http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/09/21/be-mine

But he’s wrong: each holds the key to the other’s hidden, better self.

http://www.indiewire.com/2015/12/daily-reads-depression-marriage-and-youre-the-worst-2015-awards-season-respects-its-elders-and-more-126990/

A friend once told me that loving someone else is easy, that it's harder to learn to accept yourself as worthy of being loved. As someone with his own baggage (as we all have), this spoke deeply to me. Loving my wife was easy. Letting myself believe she loved me — even in the worst times — was hard. Once we got there, I could truly help her — not to get rid of the depression but to find her way through the mazes it keeps throwing up. Also, maybe this: Loving someone is seeing the best possible version of her superimposed over the actual person at all times, even when you hate her. I loved my wife for too long not necessarily for who she was, but for who I knew she could be. And maybe that was terribly unfair to her — okay, it was terribly unfair to her — but it was how I stayed and how we made it through the wilderness. Also: Being loved is fearing, on some level, that you are not worthy of that love. It is terrifying and vulnerable, and if you fell in love on the first day of college, it makes a great story so long as you can pretend part of it wasn't a horror movie. But being loved is good when you can trust that the other sees you, yes, but also sees the flaw in the photograph that superimposes your own best self over your rotten, stinking core.

http://www.vox.com/2015/12/15/10111656/depression-marriage http://www.vox.com/2015/3/17/8203507/adoption-children-experiences