This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage by Ann Patchett

because, like it or not, he has an important spot in my personal history. He has a title. I suppose I must be his ex-wife, since somebody told me he married again. It’s been six years now. Enough time has passed that I wish him well, in a way that is so distant and abstract it doesn’t even matter.
    My divorce began less than a week before we were married. We had to drive out to Donelson, Tennessee, to the rectory at Holy Rosary, where we had an appointment with the priest who would perform the service. It was a good forty-five minutes from Nashville, my hometown, but marriage was a booming business that year, and the more convenient priests were already booked solid. We got lost once we got off the interstate and twisted through the dark and identical streets of tract houses with cinder-block foundations. We didn’t talk about anything more important than directions. My husband thought I should know where we were, Tennessee being my state, but I hadn’t been to Donelson or Holy Rosary since I was ten years old. I have a notoriously bad sense of direction.
    It was June, because that was the month to get married in, and it was buggy and hot. We had been through the weekend of mandatory Catholic marriage seminars, classes full of the nitty-gritty of natural family planning (what we had called rhythm when I was growing up) and personality questionnaires (“Which tasks will you do? Which will your husband do? Which will you do together? A. Iron; B. Take out the trash; C. Make decisions about major purchases”). Now we had to see Father Kibby one-on-one and go over a few things. My husband and I were both Catholic. He wanted nothing to do with the Church but was willing to be married by a priest to make his mother happy. For me it was worth more. I was a Catholic shaped by twelve years of Catholic school. Marriage was one of the seven sacraments I had memorized along with my multiplication tables in third grade. Catholicism wasn’t at the heart of marriage for me, but it was part of it. Marriage was one of the sacraments I was entitled to.
    My hands were sweating from more than the heat when we got to the rectory office. We were late and shouldn’t have been. Seeing a priest meant trouble, sin, confession, nothing good, but Father Kibby was young and put us at ease. He explained that he would read the questions from the sheet attached to a clipboard and check off the appropriate boxes as we answered. June bugs were thumping against the screen. At the end, he explained, we would sign the form.
    Did we believe in God and the Catholic Church? Yes.
    Would we raise our children to be Catholic? Yes.
    Were we entering into marriage lightly? No .
    Was this a marriage that could be dissolved only by death? Death?
    Death. That meant that if the marriage didn’t work, my only way out was to die. He was asking me to swear to my preference for death over divorce. At that moment, before it had even started, I understood how my marriage would end.
    I should have understood it anyway because even going in, I was not happy with my husband. We had lived together for two and a half years before we got married, so I had a fairly good idea of how we got along. Not well. It’s difficult to talk about divorce without getting into your marriage, and yet I’d just as soon leave my marriage alone. Our general patterns were much like those of any unhappy couple, periods of our screaming and my crying broken up by intolerable stretches of silence. We were not helpful to each other. We were not kind. These are the facts: I married him when I should not have, and later on I left. I ran out the door, got a ride to the airport, and bought a one-way ticket back to Tennessee.
    People ask me, If you knew it wasn’t working, why did you marry him? And all I can say is, I didn’t know how not to. I believed I was in too deep before the invitations were ever mailed, before the engagement. Maybe it was inexperience or