She is the most interesting person I’ve ever met. She is beautiful. She is a strong, dedicated, principled, loving mother. She makes me laugh out loud a lot; her sense of humor is cat-quick, edgy, and wise to the world as it actually is. She is a considerate and generous friend. When we fight, she fights her corner fiercely, and then she is almost always the first one to say “sorry” and make up. She doesn’t like chocolate. She has an uncanny, encyclopedic knowledge of pop music lyrics from the 1950s until today. She is very messy.

OK, I’ll stop. But I could go on and on and on.

Last week, Johanna joined me for my first “Ask Me Anything” here on Substack, and what I thought would happen, happened: people delighted in meeting her, just as I did years ago.

I know I am a very lucky man. To fall in love is glorious; to stay in love is to live in the long, chorusing echo of that first astonishment. It does not always work out that way; this I know, too.

The old saw is true: Every marriage is a journey, an adventure, and from time to time a struggle. Like the Dude in The Big Lebowski says, “Strikes and gutters, ups and downs.” The thread of a couple’s years together unspools, sometimes fast (how is Michael 11 years old?), sometimes more slowly, but every passage brings its challenges and heartbreaks. You face them together. What abides in a marriage is the sense that all of it is natural, right as rain, precisely because you are facing it all together, as if destiny is real and nothing has been random in your life from the moment you met your love, and your heart told you, insistently: When you know, you know.

Our poem this week is one of my and Johanna’s favorites. It’s a love poem of a very mysterious and wondrous sort, written by the Polish poet Wisława Szymborska, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1996.

What if, Szymborska asks, your falling in love wasn’t accidental? What if, she wonders, the universe was, indeed, at work?

by Wisława Szymborska

They’re both convincedthat a sudden passion joined them.Such certainty is beautiful,but uncertainty is more beautiful still.

Since they’d never met before, they’re surethat there’d been nothing between them.But what’s the word from the streets, staircases, hallways—perhaps they’ve passed by each other a million times?

I want to ask themif they don’t remember—a moment face to facein some revolving door?perhaps a “sorry” muttered in a crowd?a curt “wrong number” caught in the receiver?—but I know the answer.No, they don’t remember.

They’d be amazed to hearthat Chance has been toying with themnow for years.

Not quite ready yetto become their Destiny,it pushed them close, drove them apart,it barred their path,stifling a laugh,and then leaped aside.

There were signs and signals,even if they couldn’t read them yet.Perhaps three years agoor just last Tuesdaya certain leaf flutteredfrom one shoulder to another?Something was dropped and then picked up.Who knows, maybe the ball that vanishedinto childhood’s thicket?

There were doorknobs and doorbellswhere one touch had covered anotherbeforehand.Suitcases checked and standing side by side.One night, perhaps, the same dream,grown hazy by morning.

Every beginningis only a sequel, after all,and the book of eventsis always open halfway through.