At least my thromdibulator works

I usually hate those talks that use comparisons to help you understand how blessed you are; the fact that other people's lives suck more than mine doesn't necessarily make me appreciate mine more. Plus, I think the suckiness is relative. Anyways, the other day was reading about a girl who had only been married for a few weeks when her husband was in a horrific car accident. He suffered brain damage that doctors aren't sure will ever heal. For the last year they've lived in his parents' basement and she has to do things like give him liquid feedings every 4 hours and change his diapers. He can't even talk to her or walk on his own. Or how would you like to be the poor girl from Provo whose parents are now in court on kidnapping charges because they forcibly drove her to Colorado the day before she was supposed to get married? That's a way to get off on the right foot with your inlaws. Or what about the poor wife of this guy in Pennsylvania who went nuts and started shooting little girls. Can you imagine someday getting a phone call from your spouse like "the police are here and I'm not coming home"? Or what about the poor man whose wife decides to cheat on him with her sixth-grade student? Or the guy whose wife decides to kidnap a baby because she couldn't have one? Yikes! Tolstoy has been famously quoted as saying "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way" (yeah, I'm paraphrasing). I think that quote sets up a false dichotomy, and one could assume that there are both unhappy and happy families in the world. Personally, I think that all families have the capacity for happiness or unhappiness. And all go through periods of both. Like Tolstoy pointed out, there is an infinite number of ways to be unhappy, many of them spectacularly bizarre. I'm grateful that (so far) any of the unhappiness in our marriage has not been the publicly weird kind. I know some people think that we're taking too big of a risk to get married. Unfortunately they haven't figured out yet that marriage, like life, is all about risk.