I thrive and enjoy being in a loving, supportive, and happy marriage.

A good marriage is measurable in odd ways. One of them is the number of things you have started doing since it began: the pottery class, the running, the friend you finally called back.

Thriving is not only contentment. It is expansion. Some of your energy stops going into wondering whether you are loved, and that energy has to go somewhere.

This is the quiet argument for stability. Not that it feels wonderful, though it can, but that it frees up a surprising amount of a person.

Some of what you have taken up in the last five years was made possible by whoever is in the next room.