When we finished a personality assessment at work, I asked my friend Dan if he would share the results with his wife.

"That would require me to go home and say, ‘Hi, honey. I just paid someone $400 to tell me what’s wrong with me,’" he said.

"What's wrong with that?" I asked.

"Well, based on that, and considering we’ve been married 23 years, she’d probably hand me a bill for $798,000."

I am a first-grade teacher and a new empty nester. One night I was trying out an art project: making a person with simple materials.

I took a coat hanger, attached a paper-plate face, put a shirt on the hanger and stuffed it. Then I sat it on the couch to see how it looked.

Later that evening my son walked in the door, home for a surprise visit. Taking one look at my coat-hanger friend sitting on the couch, he said, "Mom, it’s not that bad, is it?"

My grandmother told me how she ended up marrying Grandpa. She was in her 20's, and the man she was dating left for war. "We were in love," she recalled, "and wrote to each other every week. It was during that time that I discovered how wonderful your grandfather was."

"Did you marry Grandpa when he came home from the war?" I asked.

"Oh, I didn’t marry the man who wrote the letters. Your grandfather was the mailman."

As I picked out flowers for my mother, I noticed a man next to me juggling three boxes of candy and a large bouquet.

"What did you do wrong?" I said with a laugh.

He mumbled back, "I got married."