I remember really liking this when the rest of book club was a little uneven about it, and I somehow never put my favorite quotes in Goodreads (what?!) and just came across my list of them, so here they are! Lots of relationship food for thought. (Also, I couldn't help smiling at the descriptions of the Saugatuck, MI community, because I stayed there once.) 
 "...we're both contentedly solitary people. Which is part of what makes us so good together: We know when and how to leave each other alone." 
 "When your life is going along nicely, when things are looking good, the correct posture to assume is one of gratitude, absent of any hint that you expect your good fortune to last. It's kind of a defensive crouch." 
 "I call it Permanent Romance, like Trotsky's idea of Permanent Revolution. We don't take each other for granted, nothing is carved-in-stone, sworn-in-court routine, and that makes our time together fresh and fun, in bed and out." 
 "[My parents] were happy together for two decades, they raised four children together, and then, when their children were all practically adults, they parted. That doesn't look like a marriage that failed to me. It looks more like a marriage that reached its expiration date, something more marriages do as our life expectancies increase." 
 "Being single visits a kind of constant, low-intensity misery on a person -- at least a person who doesn't want to be single. Coming home to an empty house, not having anyone to confide in, facing illnesses on your own -- being alone hurts, but people can get used to it. But being in a long-term relationship doesn't spare you from all that day-to-day pain. It just banks it. Every day I'm with Terry, every day I'm not alone, a little misery gets put into a savings account, where interest is compounded hourly. The day Terry dies, all the pain I avoided when I was with him will be paid out all at once; I will suffer a windfall of misery. I imagine the pain would feel literally like being torn in two. Maybe that's what people mean when they talk about 'one flesh'?" 
 "A religious straight couple can have a big church wedding and kids and the wife can submit to the husband and they can stay married until death parts them -- provided that's what they both want when they marry, and that's what both of them continue to want throughout the marriage. Or a couple of straight secular humanists can get married in a tank full of dolphins and never have kids and treat each other as equals and split up if they decide their marriage isn't working out -- again, if that's what they both want. ...The problem for opponents of gay marriage isn't that gay people are trying to redefine marriage in some new, scary way, but that straight people have redefined marriage to a point that it no longer makes any logical sense to exclude same-sex couples." 
 "One of the most underrated virtues -- one I'd like to see virtuecrats promote to parents everywhere, and a virtue many homos have a problem with -- is constancy. Once you're a parent, you simply have to stop reinventing yourself while your children are young." 
 "When the demands and pressures of monogamy threaten the survival of a relationship, it's better to toss the baggage of monogamy overboard than to sacrifice the ship of the relationship itself. But I'm a conservative; what do I know?" 
 "When people have to pretend that they find no one else attractive, they have to suppress a large part of their sex drive, and that means suppressing (unconsciously, sure, but definitely) their sexual feelings about their partner." 
 "...our modern concept of love has at its foundation not only the expectation of monogamy, but the idea that where there's love, monogamy should be easy and joyful. This is, in a word, batshitcrazy." 
 "The American public's track record on civil rights issues is so uniformly terrible that anything a majority of Americans oppose automatically deserves the benefit of the doubt." 
 p. 177 - prime minister of Canada's speech 
 "'I don't believe in that kind of stuff [bad luck]. I believe in personal responsibility. Nothing can f**k up you guys but you guys. It's a beautiful space. Thousands of people have gotten married here, and not all of them have gotten divorced. Don't be such a p***y.'" 
 p. 212 - building to big event - nice narrative flow 
 "So long as the person who asks the question doesn't come across as crazy or self-destructive, an advice columnist's job is usually to divine what it is the reader wants to do and advise him or her to do just that. A great deal of the mail advice columnists get is from people seeking permission to do whatever it is they want to do or know they must, all of which could be filed under 'Mother, May I?'" 
 "...I was savoring two delicious, intoxicating sensations only parents ever experience: The scent and weight of our children. It wasn't until D.J. came along that I fully understood why parents with grown children ache for grandchildren. Once your children are grown, having grandchildren is the only way to experience those twin sensations again; the rich, humid scent of your child, the way your child's hand feels resting in your own, the trusting, contented weight of your child sitting on your lap while you read or watch TV." 
 "For children, promises are a deadly serious business because it's all they really have. They don't own anything, they don't control anything. The promises their parents make them are all they've got. And while no parent can keep every promise he makes -- no child can either -- your credibility as a parent rests on a promises-kept-to-promises-broken ranking that your child carries around in his head. Keep more than you break, and you're a parent in good standing. Break more than you keep and you're in trouble."