Carey On Marriage: Just Say Yes!

CNN.com just posted a lovely, and highly personal essay that Carey wrote on marriage. More specifically, it's about why marriage, with all of its chaos and complexity and state-sanctioned fuddy-duddiness, is — unbelievably, given how she got there — the sweet center of her life.

Here's a taste of her delicious writing:

What happened to me? What happened to the independent woman who, by the time she married for the first time at age 44, felt no particular need for a piece of paper from City Hall?

It is this. Day in and out, through lunch-packing and play date-making and bath-running, I am struck by a surprising truth: Though the raising of our children constitutes the central activity of our family, it is the love between Sprax and me that constitutes its ineffable core.

That sounds like a traditional religious point of view, but we are not religious. I've come to this understanding simply as an observer of my own heart and the family dance. It is, apparently, just an emotional fact of life — at least, of our life.

What baffles me is that I was perfectly able to have Liliana without being in a committed, loving relationship with Sprax, and our semi-family life was really quite happy in that formation. We all got along; Sprax would visit two or three times a week; Liliana got plenty of love and structure.

But since he and I reunited, our bond has become the family's invisible center, the axis of its spokes. I did not need a husband. But I need him.