While it may seem implausible, the funniest book of recent memory is a memoir by a man whose wife asks him for a divorce because she’s fallen in love with another man. It is also one of the most important books in recent years. The book is Harrison Scott Key’s How to Stay Married: The Most Insane Love Story Ever Told, and it is hard to overstate how funny and poignant this book is. I am not talking about mildly funny. I am talking about laugh-out-loud, make-your-sides-hurt sort of funny. That Key can turn the very real suffering he, his wife, and daughters endured—spoiler alert, Key and his wife, Lauren, stayed together—into such a hilarious romp is a credit to his great abilities but also to his heart and his honesty.
A memoirist needs a good story, and Key learns he’s living one in early October 2017. His wife Lauren emails him to say that they need to talk that night about “Life.” Key wonders if she might have an addiction or whether she’s about to confront him about his drinking—an “online diagnostic” test tells him he’s no alcoholic. He thinks she may be depressed or wants to have another baby.
But it isn’t addictions or babies or depression she wants to talk about. She wants a divorce because she’s in love with someone else.
One of Key’s first questions for Lauren is who. “A newsfeed of faces raced across this strange new galaxy. Maybe it was someone from the classical school where she worked? I could not see my wife committing adultery with anyone who read Latin for fun, but then she’d married me, hadn’t she? . . . She’d begun working out at the YMCA a few months earlier. . . . [H]ad she fallen for someone with abs?” It isn’t Latin scholar or someone with washboard abs. Lauren has fallen in love with a former neighbor, a bland and boring guy with whom Key cannot believe he’s even competing. Key calls him “Chad” and says he wishes he “could tell you his real name, which is somehow even dumber than Chad. Apologies to all the Chads of the world. They don’t deserve this. Nobody does.”
For Key, the moment was an out-of-body experience: “My wife presented me with a little box, and in the box was my very own confused and severed heard, removed from my body before I even knew it was happening.” And the pain of betrayal is searing in those first moments. Key writes:
In addition to going insane, you will feel pain that transcends all prior experience. Pain without precedent. Pain that burns away the sky. The pain did not make me cry, not yet. It did not make me rage and break things, not yet. What the pain did was detach my brain from my spinal column and kick it like a football into new galaxies. Everything I knew had to be unknown. Every I did not know had to be learned. You never realize how much you know until you learn all of it was wrong.
Rather than turning to self-pity—or divorce—the revelation begins a process of discovery for Key. Key uses the revelations and the up-and-down process of working to save his marriage to think through his marriage and the institution of marriage, to dissect how he and Lauren arrived at this point, and to recognize what flaws and faults of his contributed to the breach. While Key never excuses Lauren’s infidelity, he recognizes that it didn’t arise in a vacuum.
Marriage is an institution battered by twin forces. On the one side are the cynics and the increasing number of people who see no point in it. To be yoked to another person for life seems like an unbearable hell. It is banal and bourgeois. It limits and crushes. The evident pain and tragic betrayals do not seem worth the price of admission. On the other are the idealists, those who sugarcoat and romanticize marriage. These see the marriage bed as heaven on earth and a good marriage as the simple product of piety and hard work.
The process of discovery Key undertakes after learning of Lauren’s affair, which unfolds in How to Stay Married offers answers to both of these dueling forces. In his beautifully told, poignant, and searing memoir, Key makes the case for real marriage. To those who doubt marriage is worth it, he says, “Make the leap.” To those who idealize marriage, he says, “Be prepared.” To both he shows that for a marriage to survive and thrive, it needs to be embedded in a larger culture and community, a community of friends, family, prayer, sinners, and saints. The married couple cannot be an island unto themselves. And Key does it all with his characteristic humor and warmth.
Key’s argument is that real marriage is hard but also an adventure on which it is worth embarking. It is from the crucible that is marriage, that something good, beautiful, and greater than the sum of its parts can be generated. To the idealists, Key writes: “Nobody ever told me that every marriage comes to this cataract in the river many times over, that every marriage goes over the falls. The two of you go tumbling across the smooth mossy rocks of time, and down you go and some couples die and some don’t, but everybody goes toppling.” Lauren, who authors a chapter of the book, echoes a similar theme: “No one really talks about marriage struggles. Not Christians. Not the real struggles. Sex, pain, anger, loneliness. Not a word. You’d think they would. Christians love to talk about sin and struggle, but we look past the many nightmares of marriage like an army of the blind.”
Not every married couple will face the sort of crisis Key and Lauren faced. But they will go over the falls. There will be crises and mini-crises. Sufferings. Loneliness. We need to equip people jumping into the adventure of marriage with this knowledge. Key notes, “I’d witnessed many weddings . . . and never heard a single officiant explain the crucible of suffering that awaits every married couple.”
Yet, such candor would seem to reinforce the cynics’ view and for good reason. What Key is describing seems the very real hell from which the cynic rightly wants to run. But Key doesn’t stop there. Key’s acknowledgment that such suffering will come isn’t throwing a wet blanket on the celebration but recognizing the grand and beautiful adventure the couple is entering. Marriage is a mini-drama in the larger theo-drama. We must be candid about it—for our own good and those crazy enough—good crazy!—to enter into the marriage adventure. (At one point, Key writes, ““If you want to stay married, the first thing you’re going to need is to be insane. Because staying married is insane.”) And such candor allows couples to avoid panic when the inevitable suffering comes. That suffering isn’t the end of the story.
But Key also answers the cynics. To them he says, marriage is the furnace that purifies and sanctifies. That is something we need as human beings. Key writes: “That is marriage, in the end: two of you, being you, warring against the worst parts of you, making space for the best to grow, and learning to see that some parts of your spouse are not your favorite, and letting those parts be anyway. Hating those parts is no grounds for divorce. The only thing worth divorcing, in most cases, is the hatred itself.”
Key isn’t afraid to present this in a theological key either:
Whatever your feelings about Christ being the bridegroom and the church being the bride, here’s what I’ve come to see: Rome slaughtered Jesus, and that’s what marriage will do. It will slay you, crucify and burn and behead you and everything you thought you knew about yourself. And the thing that is left, after all is burned and plucked away, that is the real you.
Marriage is worth it because of the transformation that it works upon the couple. Thus, near, the end of How to Stay Married, Key asks:
What if the prophets [of the present age] are wrong? Are we not freer than ever in human history, and sadder, and more anxious, more wretched? What if marriage, at its very best, exists to remake us into beautiful new creatures we scarcely recognize? What if, in some cosmically weird way, escaping a hard marriage is not how you change? What if staying married is?
Here, one hears an echo of Joseph Ratzinger’s line about Christ who “burns and transforms evil in suffering, in the fire of his suffering love.” While not all the struggles of marriage are evil, and even the evils might not rise to those faced by Key and his wife, these struggles borne in love are what refashion and remake us. They burn away the impurities and fashion a new creation. And that is an adventure worth undertaking.
But the adventure of real marriage is only possible if embedded within and supported by a larger community of love. For marriages to survive and thrive, one needs grace, prayer, and others. For marriages to survive and thrive, the Church must truly be the Body of Christ—it must be a true communio. That means that the Church must be present and supportive of couples in good times and in crises, it cannot purvey abstractions but tangible, flesh-and-blood charity—it must show us the sort of self-emptying love that St. Teresa of Calcutta showed to those in the slums.
This may all seem obvious, but think for a moment of how many times you have learned of Catholic friends divorcing and how you had no inkling that they were even dealing with marital issues. Too often couples keep things bottled up and private until it seems too late to repair. In short, Key is telling us that couples cannot go it alone. They need Christ and they need Christ’s presence extended in time and space in the real flesh and blood men and women in the Church.
The night Key learned of Lauren’s affair, he became a beggar before God. He “crawled out of bed and onto the floor,” and said, “God. Help. Help me. Help me to know what is real.” Key and his wife “were the people who had killed our marriage,” but it was going to have to be they, along “with the help of beings both divine and mortal,” who would “make it live again.” Indeed, as Key writes, “[i]f you want your marriage to survive, you need people in your life who believe in the idea of it.” These were friends who believed that there was a real fight going on between us and principalities and powers.
And such friends cannot recite platitudes and abstractions in these moments of crisis. Key talks about the sort of faith that was needed in his moment of crisis. It wasn’t a false sense of piety. It didn’t offer abstract and abstruse theories:
What did our church do for us, exactly? They came when I called. Handed children to their spouses and got in the car. They listened to news nobody wants to hear. They sat with Lauren, too. They did not tell her she was doing a bad thing and must now do this or that good thing to fix it. She seemed plenty familiar with the moral equations in play. They did not give answers, not at first. They did the harder thing and asked questions. What does it feel like to be her? And in the answering, her heart awoke to something. To know people could see your inside and not revile you, this seemed a surprising new variable of the equation.
These were Christians who knew how to love. In the deepest and darkest moments of pain in the book, Key describes his friends’ unwavering love. They didn’t offer pat solutions. They offered their presence. In them, Key discovers truly that God is love and what that love means—a self-emptying that needs to be recapitulated within marriage itself. Key writes:
They say God is love. I’d heard this remarkable axiom all my life, and I think I finally understood. Heaven and hell and smitings and virgin births and fishes and loaves, it was all a story to celebrate and make sense of the strangest fact of all: love is what saves you. Love, love enough to confess your failures, love to forgive the failures of others, is always what saves your life, your soul, your family, your marriage.
And in experiencing the searing and purifying nature of love, Key realizes the concrete nature of God and his love: “What if God and Jesus are metaphors for something too impossible to fathom, which we attempt to fathom, anyway? What if the endless fathoming is our duty? What if God and Jesus aren’t metaphors at all? What if they’re real? What if everything else is a metaphor for them?”
How to Stay Married is a profound book that offers a portrait of real marriage that answers both the cynics and the idealists. The cynics fail to see the redemptive suffering-in-communion of persons that marriage can be. The idealist’s approach is emblematic of a vision of marriage that does not candidly acknowledge the reality that the Cross will find one in marriage; the Cross is present in every vocation. With the cynics, we need to acknowledge the very real suffering that marriage can be but then demonstrate that that suffering can and does find purpose in the larger context of the communion of husband and wife and the communion of family, friends, church, and city who need to support and build up each marriage for it to flourish. To them, we need to show marriage as a path to true human fulfillment. With the idealists, we need to help shore them up when the inevitable bumps in the road occur, so they don’t run for the hills and give up.
Marriage lived and embodied within a community of love and prayer is a pathway to virtue and sanctification. Key’s book has changed me for the better. And based on my unscientific sampling of people who have read it on my recommendation, it has changed many others. That How to Stay Married offers profound lessons and is an important book does not mean it is ever pedantic. This is a gripping story told well. It is not a sermon. If you want to have your heart crushed and rebuilt again all while chortling and crying, run, don’t walk to read this incredible book.
(Editor’s note: This essay appeared previously in an earlier form at Humanum: Issues in Family, Culture, & Science, the Quarterly Review of the John Paul II Institute.)
How to Stay Married: The Most Insane Love Story Ever Told
by Harrison Scott Key
Simon & Schuster, 2023
Hardcover, 320 pages
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John Ciardi, the translator of Dante’s Commedia, used to tell his students on the first day of class, ” The Inferno is a rape. The Paradiso is a honeymoon. The Purgatorio is a happy marriage.”
The cross is present in all vocations, in all real-deal marriages. At times, married couples are each other’s purgation. Not to klow that before embarking on marriage is the reason why they mostly are claimed to have failed: those involved had no notion of the meaning of purgation to reach perfection. Without pre-Conciliar Catholic Truth what hope is there for a vocation to marriage to be undertaken?
It is not clear what is meant by ‘pre-Conciliar Catholic Truth.’ But knowing a few engaged couples who underwent diocesan “pre-Cana” programs and some who underwent prep at the hands of my FSSP parish priests, I believe one preparation is far superior. One program lasts one hour for six weeks; the other lasts at least one hour per week for six months, and a year is preferable to six months, and preferably before the man even asks the woman to marry.
The old Baltimore catechism:
Q. 1010. What are the chief ends of the Sacrament of Matrimony?
Item First: “To enable the husband and wife to aid each other in securing the salvation of their souls; etc.”
What does JPII’s Catechism say?
How many Novos Ordo Catholics had the stomach to wade through Ratzinger’s JP2 catechism – destined as a manual for national conferences of bishops to create digestable Catechisms for their faithful?
Etc…etc…
Thanks, but I’m curious to know what readers can say. Can anyone sum what JPII’s catechism teaches about the ends of Holy Matrimony or define what IT IS? The Baltimore Catechism lacks the length and detail of JPII’s catechism. The Baltimore Catechism succinctly states the purpose and meaning of the sacrament. The tree in the forest of the 1983 Catechism is not easily summed and not easily found.
Nut! I love your pseudonym. It pairs well with Mrs. Cracker’s. I’m ready to snack!
I confess. As an NO Catholic, teacher of “Faith Formation,” I waded through that CCC, a hefty piece of work. More confused than certain, I bought a Baltimore Catechism to learn exactly what it was I should teach. Bless me, Nut, for I have learned.
After that NO party, after I’d cracked too many nuts, the vacuity of the social event and the raucous strained effort at entertainment began to bore me. I wanted red meat flavored with ash from a sacrificial holocaust. That, schola, bells, incense, and music (together with Latin and God’s great mystery) transported me home.
If any pope tries to separate me from my TLM feast, I’ll pray his sins may sprout from the ground, all crying to God for vengeance.
Et tu?
Nut! I love your pseudonym. It pairs well with Mrs. Cracker’s. I’m ready to snack!
I confess. As a NO Catholic, teacher of “Faith Formation,” I waded through that hefty piece of work, the CCC. More confused than certain, I bought a Baltimore Catechism to learn exactly what it was I should teach. Bless me, Nut, for I have learned.
After that NO party, after I’d cracked too many nuts, the vacuity of the social event and the raucous strained effort at entertainment began to bore me. I wanted red meat flavored with ash from a sacrificial holocaust. That, schola, bells, incense, and music (together with Latin and God’s great mystery) transported me home.
If any pope tries to separate me from my TLM feast, I’ll pray his sins may sprout from the ground, all of them crying to God for vengeance.
Et tu?
Lets go for Ratzinger’s attempted compendium – intended to fill the gap left by the disobedience of national conferences to produce it:
346: “What are the effects of the sacrament of Matrimony?
Too long to retype, I’ll quote the relevant part: It furthermore “bestows upon the spouses the grace necessary to attain holiness”.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church has quite a lot to say about marriage. You will find it beginning with #1601.
Indeed it does… without mentioning the securing of salvation of their souls…
“….without mentioning the securing of salvation of their souls…..”
CCC 1661:
“The sacrament of Matrimony signifies the union of Christ and the Church. It gives spouses the grace to love each other with the love with which Christ has loved his Church; the grace of the sacrament thus perfects the human love of the spouses, strengthens their indissoluble unity, and sanctifies them on the way to eternal life (cf. Council of Trent: DS 1799).”
Thanks, but I’m curious to know what readers can say. Can anyone sum what JPII’s catechism teaches about the ends of Holy Matrimony or define what IT IS? The Baltimore Catechism lacks the length and detail of JPII’s catechism. The Baltimore Catechism succinctly states the purpose and meaning of the sacrament. The tree in the forest of the 1983 Catechism is not easily summed and not easily found.
Perhaps this will an add to this discussion re “the securing of their souls.” CCC1534: “Two other sacraments, Holy Orders and Holy Matrimony, are directed towards the salvation of others; if they contribute as well to personal salvation, it is through service to others that they do so. They confer a particular mission in the Church and serve to build up the People of God.”
I like about this teaching – HOLY Matrimony is an ecclesial Vocation and a complement to Orders, which I dare say most couples, engaged or married do not know. And, has Bishop Barron has said to couples “your marriage is not about you, but rather Jesus’s mission.” When I spoke this to engaged couples at the last two weekends I gave, they seemed dumbfounded and surprised.
So how can a couple enact this mission?? St. John Paul offers the Four Tasks of the mission of M&F Life (Familaris consortio, 1981, nos 17 ff). There are two internal tasks, focused on relationships, of which the Key memoir evidently illustrates well; there are two external tasks, focused on society and parish. Are couples taught this? It should be part of infant baptism classes, and revisited at the next 3 children’s sacraments.
Many reputable therapists and counselors will tell you that disillusionment, usually within the first 10 years of marriage, can lead to divorce and often when the nest is empty. From a faith standpoint, and Barron’s words, if you enter Christian marriage believing it and your spouse are supposed to fulfill you and make you happy, you are set up for disappointment. How many engaged couples want to hear about the Cross in marriage? Yet, that is the path to a happiness they cannot imagine and the salvation of their souls. But they need conversion, formation, and accompaniment commensurate both with their dignity and the importance of their sacrament/vocation “at the Service of Communion.”
In general, I do not believe the way we currently prepare engaged couples adequately helps them to navigate such a marriage in today’s world. They come wanting a wedding. Do they know and want their mission? I have faint hope that the Catechumenal Pathways for Married Life (2022) will effect the renewal of the domestic church we so desperately need. We can start by a general intercession that could sound like this: For an increase and perseverance in Vocations to Holy Orders and Holy Matrimony, we pray to the Lord.
I have not yet read this book, but I just bought it, and will most certainly do so. Where was this book, and a host of others, such as Leila Miller’s 2 precious books, 10-12 years ago when I REALLY needed them? My first marriage did not survive, I had no idea what to do, though I would have done nearly anything to save it. Here we are, 10 years later and another marriage, but there is still tremendous pain, for myself and my children. Short of a life-threatening situation, for the love of God, DO NOT DIVORCE, most especially if you have children! In my experience, divorce solves practically nothing, and the level of complication increases many orders of magnitude. There is no starting over, that promise is an insidious lie! I read books like Key’s for the sake of others who are travelling down similar roads to the one I went down, to help my children who are oh so cautiously considering marriage and are deathly afraid of failure, and finally, to help me maintain perspective and navigate my marriage now. Conor Dugan’s analysis is undoubtedly correct, and we, as the Body of Christ, must ALWAYS be willing to help and strengthen ALL Christian marriages, where the Domestic Church begins. Thank you, Conor, for recommending the book. May God bless!
With all best wishes and blessings.
sex is merely a utilitarian invention from nature which increases genetic diversity and thus resistance to parasites and diseases. it’s certainly not “sacred”, contrary to catholic thinking/threatening.
Sex is the means by which God, the only person who can create something from nothing, decided that He would make new human beings/souls.
.
We belittle what Sex is at our own peril. But I also think we place more importance on Sex than can be bourn–it is already so important, dumping ever more importance on something so fragile is likely to wreck it.
Sex arguably becomes sacred when incorporated in a sacramental union of marriage for the purpose of creating new members of the sacred new covenant and sealing the sacramental bonds. It is Holy Mother Church of the ages that renders sex sacred.
Yours truly humbly proposes three points possibly worth imprinting on any marriage. Plus a side story.
FIRST, some short advice volunteered to me and my wife in a corner during the reception: “Remember, it’s the small things that matter most.” This wisdom from a family patriarch with limited formal education and who later lived to be 103. If we take care of the small stuff, the big stuff might never happen.
SECOND, when two parties offer their vows, they are “creating a new reality(!)” and at that moment are already promising permanently, to themselves and each other, that the possible path of breakdown is no longer on the table, ever.
THIRD, when sneaky demons were still lurking at the edges, we then reminded ourselves, as from the beginning: “it’s not really us, it’s the worms trying to get in.” Time to take a walk through the neighborhood.
Ours was a blessed marriage for nearly 27 years. Some say a marriage made in heaven. Then after twelve years of cancer, this greatest stress factor ended it. From the record, the hospital team concluded that in terms of sensitivities and off-the-charts allergic reactions, Kristi was not the statistical one-in-a-hundred, but “one in a million.”
Still, near the very end she whispered: “I wouldn’t want to do that again, but I wouldn’t want to have missed it either. The graces I would not have known.”
For those possibly interested, yours truly spent the first five years after Kristi’s passing writing and rewriting her story: “KRISTI: So Thin is the Veil,” Crossroads Publishing, 2006). Both an agony and a healing process. The editor-in-chief, a non-Catholic, chose to publish the manuscript exactly as submitted, with absolutely no edits or changes. If sales ever reach the threshold for royalties, these will be donated to Kristi’s selected pro-life cause.
A combination biography and discovery of the Communion of Saints (“We are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses,” Heb 12:1)–a big part of that “larger community” mentioned by writer Conor Dugan and author Harrison Scott Key. Kristi’s most familiar friends were Therese, Catherine Laboure, Maria Goretti, and Bernadette.
I just bought the book.
As I reread the Baltimore Catchism on matromony, much of it is based on the Old Testament. “Matrimony is the sacrament by which a baptized man and a baptized woman bind themselves for life in a lawful marriage and receive the grace to discharge their duties”.
I believe much of the history of the sacrement of matrimony, but as usual, I am unable to convince myself on some of that history, especially the mythology.
God said “be fruitful and multiply; spread out over the earth and multiply on it.”
How can we expect to multiply from only Adam and Eve?
Christianity website: https://www.christianity.com/wiki/bible/what-do-we-know-about-adam-and-eves-children.html
Billy Graham Bible study: https://billygraham.org/devotion/the-purity-of-marriage/
“The Bible doesn’t say where Adam and Eve’s first two sons — Cain and Abel got their wives, although it does tell us that Cain and his wife had at least one child (Enoch). The usual assumption is that Cain and Abel married their sisters. (Later this was forbidden by the Old Testament, but was necessary at the beginning of the human race.)”
Unbaptized persons can be truly married, only baptized persons can be united in the sacrament of Matrimony and receive the graces of this sacrament.
God knew that in the 21st century the vast majority of his human creation would never see a baptismal.
I hope my view of this history causes no pain. I only hope God will not strike me with the pain of hell.