If someone were to propose that your dentist, your plumber, and your attorney all should be the exact same person, elected in early adulthood and ideally cleaved-to for the rest of your life, he’d be dismissed as a madman.  But for some reason we all live with, indeed for the most part eagerly endorse, the proposition that your most intimate friend, your bedmate, and your partner in household management should all be the exact same person, elected in early adulthood and ideally cleaved-to for the rest of your life.

Small wonder so many of us are so emotionally dysfunctional.  Small wonder also, in words attributed by Laura Kipnis to novelist Vince Passaro, “It is difficult to imagine a modern middle-class marriage not syncopated by rage.“