Even though mar­ried life was pro­gress­ing well and all involved were happy, Eliz­a­beth Weil decided to actively apply her­self to “the project of being a spouse” and to doc­u­ment the process.

Weil’s arti­cle is slow to start but becomes an absorb­ing inquiry in to what it means to be mar­ried.

I’ve never really believed that you just marry one day at the altar or before a jus­tice of the peace. I believe that you become mar­ried — truly mar­ried — slowly, over time, through all the road-rage inci­dents and pre­colonoscopy ene­mas, all the small and large moments that you never expected to hap­pen and cer­tainly didn’t plan to endure. But then you do: you endure.

via Mar­ginal Revolution

In a sim­i­larly absorb­ing man­ner, Jonah Lehrer dis­cusses the con­cept of mar­riage from a neu­ropsy­cho­log­i­cal per­spec­tive:

The only prob­lem with this roman­tic myth is that pas­sion is tem­po­rary. It inevitably decays with time. This is not a knock against pas­sion — this is a basic fact of our ner­vous sys­tem. We adapt to our plea­sures; we habit­u­ate to delight. In other words, the same thing hap­pens to pas­sion­ate love that hap­pens to Christ­mas presents. We’re so impos­si­bly happy and then, within a mat­ter of days or weeks or months, we take it all for granted.