Even the business of marriage enters in.
Alva, as the inventor was known until his second marriage, entered school there and attended sporadically for five years.
And the tensions are not always overt until something as emotionally charged as marriage enters the picture.
It noted, for example, that a marriage "entered into for the purpose of procuring an alien's admission as an immigrant" to the United States is not valid for obtaining lawful status, even if it is valid under state law.
But the Republicans who were needed to get an immigration bill through the Senate had made it supremely clear that if any hint of gay marriage entered the legislation, they were going to take their toys and go home.
Less spectacularly, Plath records the petty deteriorations of a marriage entered into precipitately on both sides: Hughes is difficult, moody, reluctant to work for a living, disinclined to bathe and with a most unromantic penchant for nosepicking.
That November, with the Israelis on the brink of sending troops into Gaza, she flouted Israeli restrictions and, carrying a Dutch passport from a long-over marriage, entered Gaza by sea, via Cyprus, on a "Free Gaza" boat, along with some British Members of Parliament.
IIn her subtle and authoritative 1998 book The Imperfect Life of TS Eliot, Lyndall Gordon argues that the poet's second marriage, entered into when he was 68 years old, was a symbolically as well as personally satisfying final chapter: "For him, paradise followed purgatory with the same logic that purgatory had followed the hell of his first marriage".
Just a couple of decades later, however, Nelly Weeton's letters and diaries recorded suffering to rival Brontë's most gothic moments: a cruelly selfish brother, nasty employers with nightmarish homes and a disastrous marriage entered into, apparently, solely for the chance to bear a child of her own.
By 1830, the Heliades' two children, a son named Virgiliu and a daughter named Virgilia, died in infancy; subsequently, their marriage entered a long period of crisis, marked by Maria's frequent outbursts of jealousy.
