There was no year Hal and I chose the drift.

There was just a Tuesday, and another Tuesday, ten thousand Tuesdays, on each of which the marriage was the reasonable thing to shortchange, and the shortchanging never felt like a decision, and that is exactly how it hollowed us out — not through any choice we’d have recognized as a choice, but through the slow compounding of a million tiny reasonable postponements, each one nothing, all of them together a marriage.

You do not neglect a marriage on purpose.

You neglect it one entirely defensible Tuesday at a time.