This is the case in my marriage, but not in my parents’. They are musicians, artists, perform together and/or take active stakes in each other’s careers. They weren’t sexual as I was growing up (I’m not giving intimate details here) but they had this whole other source of cohesion. A much greater one indeed — I have fond sexual memories but my parents have dozens of live albums at cool venues.

Then, maybe all of this anomie is a disease of affluence. The other thing that united my parents was that, well, they had to fight for survival and for the means if giving us kids a decent childhood experience. Maybe that alone works like continuous shared trauma, us-two-against-the-world.