It was the infatuation, the tailwind, the easy part, and its leaving is not the end of anything except your excuse not to choose.

What Hal and I found on that porch was the second kind of marriage, the chosen kind, and I will tell you it is better, though nobody warns you it exists because you can only get to it through a stretch of cold water most couples abandon each other in the middle of.

The second marriage is not powered by feeling.

It is powered by decision — by two people looking clearly at each other across all the accumulated disappointment of a real shared life and saying, not I feel swept away, but I choose you, on purpose, knowing exactly who you are and what this has cost, and I will keep choosing you tomorrow. That is a sturdier thing than the first love by a mile.