Love will die prematurely if the energy for honesty, trust and attention become encrusted with habit and the accretions of pernicious boredom. Boredom borne of too much time spent with one person to the exclusion of others. It is not fair or realistic to expect that one person can be all things to you, all of the time. One person could be all that you need, but the needs of both of you will usually include freedom. The purest love, that of parent to children, includes the knowledge that at some moment, sadly, you must be prepared to let them go.
Marriage is political, inevitably so, too often viciously so.
In these inevitable battles that get sealed with a thousand peace treaties, anger lingers. Marriage contains these petty miseries until they grow into bedsores of the soul. And yet, and yet. It would be nice if every couple could just fashion for themselves a special union unique to them, and it would be advertised to the world by a kind of light that would emanate from them, a glow understood by all. Maybe some kind of Day-Glo bracelet.