Everything tells you it can.

The whole world is arranged to tell you it can.

The baby’s fever cannot wait and the mortgage cannot wait and the boss cannot wait, and next to those loud urgent things a marriage looks like the one item on the list that will still be there tomorrow, patient, undemanding, safe to postpone.

And so you postpone it.

Everyone does.

You put the marriage last because it complains the least, and you keep putting it last, and the terrible arithmetic is that a thing put last for twenty-five years is a thing put last for a life.