From “How to Be Married,” an essay in the collection How to Be Normal, which will be published next month by Belt Publishing.
For some of us, there’s a season on the cusp of young adulthood—around sixteen or seventeen—when all the deepest failings and yearnings of our nature announce themselves as symphonic themes that the rest of our lives will restate with greater complexity, perhaps, but never again so pristinely. We adults view the struggles of teenagers with pity, amusement, and contempt, reactions that preserve our distance from our own memories of being so young, so susceptible to the…