously trying to heal our nation’s unhappy marriages. Will they be successful? Will that one hipster couple in Williamsburg decide to keep their relationship “open” and not legally binding because of some great article they read in the Times over Sunday brunch? Probably not. People will still get hitched. Sometimes it will work out; sometimes it won’t. Hopefully they can talk about why it’s not working out over a Bloody Mary and some home fries, and not let it fester for too long. Does all this chronicled unhappiness and emotional anguish make the people reading the news online not want to get married to their sweethearts? I doubt it, because the Times (I am sick of italicizing you!) also maintains this section of their daily paper, just begging us naive couples of the world to drop tens of thousands of dollars on string quartets and jumbo shrimp.