QUOTE : Some people stay married for lifetimes, decade after decade, great skelps of centuries together until they're almost in the same skin, growing into each other, shrinking to each other's sizes and shapes, speaking with one voice, clinging fast together, dying days or hours apart. Love doesn't come into it. Not the love of cartoon hearts and cards and cakes and movies and ads for things that no one needs; that grisly synthetic thing, that smiling dog. Love is just a word used to explain away the impossibility of this co-existence, the glorious achievement of being together in the same place, of being happy, and peaceful, and calm, and meeting up again at Heaven's gate, and walking hand in hand to the eternal light. Fairy stories. Couples in care homes curled together in fear of being alone, of being left in darkness and silence, listening for the step of a stranger, too afraid even to use the commode. This happens, people are left like this. It's better this way, to have smashed it all to bits while we're still to separate people.