Marriage 101: There Are No Soul Mates

I was so madly in love with my ex. Unfortunately, we couldn't really talk at all, and in the long term, love doesn't work without communication.

My wife is one of the smartest and most rational people I know, flat out. It can still be quite a bit of work to communicate. (The stuff we argue about is the stuff that falls below the level of conscious verbal communication.)

LOL, worth it for the title alone.

For marriage is like life in this—that it is a field of battle, and not a bed of roses.

- Robert Louis Stevenson, Virginibus Puerisque, I (1876)

Or to give more context:

Marriage is a step so grave and decisive that it attracts light-headed, variable men by its very awfulness. They have been so tried among the inconstant squalls and currents, so often sailed for islands in the air or lain becalmed with burning heart, that they will risk all for solid ground below their feet. Desperate pilots, they run their sea-sick, weary bark upon the dashing rocks. It seems as if marriage were the royal road through life, and realised, on the instant, what we have all dreamed on summer Sundays when the bells ring, or at night when we cannot sleep for the desire of living. They think it will sober and change them. Like those who join a brotherhood, they fancy it needs but an act to be out of the coil and clamour for ever. But this is a wile of the devil’s. To the end, spring winds will sow disquietude, passing faces leave a regret behind them, and the whole world keep calling and calling in their ears. For marriage is like life in this—that it is a field of battle, and not a bed of roses.

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/386/386-h/386-h.htm

Virginibus Puerisque is an essay in 4 parts about love, marriage, communication.