Library of Wisdom

Love & dating · Joy & gratitude

On the question

Since 1987, at every wedding, someone's aunt has asked me — gently, as one inquires after a limp — whether I never wanted to marry. Here is the answer at full length, recorded so I can finally stop giving it: I wanted my life. I got it. Whole decades of mornings that belonged entirely to me, work I loved past reason, forty-one students who are my descendants in the way that counts for me, and friendships forty years deep that nobody ever asked me to rank. A life can be full in more shapes than the one on the greeting cards. Mine was one of the other shapes. It held.

To someone younger: A full life comes in more shapes than the cards print. Pick yours on purpose.

— Dr. Priya Sharma · Immunologist — thirty-four years at NIH, BethesdaDemonstration

Love & dating · Marriage & partnership

Angela

I came back wrong, and Angela looked at the wrongness like it was a flat tire. Not the whole car. The tire. Fifty-two years this spring. People ask the secret and get mad when I tell them there isn't one. You marry somebody who can tell the difference between who you are and what happened to you. Then — this is the part they leave off the greeting card — you spend the next fifty years proving them right about which was which.

— Frank Moretti · Marine, tool-and-die maker, grandfather — Toledo, OhioDemonstration