Wendy Plump > Quotes

“Affairs are like a seventh day. They are a break from all duties and obligations and responsibilities. I'm not saying this is right and I'm not saying it lightly. This is just how they are. You can't be responsible when you're with your lover. And since you already know you're way out of line, you go the extra distance. You throw yourself in headfirst. You become the very personification of irresponsible. You are way alive. Every detail sings. It would be a great way to live if it weren't so ruinous.”
― Wendy Plump

“I have never cataloged what I would want in a marriage. I might as well do it now... I want an arrangement in which love and passion mingle and last. I want a rock to lean against. I want sex to pierce reality and come blazing out the other side. I want to feel that someone has my back. I want it to be us against the world. I want marriage to be cool. I want the words wife and husband to resonate with joy. I want our intimacy to be inviolate. I want it all under one roof. I want the institution to deserve my energy and my commitment and the last decades of my life.I want what Jane Cooper called "A radiance of attention/Like the candle's flame when we eat." I want to wake up next to a person who feels what I feel - that there is a constant, self-renewing joy in being with the other.”
― Wendy Plump, Vow: A Memoir of Marriage

“As a young woman, I schooled my romantic sensibilities on the most impossible examples. "Romeo and Juliet" is one of my favorites. I once plotted out the length of time it took them to conjoin. Four days. Four days for one of the world's greatest stories of love and marriage to play out. I do not see how that is an example for the rest of us. If every marriage on record lasted only four days, then there wouldn't be a word for infidelity. There wouldn't be a word for divorce. There wouldn't be time for anything but sex and adoration. Sounds like a charming recipe. I just have trouble practicing it in extension.”
― Wendy Plump, Vow: A Memoir of Marriage

“When you start to get bored with your misery, you are on the first rung of recovery and you are beginning to climb back up. You add one thing at a time back into your life just as a break from monotony. Instead of feeling wretched, I will start reading again. Instead of feeling wretched, I will start working out again. I will start answering the phone. I will consider the city. I will think about coffee with friends. You start putting in the pieces until eventually what you have is an actual life.”
― Wendy Plump, Vow: A Memoir of Marriage

“Emotional trauma is something we should be forced to take a formal course in during high school, sandwiched between advanced statistics and AP English.”
― Wendy Plump, Vow: A Memoir of Marriage

“They make sense in a superficial way, and they've been tossed around so much that they are almost a received wisdom. Spouses do feel unloved, do feel bored, do think the lover understands them better or is at least more willing to act that way for the sake of getting laid.
What I think I should have been told - what I think any adulterer should be told - is this: If your needs weren't being met, you ought to have communicated them. If the spark was gone and this bugs you, find it again or get out. Is sex ever really boring, really? And you know where the passion went - it went into your lover's bed, that is where you took it. And your lover really understood you better only because you were answering the front door in a thong.”
― Wendy Plump, Vow: A Memoir of Marriage

“Coping with the strains in her own marriage, she told me that she had a simple way of getting around the tension with her husband: that you should always be polite with each other and that you should always have sex when the other wants it. Because sometimes manners and sex are all that you will have. And that, she said, is enough to get you through the worst of it.”
― Wendy Plump, Vow: A Memoir of Marriage

“Divorced people try to maintain at least a shred of respect for their former spouses. They say, He or she is the parent of my children and I will do it for that reason. This statement brings me down. I always feel defeated after hearing it. As if that's the only reason there is to err on the side of slack toward this person you once loved, slept next to, cried over, made love to, bought presents for, married. I also think it's a lot of heavy webbing to drape over the kids, as if you're offering your tolerance as some hard-earned prize: See how I sacrifices for my children by continuing to endure that freak show that is the other person?
I always hope there is more to it. This is a person, after all, whom we pluck out of a crowd of possibilities. Magic attends that choice. Or if that word belongs irrevocably to the World of Disney, then use the word mystery. At any rate, it's a remarkable kind of calculus that makes you look at a field of men or women and quickly zero in on the one person who turns you on most.”
― Wendy Plump, Vow: A Memoir of Marriage

“Based on my perspective of him, man's men do not cheat. They get jazzed just by being manly.”
― Wendy Plump, Vow: A Memoir of Marriage

“Marriage used to be a legal term. It denoted a partnership and property and protection from the Visigoths beyond the village walls. This was apparently not good enough for us, the modern married. We wanted it to be something else. We wanted to invest it with all of our hopes and all of our conceptions of passion and romance. And now that is what we have. A freighted, overburdened, gorgeous institution that is the devil and all to get right.”
― Wendy Plump, Vow: A Memoir of Marriage

“You cannot have a life with someone when half of that life is sealed off behind a wall of lies.”
― Wendy Plump, Vow: A Memoir of Marriage

“Doubt is a scourge of incipient sophistication. Life would be pleasanter without it.”
― Wendy Plump, Vow: A Memoir of Marriage

“And when you finally want to end the thing, you want to end all of it. Including the burden of hiding it.”
― Wendy Plump, Vow: A Memoir of Marriage

“Lies are easy to forget, too.”
― Wendy Plump, Vow: A Memoir of Marriage

“Having an affair doesn’t inoculate you against the effects of one. Adultery is not a SARS vaccine.”
― Wendy Plump, Vow: A Memoir of Marriage

“In love, I desired no one else. All the attraction, all the compulsion, all the hope for the future, went to one man. These seemed an effective demilitarized zone against temptation, and they are. They keep the enemies of the marriage at bay. But they weaken over the years without any siren going off to alert you to that fact.”
― Wendy Plump, Vow: A Memoir of Marriage