Library of Wisdom
Hard-earned lessons from lives shared by choice — every card donated deliberately by its author, with the whole life behind it. The Library is young; it grows one life at a time.
2 cards from 2 lives on marriage & partnership.
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
Marriage & partnership · Regret & forgiveness
On being married to someone who was also married to a company
Maria says she spent twenty years married to a man who was always slightly somewhere else, and she's right. We made it because every time she hit her limit, she said so in plain words, and I came back. It took the plain words twice. The company was the other woman — and unlike most other women, everyone congratulates you for the affair. Nobody at the chamber of commerce dinner is checking on your wife.
To someone younger: Don't ask them to be patient. Ask them what it's costing, and listen to the whole answer.
— Marcus Reyes · Built a freight company for nineteen years, then sold itDemonstration