Why Marriage Requires Amnesia

Marriage is a solution to several problems that creates infinite additional problems. Marriage can cure your loneliness or exacerbate it. Marriage can make you feel a lot stronger than you really are and a lot weaker than you really are. Marriage can feel like a soothing meditation retreat or a dirty tryst or a very…

‘The Nutcracker’ and the Sex Tape

I was working backstage at a production of “The Nutcracker” that was being performed at the Tacoma, Wash., school where my daughter attends kindergarten. Since the company was using the school’s theater, they extended an invitation to the kindergarten ballet class to play Mother Ginger’s children. What an opportunity; I was stoked. But now that…

Finding Romance in the Ups and Downs

Since then, the couple have been busy either planning adventures or recuperating from them. In 2016, they climbed Cho Oyu, a 26,864-foot peak on the border of Nepal and Tibet, then skied down. And in November 2020, six months after Mr. Ballinger proposed, they drove their beat-up Ford Econoline van named Sketchy Betty to Yosemite…

The First Spark Flew in the Fifth Grade

When Daniel Khaytman and Angela Ratmansky were both 8-years-old, their parents moved into houses on the same Miami street. A friendship almost immediately followed when the two, who also both come from Russian families, began attending the same elementary school and riding the same bus. “Daniel was always the constant friend to me,” Ms. Ratmansky…