How to Stay Married

It takes a special kind of author to make a reader laugh out loud. To do so while writing about the nightmare scenario of your wife carrying on an affair behind your back, while making profound observations about marriage, life, and faith along the way? It could only come from a one-of-a-kind exceptional talent.

            Until a few weeks ago, I had not heard of Harrison Scott Key. I am richer for having stumbled onto his work. To say Key is funny would be a disservice to the man and his writing. Lots of people are funny. Many writers are funny; some even manage to produce a few audible chuckles from their readers. Key offers more than that. His writing is of the uproarious, side-splitting, belly laugh variety of funny. Kristen was repeatedly interrupting my reading, asking what was so amusing. Key is hilarious. His words are also weighty, insightful, cutting, raw, and wise with experience.

            Key also happens to be a Christian. This would normally disqualify a writer from the kind of glowing affection and praise I am pouring onto his comedy. His work, however, has made him the recipient of the Thurber Award for American Humor. I was unfamiliar with that prize but consider the list of fellow recipients over the years: Trevor Noah, Jon Stuart, David Sedaris. The man is in elite company.

            Penning a truly funny book would be one thing, but it is the power of his story that truly elevates this book to my favourite read of the past three years. Is it possible to stay married when your wife has cheated on you, multiple times, and left you with the kids? Is it possible to stay married when your marriage long ago passed the point of any hope?

            The book is not a "how to" manual, nor does it pretend that every case of infidelity might work out the same way. What it does offer is an intensely honest glimpse of the gritty realities it takes to make a marriage work, even when there has been an affair (or two). I am so bloody tired of cynical books. Works about escaping marriage, church, or faith are just so cliché. Taking pot shots at any of those is easy, lazy, and quite frankly, boring.

            To read a book that had me walking away loving the institution of marriage and church, faith and Scripture, more than when I started, was so incredibly refreshing. That this book did that while having me laughing, at times with tears in my eyes, is a testament to the brilliance of Key and his writing.

            Now, should you be worried that the book features a man telling his side of a marriage story, rest assured, his wife contributes a chapter, and gave her blessing for the writing.

            All that to say, do yourself a favour and read this book. Below is a selection of quotes from the book. Enjoy!

On Faith & Scripture

What do I believe, exactly? I believe there is a thing called God. I believe happy endings are real. I believe the Bible is both a comic novel and the oddest and most accurate accounting of human psychology ever assembled.

On Monogamy

I’d grown comfortable with the idea of sex with this woman and only this woman for the rest of my life, like when you only bring one pair of shoes on a weekend trip. Bold choice, make it work.

On the Crisis of Infidelity

I love the sensation summoned by crisis: hurricanes, tornado warnings, kitchen fires, car accidents, live audiences waiting to be entertained, former neighbors waiting to be bludgeoned to death with a gardening tool—these awake in me a heroic fearlessness I do not feel most days.

On Marriage & Prayer

I’ve prayed for my wife more than just about anyone else, because God says to pray for your enemies, and marriage can sometimes be a war of attrition and one of siege, sometimes cold, occasionally hot.

On Believing In Miracles

I’ve known many teenage mothers who are virgins. They’re called Baptists. So, yeah, I believe the miracles.

His Qualifications Should He Want to Become a Pastor

He possessed "all the necessary virtues of a future Church of Christ preacher, including testicles and a love of my own voice."

On Love

That’s the thing they don’t tell you about love. You can love somebody, really love somebody, while being totally okay with their unfortunate mauling by an escaped Siberian tiger.

On Marriage

The reality is that every marriage is a partnership of two broken assholes with good intentions and varying degrees of ability to deliver. Marriage is as much a mystery to me now as the origins of the universe and the laws that govern the behavior of matter. What makes one work is just as strange as what makes one not.

An Honest Appraisal of Scripture's Readability

Halfway through the Old Testament, the grand comic fugue of Scripture devolves into an excruciatingly slow action movie that made me want to eat a bag of glass. The book of 1 Chronicles felt like a history textbook written by somebody who kept blacking out. Reading the minor prophets—Hosea, Joel, Amos—felt like reading YouTube comments written by people who hate a video of Israel. Lamentations is quite obviously a sad book and so is Jeremiah. The gloriously poetic book of Isaiah reads as if a clinically depressed Middle Earth elf king wrote it, and Ecclesiastes now sounded not unlike an elegantly dismal Edward Albee monologue delivered on a park bench by a wealth manager pondering suicide, and the Psalms read like a high school friend’s Facebook posts about all the cryptic drama in her life that she won’t fully explain, but you know it’s not good and also that she might be high.

On Faith Traditions

You’ve got to appreciate a world religion that does not attempt to make the good guys look too good. Name some grotesque character trait of Barack Obama or Dolly Parton. You can’t. You know they’re probably jackasses in specific ways—we all are—but the official narrative won’t allow for it. Too much is at stake.

Marriage Truths

One of your greatest misconceptions, the one you must jettison as soon as is convenient to you, is that you’re easy to live with. You’re not. You’re a monster. Marriage reveals this to you, though you’d prefer to blame your partner.

The Importance of Happiness in Scripture

The Bible seems to think the happiness question is moot. Saying you deserve happiness is like saying you deserve fresh, minty breath. Nice to have, enjoy it while it lasts. There are more things in heaven and earth to want than happiness. Purpose. Community. Duty. Joy. Goodness.

The Point of Scripture

I finally understood the point of the Bible, this book of operating instructions crowdsourced over thousands of years, a sort of vast cosmic Wikipedia of wisdom about the human comedy, each story a case study in the long war between darkness and light, proud and meek.

On Pastors

I have always felt pity for people who did this for a living. You try writing and delivering a new TED talk or two every week for ten or twenty or thirty years, based on a book nobody reads, baring your inmost thoughts for a crowd of friendlies who’ve heard it all before and strangers who’d rather be washing a cat.

On Churches

The nice thing about church is, if you move to a new city and find a good one, you’ve got instant access to dozens of friend prospects who are kind and funny and who may also believe Jesus held a concealed-carry permit . . . I found it edifying to worship with the deranged, especially when they let you swim in their pool.

The Odds of Infidelity

If you’re a man, you’re more likely to commit infidelity than you are to play a musical instrument. If you’re a woman, you’re more likely to have an affair than you are to have bangs . . . If you think this could never happen to you, you’re a fool. It’s happening right now. Your wife is sending memes to your neighbor this very day. Does she send you memes, too? Your husband is a little drunk and texting an inside joke to a colleague whom he’s so often imagined disrobing in a luxury hotel room that he could tell a police sketch artist what she looks like in the shower.

On Sexting

Whenever I’ve asked to see a woman naked, I’ve always had the decency to do this in person.

What People Say About Infidelity

People had and would say many things to me in the coming days and weeks—I’m so sorry; Let’s go beat this dipshit’s ass; I know a guy; Call my lawyer; Praying for you—but only Angie said, “Fight for her.” I held the phone to my face and looked upward into a sky so painfully blue you almost wanted to cry for the beauty, and I thought, “You know, that’s not the worst idea.” . . . What the demons said, via blogs and TED talks and occasionally at hotel bars while I traveled for work, was “You deserve to be happy.” The demons said, “To hell with her.” The angels said, “Love her.” The demons said, “Let her die.” The angels said, “If anybody dies, let it be you.”

On the Prospect of Divorce

I think most divorces are merely a failure of imagination: you lose the capacity to conceive of a happy future.

On Peace & Surrender

When I got home from my long drive, I no longer felt terror or shock or even the delightful masculine compulsion to assault the problem with the brute force of reason. Instead, what I felt was peace. Man, it was weird. It was not a spacey, THC-laced tranquility, but more like the peace you feel when you’ve ordered a cheese pizza and they bring you one pocked with hateful black olives and you eat the disgusting pizza anyway, it’s not so bad, it’s still pizza, fuck it. It was the peace of allowing asshole drivers to pass you freely on the interstate, though they deserve slow and painful deaths, the peace of accepting that this ballet recital is going to last three hours and you can do nothing short of calling in a bomb threat. Chill, brother, nobody here is having fun, not even the children. Let it go. It was the peace of surrender.

On Therapy

And if you, like Lauren and me, can afford a little therapy, do it: solo therapy, marriage counseling, do it all. You don’t have to go every week. But go when it gets hard. Go during the difficult years. Go before it gets as bad as it got for us. Go when you feel that distance. If you haven’t had sex in three months, go.

On the Reality of Marriage

Nobody told me fighting for my marriage would be less a fight than a kneeling in humiliation at the feet of my enemy. In those delicate days in the autumn of 2017, our marriage motionless in the critical care unit of the burn center, this admission of such an obvious truth, that we were both deeply flawed assfaces, was the first thing we’d agreed on in a long, long time.

Best Friends vs Marriage

Best friends remain best friends because you can take breaks, but a marriage is the sleepover that never ends.

On Children & Divorce

Children "thrive best with two parents in the same house, we know this: two people bound together by covenants not easily dissolved. Be offended at this simple truth if you like . . . For a brief and harried season of my life, I was a single parent and just about died. The dishes alone were

enough to make you deny the existence of a loving God. Parents are like arms. You can swing it with one but two work best and three would be weird . . .

            Perhaps one day we will evolve ourselves into some better arrangement for the children, where benevolent armies of solar-powered robots raise children on expansive baby farms, but until Elon funds this nightmare, marriage is what we’ve got. It’s good for us and it’s good for the kids, even when it hurts like hell.

            I think often of our daughters and what they have learned of love in this strange season. I suppose we’ve given them enough trauma to turn all three into artists or writers, or at least law students. But we’re here, all of us: a nuclear family, detonated but not destroyed. We won’t be traumatizing our children with our divorce. We’ll traumatize them with our marriage, as God intended."

On Bad Advice

Avoid those who urge you to vengeance or say you deserve better. The only thing you deserve is better advice from people who have a rudimentary grasp of the nightmare of marriage for both people in it. Run far and fast from those who say different.

On Contemporary Wisdom About Marriage

Marriage has changed over the millennia, and that’s a beautiful thing, but the prophets of this present age would have us believe marriage should exist solely for the benefit of the people in it, for their emotional, psychological, and carnal empowerment, as though matrimony is merely an extended couple’s spa experience featuring orgies and explosive self-actualizations that you can exit whensoever your heart desires. What if the prophets are wrong? Are we not freer than ever in human history, and sadder, and more anxious?

On How to Stay Married

One of my favorites, Alain de Botton, once wrote, “Compatibility is an achievement of love; it must not be its precondition.” That is marriage, in the end: two of you, being you, warring against the worst parts of you, making space for the best to grow, and learning to see that some parts of your spouse are not your favorite, and letting those parts be anyway. Hating those parts is no grounds for divorce. The only thing worth divorcing, in most cases, is the hatred itself, and your inborn desire to shape the world to your will like some kind of Marvel villain.

On Over-Affectionate Couples on Social Media

I worried they were pretending marriage isn’t an impossible riddle only solved by breaking both of you in half. I thank those weirdos for reminding me that a good marriage often looks like a joke to those outside it.

On Human Depravity

I like the idea of human depravity—really, it explains so much—but it’s not a breakfast-friendly doctrine.

On Faith

Sometimes maybe is all you have to hold on to. That’s all faith is, an enthusiastic maybe. A passionate probably. A hopeful hopefully . . . All I really know is this: the most powerful force in the universe is love and the strangest is forgiveness.

The Power of Church Community

What did our church do for us, exactly? They came when I called. Handed children to their spouses and got in the car. They listened to news nobody wants to hear. They sat with Lauren, too. They did not tell her she was doing a bad thing and must now do this or that good thing to fix it. She seemed plenty familiar with the moral equations in play. They did not give answers, not at first. They did the harder thing and asked questions. What does it feel like to be her? And in the answering, her heart awoke to something. To know people could see your inside and not revile you, this seemed a surprising new variable of the equation.

            And they texted me. “Checking in.” And “This bourbon won’t drink itself.” And “You drank all of my bourbon.”

            They hug us. They feed us. We feed them. They feed our children and we feed theirs and they feed Gary [their dog] when we’re out of town and when they’re out of town, we feed their cats. All we’re doing is feeding each other, basically, with hymns and prayers and sermons thrown in there to remind us why.