Laura Munson

I'm delighted to have discovered (through the wonderful La Belette Rouge blog) a writer named Laura Munson who wrote this piece for the Modern Love column in the New York Times.  (Beware, you may need a kleenex).

Her book "This Is Not The Story You Think It Is...A Season of Unlikely Happiness" was published by Putnam in April.  Her blog is here.  Check it out.

"The point of marriage is not to create a quick commonality by tearing down all boundaries; on the contrary, a good marriage is one in which each partner appoints the other to be the guardian of his solitude, and thus they show each other the greatest possible trust. A merging of two people is an impossibility, and where it seems to exist, it is a hemming-in, a mutual consent that robs one party or both parties of their fullest freedom and development. But once the realization is accepted that even between the closest people infinite distances exist, a marvelous living side-by-side can grow up for them, if they succeed in loving the expanse between them, which gives them the possibility of always seeing each other as a whole and before an immense sky."
— Rainer Maria Rilke (Letters to a Young Poet)