![]() ![]() We may talk about the low and high points with our friends or our therapists, but in the larger cultural narrative, we’d rather focus on the children, on the jobs, on the events leading up to or away from the married state. There are flowers and there is flatulence. In that way it reflects both marriage itself and the experience of listening to anyone talk about their own, past or present.Īll those self-help books to the contrary, we don’t like to talk about marriage, not really, not in real-time gory/glorious/boring/honest detail because it is frustrating, exhausting and impossible, like trying to describe being alive. So granular that it is difficult at times not to scream while reading it, sometimes in frustration (she openly participates in her own denial) and sometimes in exquisite recognition. In the end, however, he left and Crane was devastated.Īs with the death of a loved one, advance warning does not ease the pain of a divorce one does not want.Īnd so Crane, a novelist and short story writer, attempted to write her way out of grief, examining her marriage in granular detail. He subsequently participated in marital counseling and seemed, at some level, to want to stay in the marriage. He announced he was unhappy, that he had a crush. ![]() He behaved, according to Crane, as openly as a person can behave after he has decided to pursue a workplace attraction to deeper realms while married. (To be fair, they appear to have been very fancy windows that required a lot of design and, well, collaboration.) He left her for another woman, a client for whom he had been installing windows. Categorized as a memoir, it deals almost exclusively with the author’s marriage to artist and woodworker Ben Brandt, which ended in a way that seemed, to her, sudden and baffling. But those stories taught us we can survive anythingĪnd that, Crane’s book, “ This Story Will Change: After the Happily Ever After,” most definitely is. The reality of 2021 was both gentler and messier than the apocalypse fiction we consumed. I also knew that despite the best (and worst) efforts of all the self-help columns, books, call-in shows and podcasts in the “can this marriage be saved” industry, the most revealing accounts often come in the form of an autopsy.Įntertainment & Arts Column: There is no script to get us ‘back to normal.’ ‘Normal-adjacent’ will have to do I knew going in that Crane’s own marriage ended after 15 years. ![]() So I came to Elizabeth Crane’s new book hoping, fairly or not, to find some answers. But if I’m honest, I don’t know exactly why our marriage has lasted this long while so many others haven’t it cannot be because I am easy to live with. We still love each other, for pretty much the same reasons we loved each other enough to get married in the first place. Many required us to review the chapter again and retake. ![]() Some of these tests we have passed easily, others only on a generous curve. My husband and I have spent more contiguous workday hours together in the last two years than we did in the previous 23, and you know what they say about familiarity (spoiler: it’s not good).īut then there have been so many tests: age and children, time and life, not to mention the fact that the man cannot learn how to mute and unmute his cellphone or remember that I hate olives. Not that I know what I’d say for either the self- or the spouse evaluation part - maybe I’d just upload Elaine Stritch singing “I’m Still Here.” (It’s dated, but it covers a lot of bases.)Īs with many marriages, the pandemic has been a test. My 25th wedding anniversary is coming up and I keep waiting to get some sort of a performance-review notice in my email. I’ve been thinking about marriage a lot lately. If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from, whose fees support independent bookstores. This Story Will Change: After the Happily Ever After ![]()
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