The Outer Banks are beautiful in the slightly unnerving way of places that have killed a great many people.

The beaches are wide. The dunes hold their pale line against the Atlantic.

Pelicans pass overhead with the composure of creatures that have not spent much time reconsidering their marriages.

And beneath the water lie the ships.

These waters are called the Graveyard of the Atlantic.

Storms gather quickly. Currents collide. Sandbars move.

The coastline rearranges itself without consulting the charts.

A captain could possess a sound vessel, an experienced crew, and a respectable understanding of the sea—and still strike something that had not been there the last time anyone looked.

This is the first uncomfortable thing shipwrecks know about marriage:

The map can be accurate and still become useless.

Robert Heinlein spent much of his career designing improved arrangements for the human race.

Improved governments. Improved armies. Improved sexual customs. Improved marriages. Improved methods for occupying other planets, where presumably nobody would insist upon bringing the same tedious rules from Connecticut.

His novels considered communal families, plural marriages, nudism, sexual freedom, and the possibility that jealousy might be one more primitive habit intelligent people could learn to outgrow.

He was fascinated by relationships constructed deliberately rather than inherited wholesale from parents, priests, and county clerks.

Then, in 1948, he married Virginia Gerstenfeld.

They remained together for forty years.

It was not quite the domestic conclusion one might expect from the great speculative engineer of unconventional love. Heinlein imagined households populated by several unusually attractive adults sharing affection with astonishing administrative efficiency. What he created for himself was more concentrated: an intensely bonded marriage to one brilliant, disciplined, indispensable woman.

The man who kept redesigning marriage in his fiction appears to have found his greatest freedom inside a partnership of two.

Hermann Hesse became a patron saint of the 1960s without having the good manners to remain alive for most of them.

Young Americans like me discovered Siddhartha, Steppenwolf, and Demian and recognized a fellow traveler: suspicious of authority, hostile to bourgeois conformity, interested in Eastern spirituality, and convinced that the authentic self was hiding somewhere beyond the reach of parents, pastors, employers, and anyone wearing a necktie.

At the time, I was less interested in his marital history.

This was understandable.

The counterculture preferred its prophets wandering beside rivers, not negotiating childcare with an exhausted wife.

The same young readers like me who struggled with the notion that love should be free also tended to believe it should be easy—an arrangement history has not often managed to provide.

Hesse married three times. Some might suggest that Hesse displayed a degree of Avoidant Attachment.

The marriages were very different, but together they revealed something central about him.

He longed for intimacy, depended upon it, and repeatedly experienced its ordinary demands as an encroachment upon the sovereignty of the self.

He wanted love.

He was less enthusiastic about somebody being there.

Somewhere in America, a perfectly contented couple is worrying that they are not having enough sex.

They do not know who established the quota. No physician handed it to them.

It was not included with the marriage license.

Nevertheless, they have absorbed the idea that happy couples have sex frequently, unhappy couples have it rarely, and everybody else should be monitoring the situation like an underperforming retirement account.

The result is a peculiar form of intimate anxiety: two people may be reasonably satisfied until they begin wondering whether they are satisfied often enough.

The Wall Street Journal recently examined several popular beliefs about sex that do not sit comfortably with the available research.

One of the most persistent is the assumption that more sex necessarily produces a happier relationship.

It does not appear to be that simple.

Money enters a relationship wearing several disguises.

Sometimes it arrives as a paycheck. Sometimes it arrives as a house, an inheritance, a retirement account, or a suspiciously specific collection of vintage motorcycles described as “an investment.”

Money can represent freedom, safety, status, competence, loyalty, power—or the ability to order lunch without submitting a small grant proposal to one’s spouse.

When couples decide whether to combine their money or maintain separate accounts, the conversation is usually presented as practical:

Who pays the mortgage?

How much should each person contribute?

Can we afford the vacation?

Why did someone spend $780 at Costco when there are only two of us?

But money management is rarely just bookkeeping. It is an emotional constitution. Every couple quietly decides what belongs to me, what belongs to you, and what belongs to us.

Fascinating new research suggests that two forms of financial equality—equal income and equal wealth—may push couples in opposite directions.

When partners earn similar incomes, they may be more inclined to keep some money separate. But when they possess similar amounts of wealth, they may be more likely to combine their finances.

Apparently, equality does not have one financial personality. It has at least two checking accounts.

Leonard Bernstein did not enter a room so much as take possession of its weather.

He conducted orchestras with his entire body. He composed symphonies, ballets, operas and Broadway musicals.

He explained classical music to American children without making it feel like court-ordered enrichment.

He smoked, lectured, flirted, embraced, perspired, wept and generated more emotional electricity before lunch than most families produce in a fiscal quarter.

Felicia Montealegre was different.

She was elegant where Leonard was exuberant, contained where he was overflowing, and socially precise where he treated personal boundaries as an intriguing but unproven theory.

Together, they created one of the most glittering marriages of 20th-century cultural life.

Their homes were filled with actors, musicians, writers, activists and the sort of people who referred to Aaron Copland by his first name. They raised three children.

They made art together. They supported civil rights, protested the Vietnam War and entertained with such panache that even their political controversies appeared to have been catered.

They also constructed a family around a difficult truth.

There are worse things to find in your parents’ attic than their love letters.

Tax returns.

A NordicTrack.

Thirty-seven years of National Geographic preserved under the assumption that somebody, someday, will urgently require the April 1986 issue.

Melissa Newman found something considerably more dangerous.

Her parents’ desire.

Years after her father, Paul Newman, died in 2008, Melissa Newman discovered early letters her father had written to Joanne Woodward.

She later described encountering correspondence that could be sweet, romantic, and sufficiently intimate that not everything belonged in a book assembled by their daughter.

Which may be the strongest endorsement of a love letter ever offered.

We already knew Paul Newman was beautiful. There is an extensive photographic record.

What the letters reveal is more interesting.

He was besotted.

And decades later, after the beautiful young man was gone, the evidence remained.

The marriage had lasted fifty years before ending in the only way a lifelong marriage ultimately can.

One of them died.

And among the family papers, the young Paul Newman was still trying to tell Joanne Woodward something lovers have been trying to say since we first figured out how to write things down:

Of all the people in the world, I choose you.

There is a photograph of Johnny Cash and Vivian Liberto taken before the mythology hardened.

They are young, dark-haired, almost absurdly beautiful.

Johnny has not yet become the Man in Black. Vivian has not yet been demoted to “the first wife.”

June Carter is not yet standing at the center of an American redemption story, holding a fistful of amphetamines she has supposedly rescued from Johnny’s pocket.

Nobody in the photograph knows what the culture will eventually do with them.

Johnny and June will become one of popular music’s great love stories: the wounded outlaw and the woman who walked with him through the ring of fire.

Vivian, meanwhile, will be assigned the less glamorous role of the wife who could not understand him.

It is a marvelous arrangement for everyone except the woman who was actually married to him.

The Vivian–Johnny–June triangle was real. But it was never symmetrical.

And the more carefully we examine it, the less it resembles a simple story about finding one’s soulmate.

It becomes a story about celebrity, addiction, divided identity, marital betrayal, and the remarkable ability of a good soundtrack to make collateral damage disappear.

There are divorces that end at the courthouse, and divorces that require a sextant.

Stephen Stills’s marriage to French singer-songwriter Véronique Sanson belonged rather decisively to the second category.

After the marriage broke apart, Stills went sailing through the South Pacific.

Somewhere between California, Tahiti and the Marquesas, heartbreak acquired celestial navigation.

The result was “Southern Cross,” one of the loveliest songs ever written about discovering that changing your latitude does not immediately change your emotional address.

Stills met Sanson while touring France with Manassas. They married in 1973 and had a son, Christopher, the following year.

This was not simply a marriage between musicians.

It joined two substantial artistic identities from different worlds.

Stills belonged to the sprawling American republic of electric guitars, touring bands, Colorado ranches and spectacular male improvisation.

Sex Researchers, bless their hearts, have spent decades asking millions of folks one simple question.

"Do you masturbate?"

Which sounds perfectly reasonable.

Until you realize it's about as scientifically rigorous as asking,

"Do you exercise?"

One person counts chasing a toddler through Target.

Another trains for an Ironman.

A third considers aggressively opening a pickle jar "upper body."

Congratulations.

You haven't measured exercise.

You've measured everyone's private relationship with the English language.

Sex researchers have been wrestling with exactly this problem for generations.

She was writing about what happens when a civilization becomes afraid of surprise.

Some books become famous for what they say.

Others become famous for what people think they say.

For nearly twenty years, Esther Perel's Mating in Captivity has been shelved beside books promising better marriages, better communication, and better sex.

That was always too small.

Much too small.

Perel certainly wrote about erotic desire. She challenged the comforting assumption that emotional intimacy naturally produces erotic intimacy.

Instead, she argued that desire depends upon something love constantly threatens to erase:

mystery, distance, uncertainty, and the thrilling realization that another human being will never become completely knowable.

Most readers assumed the book was about bedrooms.

I think it was about civilization.

Because underneath every page lies a far more unsettling question.

What happens to a culture that slowly loses its tolerance for surprise?

Walk into any pharmacy and you'll find an entire civilization devoted to female self-improvement.

There are creams for the face, creams for the neck, creams for the hands, creams specifically formulated for the alarming possibility that your elbows may someday become visible.

There are serums that promise radiance, masks that promise renewal, and devices that appear capable of communicating with low-orbit satellites but are, in fact, designed to tighten your jawline.

The modern beauty industry is worth hundreds of billions of dollars.

I

t employs chemists, dermatologists, influencers, photographers, plastic surgeons, advertisers, and algorithms that somehow know you've glanced at your forehead exactly once.

The usual explanation is straightforward.

Women like looking beautiful.

Many do.

There is nothing remotely irrational about wanting to feel attractive, expressive, stylish, or confident.

Human beings have decorated themselves for thousands of years. Ancient Egyptians wore eye makeup. Romans experimented with cosmetics.

Victorian women suffered through corsets that made breathing feel slightly optional. Beauty has always been part of culture.