And yet, it is difficult to be hopeful. Sometimes the obstacles feel insurmountable and the differences too acute. We bled into each other. It became difficult to know where he ended and I began. And the odds are not good. Divorce is a strong theme in my family. My daughter still talks about the family tree she once compiled for a Sunday school project where the list of broken marriages was so long, one of the kids asked, “Even your grandma’s divorced?” Her parents and stepparents, she likes to remind me, have racked up ten marriages among them. This is the third time around for both my husband and me, although, this time, he and I never actually married. And yet, in spite of its darkest moments and our unwedded state, I can say, unequivocally, that this is the best marriage I have ever had. Certainly it feels like the truest.

My daughter is twenty-four. She is the cool realist about marriage in the family. It embarrasses me to admit that I’m the one who still cries watching A Wedding Story. She just rolls her eyes. “I’m never getting married,” she says. “Marriage doesn’t work.” Still, I think this is just a defence. I think she would like to feel that marriage is possible, but she can’t risk believing in what seems to her such a doomed enterprise. I blame myself for her cynicism, of course. How is she supposed to believe, as I do, that aspiring to intimate partnership is a worthy goal, when all around her marriages are collapsing?

I want to give her some hope, but I’m not sure what to say, and platitudes are pointless. My husband tells her that just because marriage doesn’t always last doesn’t mean it isn’t deeply satisfying to experience a good marriage for a time. I tell her I think there is something of great value in marriage, some opportunity to achieve a certain wisdom and generosity and patience that only a marriage can bestow. I want to be married, I tell her. I’m just not sure how.

How many happily married couples do you know? I can’t speak for other communities or social groups, but certainly in the circles in which I travel—an urban, North American middle class whose formative years were profoundly shaped by the Sixties—most people can count on two fingers the number of poster marriages they’ve observed. And even then, all you can ever do is press your nose up against the glass and wonder, “How are they doing?” I asked a friend about a couple we both knew whose marriage was faltering. His own marriage, at least to my eye, has always seemed solid and true. “How well are any of us doing?” he shrugged. When another friend announced that she was moving in with the man in her life, her phone started ringing with calls from married female friends anxious to know what she was doing with her apartment. For a while, it looked as if there might be a bidding war. “I’m thinking of turning it into a shelter for married women,” she joked. And yet, as a culture, we tend to pity those who prefer to take their chances on the open seas rather than go down with the ship.

And why is it that the moment you’re through the gates, married people have this compulsion to fix you up? I’m not talking about the contentedly married, who, in their sweet and generous naiveté, simply can’t imagine why anyone would be happier flying solo; I’m talking about the ones who find your action deeply unnerving because they perceive in it an implicit judgment on their own inaction, and hasten to restore order.

I know of only a handful of marriages I would want for my own. I know what a good marriage feels like, and once you’ve known the feeling, it’s hard to settle for less. But most of the marriages I observe fall short of the mythologized version. I see serviceable marriages based on routine, dysfunctional marriages supported by a web of lies, marriages sustained by social ritual, marriages whose bones are brittle with calcified resentments, marriages where the contempt is so palpable it oozes between the cracks like primordial slime, marriages that went on life-support years ago: dead couples walking. And yet, when incontrovertible evidence suggests that most of us are, at best, ambivalent about marriage, when only a lucky few seem to have mastered the trick of contented coupledom, when the institution itself seems to be flailing about in the grip of social Darwinism, when it is becoming increasingly evident that marriage itself may be the culprit here, or at least our current ideas about marriage, there is still a terrible sense of failure when a marriage ends.

Somebody ought to sue marriage for false advertising. It’s supposed to be this honeymoon hotel where you check in with your soulmate for life and you crack open the bubbly of your hopes and toast your good fortune and go to sleep on the Frette linens of emotional intimacy and elegant communication and mutual fulfillment and rewarding sex. You know in some vague way, standing at the threshold, that it’s not all going to be a bed of roses—there’ll be leaks in the ceiling and the remote won’t work and you’ll have to call housekeeping from time to time, but mostly, when the door snaps shut behind you, you’ll loosen your tie, kick off your heels, pillage the minibar and breathe a sigh of relief that you’re home sweet home. Over time you’ll be able to afford a suite, maybe even separate bedrooms—by then the fever will have broken—but you’ll have entered the Oz of Enduring Love, which has its own rewards. And when the going gets tough, there’ll be those endless reserves of trust and affection and respect to see you through. Or so marriage’s brand marketers would have us believe.

What you will not feel is doubt. Or contempt. Or boredom. Or disgust. Or exhaustion. Or despair. Or desperation. Or the desire to flee. Or bouts of such hatred for your spouse that you start realizing the true miracle of modern marriage is not that half survive but that more don’t end in murder.

It strikes me as nothing short of astonishing how two people can travel the distance between adoring affection and lethal rage and back again. I know of a couple whose marriage endured Shakespearean trials. For a time she hated him so much that she would lie beside him in bed at night thinking “Die! Die!” Now they take cooking courses together. How does this happen? How does one partnership survive while another crumbles under the weight of too many “fuck you”s?

Let’s talk about ambivalence for a moment, because ambivalence, it seems, is the quicksand on which modern marriage is built. A happily married man of my acquaintance says that he loves his wife and sometimes he hates her, but that he loves her more than he hates her, which strikes me as a pretty decent definition of the precarious balance on which most marriages teeter. His wife attributes their marital success to the fact that they never fell out of love at the same time. Joan Didion, whose marriage to the late John Gregory Dunne was, by all accounts, a splendid partnership, once said that she and Dunne wished their epitaph to read “We had fun,” which has always struck me as the single most eloquent testimonial to a marriage that I have ever heard. And yet Didion also famously wrote that marriage was the “classic betrayal.”