An interesting essay in The Atlantic on love and marriage from a woman's perspective.

Most of my closest friends have always been women -- when I got married, the attendants on my side were my brother and two groomsmaids. And many of my women friends have been (or are) unmarried considerably longer than they might have liked; this was for all the right reasons, but it still made them somewhat unhappy. So I've thought a lot about such matters, thought obviously without the intensity stemming from direct personal concern (men face a different set of problems related to marriage), and the essay seemed to me to capture a good deal of truth.

In any case, I'm not sure the essay is right, I'm sure that it doesn't tell the whole story, and I am pretty sure that nothing in it is particularly original. But it strikes me as refreshingly candid as to one set of circumstances that are worth a good deal of thinking (even though it necessarily slights other circumstances). And there is one item that I thought was very well put (though I stress again that, like all statements on this subject, it can't describe everyone's experience equally):

Marriage isn't a passion-fest; it's more like a partnership formed to run a very small, mundane, and often boring nonprofit business. And I mean this in a good way.