I've seen where an affair lands you; it lands you back in a relationship, is where. A relationship strewn with the inevitable tedium, crankiness, and wanderlust that accompanies two people living together, no matter how much they love each other. You don't need to have fundamental compatibility issues; those weeds can sproud from trivial ones. It's temptation waiting to strike, the lie that I would be much happier with someone different. Something new. It promises that somewhere out there is a man who loves Mediterranean light and artisanal cuisine as much as I do, and I owe it to myself to find him and spend the rest of our lives under the Tuscan sun, eating wood-fired pizza alfresco. But different and new is just the same old if you keep doing it over and over.

Living with boys has changed the way I see men. I used to love them in spite of themselves. I've come to love them because of themselves. Collectively, they can be assholes. But so can women, given the same chance. Anyone who thinks estrogen is the antidote for brutality has neither paid much attention to history nor taken an eighth grade girls' gym class. Men may have sins against female kind to atone for, but being born male is not one of them.

If you can hang in there through minor and major differences of opinion, through each other's big and little screwups, year after year, you come to understand that the person you married is really, terribly flawed. There isn't a human being you can hang out with, day in and day out, for over a decade and not come to the same inescapable realization.

The real wonder is that anyone stays together, as impossible to live with and as broken as we all are.