The Marriage Forest

"We enter marriage as we enter a wood: with purpose, with hope, with direction. We continue in marriage as we continue in a wood: confused, haunted, and imminently lost. And we survive marriage as we survive a wood: by a combination of dumb luck, faulty knowledge, and helpless goodwill - and at the price of coming through with no thinnest skin left upon a single tooth in our heads. It's a great hike when it's over, but the campfires at which its praises are sung are seldom the ones we light in the forest." (Robert Farrar Capon, The Romance of the Word, 124)