The marriage test

I recently read Ann Patchett's wonderful collection of essays, This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage (2013). In the title essay, Patchett devotes as much attention to all the failed marriages in her family, including her own first marriage, as she does to her second marriage, which is the "happy" one. While at a writer's retreat, Patchett received some useful advice on how to figure out whether her first marriage was worth saving:

Standing waist deep in the swimming pool at Yaddo, I received a gift—it was the first decent piece of instruction about marriage I had ever been given in my twenty-five years of life. “Does your husband make you a better person?” Edra asked. … “Are you smarter, kinder, more generous, more compassionate, a better writer?” she said, running down her list. “Does he make you better?” 

“That’s not the question,” I said. “It’s so much more complicated than that.”

“It’s not more complicated than that,” she said. “That’s all there is. Does he make you better and do you make him better?”

This rings true to me as a passable test of a worthwhile marriage, all the more so because it mirrors a scene in one of my favorite sappy movies, The Family Man. In the movie, Jack (Nicolas Cage) is a high-powered Wall Street investment banker living life in the fast lane. Around the holidays, an angel gives Jack a glimpse of what his life would have been like if he had married his college sweetheart, Kate (Téa Leoni). It takes a while, but Jack finally figures out that his king-of-capitalism days couldn't hold a candle to his suburban, just-scraping-by life with Kate. But just when the light bulb goes off, Jack is returned to his former life. In the concluding scene of the movie, Jack catches Kate at the airport, where she is about to board a plane and fly off to her new job in Paris (of course), and tries to convince her to wait and have a cup of coffee with him. In explaining what their life together could be like, based on what the angel had shown him, Jack tells Kate that, "You're a better person than I am, and it made me a better person to be around you." As in Patchett's anecdote, that's what it takes to prove you work together: you make each other better people.

I applied this test to my marriage and Mom passed with flying colors; she makes me smarter, kinder, more generous, more compassionate, better all around. I'm not convinced I do the same for her, but Mom assures me that's the case, so I guess that's all that matters.

Of course, psychologists have identified a much simpler test, which requires a lot less self-reflection. Daniel Kahneman explains it like this: "[M]arital stability is well predicted by a [simple] formula: frequency of lovemaking minus frequency of quarrels. You don’t want your result to be a negative number." (Thinking, Fast and Slow [2011].) I won't gross you out by telling you how Mom and I are doing by that measure.

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I always have a bag or two of Trader Joe's Mango Chunks in the freezer; they're an essential ingredient in my daily breakfast smoothies. So I was intrigued when I saw this recipe for a no-churn frozen dessert using frozen mango chunks by Alice Medrich, who is one of my favorite cookbook authors. And it does not disappoint, unless you're not a big mango fan.

No-Churn Mango-Lime Sherbet/Sorbet/Frozen Yogurt

Adapted from Alice Medrich, from Food52

If you’re feeling adventurous, Medrich also has variations for Mango Basil Sherbet and Mango Jalapeno Sherbet.

255 grams (9 ounces) frozen mango chunks
160 grams (~⅔ cup) skim, low-fat, or whole milk (for sherbet), water (for sorbet), or plain yogurt (for frozen yogurt)
75 grams (6 tablespoons) granulated sugar
zest and 1½ tablespoons juice from a fresh lime
a pinch of fine sea salt

    1. Place all of the ingredients in the workbowl of a food processor fitted with the metal blade. Pulse and process until everything is completely blended and the texture of soft-serve ice cream. Taste; pulse in more sugar, lime juice, or salt as needed.
    2. Scrape the mixture into a container that will hold 2 or more cups. Freeze until firm enough to scoop. This recipe does not include any alcohol and/or corn syrup to keep the end product soft, so it will freeze solid after a few hours. If necessary, let it soften in the fridge or on the counter before scooping. Makes about 1 pint.

Mango Ice Cream
Stir 37 grams (3 tablespoons) of granulated sugar and ½ teaspoon pure vanilla extract into ½ cup (116 grams) heavy cream. Let the mixture stand until the sugar is dissolved, about 2–3 minutes. Use the cream mixture in place of the milk and sugar in the main recipe. Omit the lime zest, but not the juice.