“Is a partially unfulfilling but stable marriage a romantic failure or a post-romantic ideal? When you stay, maybe you have realistic expectations or maybe you're just rationalizing mediocrity; when you leave, maybe you're courageous or maybe you're just selfishly deluded. In the gloaming of the romantic age, we've valorized marital mediocrity, and called it realism; we've vilified marital ambition, and called it selfish. Consequently, at a time when marriage could be anything, we very often expect it to be less.”