You give up your job to move somewhere for your spouse’s job, which pays better than yours ever will, so the marriage wins. It happens five times in a row, in five consecutive years. You’d never have agreed to this, but the marriage keeps winning! The trick is to train yourself to value the marriage above yourself, to feel as if you win when the marriage wins. After the fifth move, I barely even tried to make friends, barely arranged the house, barely cared what it looked like, what I looked like. Marriage is a machine that deforms whatever self you once were into an accommodating engine.

But then there is the opposite agony of the pristine, unmarked self.