An illustrator’s guide to making your marriage last a lifetime.

As part of everything else I’m doing, I am hauling marriage back from the abyss. I am very much a champion of the family, but your marriage is what makes your family possible – and someday your children will move away. Your marriage is by far the most important interpersonal relationship in your life. Working hard to make it great will make your lives together perfect.

My friend David Brodie linked to some wonderfully charming illustrations of the everyday miracle of a happy marriage. The image to the left is but one thrilling example: A man has four appendages – two hands, his chin and his tumescent homunculus – with which he can commit himself to hugging his wife, and this simple sketch shows a very-happily married man deploying each one of them to its very best advantage – and to his wife’s palpable delight. That picture is sexy beyond anything – to me, at least – because I can feel that hug from the inside. I like to feel precisely that way several times a day.

And that’s the point: The everyday miracle of a happy marriage consists of the repeated expressions of just that kind of loving, lustful commitment – the poetry of authentic affection. It doesn’t matter who does what chore. What matters is why each of you is doing what you’re doing. A man worth being wed is never not a man. A woman worth marrying is never not a woman. But if their marriage is working, they are always an “us” together – us before anything, us against the world. When they see their marriage that way, they can see it that way forever.

The illustrator is Puuung. Click the link to see many more of her images of loving marriage. Showy speeches and grand gestures are the search-and-rescue missions of a marriage that is failing. Small loving gestures are the stuff of a marriage that will endure forever. These charming sketches will show you what marriage looks like when you’re getting it right.