How to Stay Married: The Most Insane Love Story Ever Told (2023)

Harrison Scott Key

Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster

320 pages

$19.99

I laughed. I cried. Then I thrust the book at my husband and told him to read it. Harrison Scott Key’s book “How to Stay Married” reads like a Shakespearian tragedy and comedy, a tramedy which, when I say it out loud, holds the truth of this book: a “trauma-dy” indeed. It’s a story of trauma, past and present, a marriage gone off the rails with two wounded partners who endure betrayal, pain, mercy, and grace. It’s a story about a marriage on life support. Then the marriage dies. Then it’s a story of untidy resurrection. 

This book was the highlight of my summer reading list. Not unlike a python consuming a deer, I finished it in one big gulp and then digested it for days, weeks after. Its impacts stayed with me, as someone married, a Christ follower, a couple’s therapist, a friend to those in split marriages, and a fellow sojourner in this life of pain and beauty. Warning to the faint-hearted reader, this book is not a fairy tale.

Key painfully and honestly slits open the underbelly of marriage and splays out the decaying relationship for his readers, despite the stigma: “No one really talks about marriage struggles. Not Christians. Not the real struggles. Sex, pain, anger, loneliness. Not a word. You’d think they would. Christians love to talk about sin and struggle, but we look past the many nightmares of marriage like an army of the blind.”  Bravely, his writing makes explicit what often isn’t: the insanity of staying married and the befuddled mystery and pain of it: “If you want to stay married, the first thing you’re going to need is to be insane. Because staying married is insane.”

Key does not dissect his marriage as a detached, white-coated observer. Rather, he fillets it with what he calls his greatest virtue, “radical transparency.”  We are given an intimate, behind-the-scenes look at the muck and horror typically reserved for those in the relationship or their therapist. This intimacy, their marriage story, is a gift, served with equal sides of gravitas and comedic wit: “Here, take our memories, take our stories. Let it do in you what stories do.”  Like a gift that keeps giving, he challenges readers throughout to check assumptions and take a reflexive look at our own marriages: “Don’t assume your partner is cheating. Assume your partner will, eventually. Assume you will, too.”  His story, to our fortune, shows the courageous way he heaves himself into the ring to wrestle with unwieldy themes that keep hammering him: justice, grace, mercy, redemption, community. 

My favorite elements of this book (oh, there were many):

1. The way Key holds readers in uncertainty that parallels his own marriage’s uncertainty and messy evolving nature. Will they stay together? How? Is the marriage salvageable? What about their kids? (Spoiler alert: the kids are not ok); 2. His descriptions of community and church; and 3. His humor (dark but so funny).

While his book’s title gives the ending away, “How to Stay Married…” (ok, they stay together), it is the unknown of how to do so that lingers. Hint – it’s not linear and it’s not neat. He doesn’t write about their wedding until the last quarter of the book and doesn’t follow a chronological narrative arc. It unfolds, unlike so many of today’s formulaic “top ten tips” books on marriages putting flesh and blood on the difficulty of marriage. Yet, departing from cultural norms, namely the worship of individualism and the high incidence of divorce, Key leaves us with the truth of what a radical institution marriage is and its life-altering importance. 

Key writes of needing a village and urges readers to seek community when hurting. When a marriage takes its final shaky breaths, you can’t go it alone. While Key’s critiques of Christianity are candid, his descriptions of how the unconventional church shows up for him is a testimony to the body of Christ: “It was the kind of church where you could show your ugly heart to everybody, and they just loved you harder and handed you a beer… A church with broken windows is just what we needed: the community that would makes us whole again and pull us through what happened, and what was yet to come.”  Their experiences with church, both helpful and harmful, spurred my own questions: How do we care for those in our church going through marital difficulties? How do we show up as a community?

Perhaps the book’s biggest surprise was the chapter written by Key’s wife, Lauren. Spoiler alert #2: she writes from her own perspective, which, from a couple therapist’s vantage, felt exactly right. Too many stories about marriage are written from one perspective and her brave contribution models exactly what Key wants his readers to know: there are two toe-steppers in this dance (also evidenced by the chapter that lists his faults from A-Z). In fact, marriage therapists will tell you that ownership of your part of the problem is the ultimate lynchpin to whether therapy will be successful or not. 

A minor critique is that his last chapter could have been condensed into half. I recognize his last chapter was the culmination of all he has learned but he does such a good job of threading these insights throughout his book, parts of the last chapter felt repetitive.

There’s no easy or prescribed roadmap to staying married, but Key gives well-earned (literally from his travels to hell and back) recommendations: get help, unbury the deadness in your past, find wise people who believe in marriage, and go to therapy. He ends with: “All I really know is this: the most powerful force in the universe is love and the strangest is forgiveness.” The way his book holds these strange and powerful forces, swims against our cultural climate, and makes one laugh loudly are well worth the read and its impact.