Who to marry?

Or at least make your marriage the best friendship you can muster.

There are many quotes on marriage and friendship.  And often I hear a couple say, I am marrying my best friend.
In this blog, I gift some quotes that describe some aspects of friendship and marriage.

It is unclear who wrote this piece. It has been attributed to different authors including anonymous…. but the message is sweet.

Marry your best friend

“Marry your best friend. I do not say that lightly.
Really, truly find the strongest, happiest friendship in the person you fall in love with.
Someone who speaks highly of you. Someone you can laugh with. The kind of laughs that make your belly ache, and your nose snort. The embarrassing, earnest, healing kind of laughs.
Wit is important. Life is too short not to love someone who lets you be a fool with them.
Make sure they are somebody who lets you cry, too. Despair will come. Find someone that you want to be there with you through those times.
Most importantly, marry the one that makes passion, love, and madness combine and course through you.
A love that will never dilute – even when the waters get deep, and dark.”

 

Or as the inimitable writer Neil Gaiman, penned for his friends, Sxip and Coco on their wedding day:

This is everything I have to tell you about love: nothing.
This is everything I’ve learned about marriage: nothing.
Only that the world out there is complicated,
and there are beasts in the night, and delight and pain,
and the only thing that makes it okay, sometimes,
is to reach out a hand in the darkness and find another hand to squeeze,
and not to be alone.
It’s not the kisses, or never just the kisses: it’s what they mean.
Somebody’s got your back.
Somebody knows your worst self and somehow doesn’t want to rescue you
or send for the army to rescue them.
It’s not two broken halves becoming one.
It’s the light from a distant lighthouse bringing you both safely home
because home is wherever you are both together.
So this is everything I have to tell you about love and marriage: nothing,
like a book without pages or a forest without trees.
Because there are things you cannot know before you experience them.
Because no study can prepare you for the joys or the trials.
Because nobody else’s love, nobody else’s marriage, is like yours,
and it’s a road you can only learn by walking it,
a dance you cannot be taught,
a song that did not exist before you began, together, to sing.
And because in the darkness you will reach out a hand,
not knowing for certain if someone else is even there.
And your hands will meet, 
and then neither of you will ever need to be alone again.

And that’s all I know about love.