12 Ways I Think My Marriage Will Be Even Better in My Thirties
5 Reasons Why I Hesitated to Take My Husbands Last Name
I Am Not the 60 Percent: On Not Letting the Second Divorce Statistic Become Your Statistic
A Characteristic I Am Thankful My Spouse Has
12 Sweet and Simple Ways to Show Your Spouse Gratitude
7 Reasons You Should Say Yes to a Quickie (aka a short date!) With Your Spouse
10 of the Most Disgusting Things I Do for Love
Were You Disappointed by the Way Your Spouse Proposed?
Sweetest Day Is Coming: 5 Simple Ways to Show Your Spouse You Care
10 Things Every Married Person Should Know About Their Spouse
10 Dating Do's and Don'ts We Can Steal from the Disney Princesses
5 Fun and Frightful Ideas for a Spooky Date Night
Survey Reveals the Most Difficult Year of Marriage
How Love Is Like the Seasons

I don't like the Settling writer's attitude. She's written with horror and anger about S&M in other venues, for example; and the whole Settling article has a generally conservative bent. But she's articulating some real feelings and important thoughts, and while I don't agree with all of them, I do agree with some. At one point, analyzing television, she notes that:

While Rachel and her supposed soul mate, Ross, finally get together (for the umpteenth time) in the finale of "Friends", do we feel confident that she’ll be happier with Ross than she would have been had she settled down with Barry, the orthodontist, 10 years earlier? She and Ross have passion but have never had long-term stability, and the fireworks she experiences with him but not with Barry might actually turn out to be a liability, given how many times their relationship has already gone up in flames. It’s equally questionable whether "Sex and the City"’s Carrie Bradshaw, who cheated on her kindhearted and generous boyfriend, Aidan, only to end up with the more exciting but self-absorbed Mr. Big, will be better off in the framework of marriage and family. (Some time after the breakup, when Carrie ran into Aidan on the street, he was carrying his infant in a Baby Björn. Can anyone imagine Mr. Big walking around with a Björn?)

I've never watched "Friends" or "Sex and the City", but I know the feeling.

Personally, I'm more of a novel girl. The other day, I found myself thinking of my long-ago roommate and her thoughts on arranged marriage while I read Monica Ali's beautiful book Brick Lane. Monica Ali is an immigrant to the United Kingdom, and the characters in her novel all come to the UK from Bangladesh. Some of the characters accept traditional arranged marriages, while others make "love marriages" instead — often defying their parents, their whole set of cultural norms, to do so. Towards the end of the novel, one man reflects on the early days of his marriage:

We thought that the love would never run out. It was like a magic rice sack that you could keep scooping into and never get to the bottom. It was a "love" marriage, you see. What I did not know — I was a young man — is that there are two kinds of love. The kind that starts off big and slowly wears away, that seems you can never use it up and then one day is finished. And the kind that you don't notice at first, but which adds a little bit to itself every day, like an oyster makes a pearl, grain by grain, a jewel from the sand.

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