The glue of a happy marriage is shared time. My wife knows my mind, and I hers, not from deep, late-night conversations, but by the osmosis of being together year after year. As grains of sand form massive dunes, small forgettable revelations of our personalities, accumulating daily, have grown into a detailed knowledge that makes all other relationships seem shallow. We share life's major experiences with a wide circle of family and friends, but the whims of mood, fleeting thoughts verbalized, and countless incidents too trivial to bother repeating to anyone else are our private possession and form the filaments of our intimacy.
Love is not an exact fit. Ours was not the instant connection of soul mates, the I delightedly encountering its mirror image in another. We were not two puzzle pieces, for our edges bumped and gapped and overlapped. But our edges were fluid like the walls of two amoebas, and over time each spread and grew into the contour of the other.
Mr. Stanley’s Aphorisms and Paradoxes are outstanding examples of the long-form aphorism... inevitably studded with discrete individual aphorisms that could easily stand on their own. 
