Don't Do It By the Book

The "It" in the title of this post is marriage. The occasion is a remark by Dahlia Lithwick on Slate's Doublex site.

Commenting on Sandra Tsing Loh's "Atlantic" article about her divorce, Lithwick declares that the problem with Loh's marriage and the marriages of her friends is that they are all based on what the participants have read in books. Link here.

To quote Lithwick's great insight: "Anyone whose marriage is predicated on the idealized images of glossy magazines, the dopey optimism of parenting books, and the dispassionate optimism of whatever Marriage Sucks book is in vogue this week is almost doomed to fail."

The moral: put down the books, don't try to make a human relationship correspond to a fiction, and get back into your life.