When once married people begin to attack me with, 'Oh! you will think very differently, when you are married,' I can only say, 'No I shall not'; and then they say again, 'Yes you will,' and there is an end to it.
I read somewhere that Mitt and I have a 'storybook marriage.' Well, in the storybooks I read, there were never long, long, rainy winter afternoons in a house with five boys screaming at once. And those storybooks never seemed to have chapters called MS or breast cancer.
I myself have never been enchanted by the dream of the white wedding, and, heaven help us, the expectation that this exquisitely catered event should be 'the happiest moment' of one's life.
Married men make the best husbands.
The problem of unmet expectations in marriage is primarily a problem of stereotyping. Each and every human being on this planet is a unique person. Since marriage is inevitably a relationship between two unique people, no one marriage is going to be exactly like any other. Yet we tend to wed with explicit visions of what a “good” marriage ought to be like. Then we suffer enormously from trying to force the relationship to fit the stereotype and from the neurotic guilt and anger we experience when we fail to pull it off.
It is ill to marry in the month of May.
I think another [myth] is that some marriages are just hopeless. This is a common thing I hear from people, "Well, I just think there are some marriages that are hopeless, Dr. Chapman, don't you agree with that?" I say I understand the feeling, but the fact is that there are no marriages that are hopeless.
A lot of people, they've been saying to me, oh don't get married. It ruins everything. And I'm like, damn.
There is no such cozy combination as man and wife.
There are black marriages that are still going strong 40 years later. You hear so many myths that there aren't any people making it, but there are. As long as there are some, there's hope.
I do not have a bride gene. I haven't been planning a wedding since I was 3. I never put a sheet on my head and pretended that it was a veil.
I know plenty of people my age that will never get married because they genuinely believe the false cultural meme that marriage has sadly become. There's only one problem. It's completely untrue.
That dangerous but too commonly received notion, that a reformed rake makes the best husband.
