And so I begin the next chapter, armed with their defeat but also with a strong sense of idealism. "You learned from us," my mother once remarked. "You shaped yourself against the grain of our unhappiness." I tend to think of it more as luck, as if I whirled around the dance floor a little recklessly and somehow landed in the arms of the right man at the end of the night. But truthfully, I think my current happiness is made up of some unknowable combination--as unknowable as love itself--of work and circumstance. It has to do with my own yearning to still a shaky sense of family and the joyous luck of meeting someone who so deeply suits me. Perhaps my own modern childhood crisis sent me backward, back beyond the cynicism of recent times, seeking marriage in an old--fashioned sense.

I'd like to describe Jesse for you--his excellent forehead and distinguished face--and the meaning he has brought to my life. I could tell you the stories that make up the very marrow of our marriage: the ways he's helped me know myself, his devoted love of soul music, or the way that emotional subtlety and outrageous humor reside together so comfortably in him. I could tell you that our love both draws me out and steadies me on the beam. Or I could simply recount the time Jesse, not long after first meeting my mother, suddenly broke the reserve between them by dancing ahead of us across a busy street in Manhattan and singing, "I've got the rhythm of the city in me!" But then I'd be trying to convince you of something that is mine alone to know. There is no way to explain why someone walks into a room and awakens your most primal dreams.

I was seated next to a well--known painter at a dinner party not so long ago. He's in his mid--sixties and has been married for 38 years. When I asked him what essential bit made his marriage last, he grasped uncomfortably for the answer. "She's still my best friend," he said, then slightly grimaced at his own corny explanation. "We amuse each other. We have a shared interest in our children." His eyes closed and fluttered as he concentrated, searching for more. "A long marriage can sometimes feel like life imprisonment," he said, suddenly opening his eyes again. "But love also changes again and again and again over the years. Don't expect that what you have now will be what you have down the road. You won't even recognize why you first fell in love." He shrugged, offering one last possibility. "And some people are just lifers."

I felt torn. I respected the words of an intelligent man who has been married for decades. I tried to weave his weary appreciation into our future, imagining Jesse and me one day feeling the same way. And I also shrugged off his words with the impishness of a teenager. I am impatient with those who resist marriage after having chosen it, who don't endorse it fully. Why not love love? Why let time wear it down? That won't happen to us, I thought.

Perhaps my determination and optimism won't carry me effortlessly into the future. I may have to loosen my grip, to let time have its way and let our creation disappear before building a new one up again. My gratefulness for having constructed a happy life on the back of a sad one may get harder to summon, and I'll have to face the coming days, inevitable and unpredictable, making it up along the way. We might have to draw on strengths we can't be sure we have or face the frightening truths about ourselves that longtime intimacy can so often demand.

Or maybe we'll just be happy lifers. Still, I go forward with the only reason the institution of marriage has survived all these many centuries: hope.

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Nell Casey is the editor of the national bestseller, Unholy Ghost: Writers on Depression and, more recently, An Uncertain Inheritance: Writers on Caring for Family. Her articles and essays have been published in The New York Times, Slate, Salon, Elle and Cookie, among other publications, and her fiction has been published in One Story. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and son.