Life after marriage can be a major blessing but also a great fiasco if you don’t take the time beforehand to discuss some very important details. What kind of details you might ask…well, for example, did you and your new hubby discuss your weekly-without-fail, Saturday afternoon shopping trips to the mall? Or how about that incredible shoe fetish you’ve had for years—the one where you can’t help snatching up at least four to five pairs of brand new kicks every single month? Did you discuss the fact that you have absolutely no intentions whatsoever of depositing “your” hard-earned paycheck into that brand-spanking-new joint checking account—the one the love of your life has so proudly opened for the two of you? Or better yet, did you make it clear from the start that sharing a joint account is the only kind of financial arrangement you’re willing to live with? Does your husband know that for as long as you can remember, you’ve been a huge believer in the idea that “What’s mine is mine and what’s yours is mine, too?! Now, of course, the above questions are all hypothetically speaking, but they are also hugely symbolic of the kinds of problems…

In one of my favorite films last summer (Paris, je t’aime, which is actually a series of short films about love, set in Paris), there is a vignette in which a long-married man is about to leave his wife for his mistress. Years of mutual apathy have rendered the couple’s marriage stale and wilted. All of the little idiosyncrasies that he once found charming and endearing about his wife have become irritants that make his skin crawl. He fairly loathes the woman. Nothing short of an injection of a serious dose of “I actually give a care about you” could save it. But (without spoiling it!) the husband learns something that completely alters his approach to their relationship. As their relationship evolves, the narrator intones, “Once he began to act like a man in love, he became a man in love.” I love this line, and the concept behind it. It is, in fact, this very kernel of an idea that grew into my novel, SLEEPING WITH WARD CLEAVER. So I found it interesting to hear it verbalized in the movie. There is, to me, such a simple truth to it. Most everybody starts out in a marriage happy (I…