I was too young to know how to love her.

I had no idea how to deal with relationship problems, so I chose not to deal with them at all.

None of the young women who wanted her position knew what her position was.

Never had it occurred to Widdowson that a wife remains an individual, with rights and obligations independent of their wifely condition.

Up until then I had lived for myself or at least inside of myself. I had gotten married without imagining that my wife was anything more than a comrade, without realizing precisely that because of our union my life could be changed.

i had no idea what i wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out.

If, as I say, I did not love my betrothed, at any rate, I had never loved any other woman.

I had no idea how to live, but I didn’t want to die.

I guess I have always been deeply terrified to really be someone's wife since I know from life one cannot love another, ever, really.

I’m not like the rest of you; I never made any plans about what I’d do when I grew up; I never thought of being married, as you did. I couldn’t seem to imagine myself anything but stupid little Beth, trotting about at home, of no use anywhere but there. I never wanted to go away, and the hard part now is leaving you all. I’m not afraid, but it seems as if I should be homesick for you even in heaven.

I'll never know the right answer for sex and marriage, sense and mirage.

Sex is something I really don't understand too hot. You never know where the hell you are... Sex is something I just don't understand. I swear to God.

And now, while he didn't particularly think any of these stories was a bit truer, he did realize that he didn't really know his wife at all; and that in fact the entire conception of knowing another person — of trust, of closeness, of marriage itself — while not exactly a lie since it existed <i>someplace</i> if only as an idea (in his parents' life, at least marginally) was still completely out-of-date, defunct, was something typifying another era, now unfortunately gone. Meeting a girl, falling in love, marrying her, moving to Connecticut, buying a fucking house, starting a life with her and thinking you really knew anything about her — the last part was a complete fiction, which made all the rest a joke.

Unacquainted with grief, I knew not how to appraise my bereavement; I could not rightly estimate the strength of the stroke.