My name is Ian Koss. What you're listening to is a series of songs and conversations

about every marriage in my family that ended in divorce, which is most of them.

My wife Kelsey and I met in college, the fall of freshman year. I was 19. She was 17. It sounds kind of cliche, as I recount it now, but we lived in the same dorm. I was upstairs. She was downstairs. We'd seen each other around in the halls or on the quad,

then one day we found ourselves talking face to face in the room of a mutual friend.

And that same friend would later officiate our wedding.

What's kind of interesting though, and the reason I share this now, is that those years when we were dating and inching closer to the idea of getting married are the same years when all the remaining marriages of my childhood finally ended.

These were the marriages of my aunts and uncles.

Marriages that I had known my entire life and completely took for granted.

They didn't seem perfect even from the outside, but they had lasted so long that in a way, I think their collapse shook me even more

than my own parents' divorce. I remember talking about it with Kelsey at the time, about how

impossible the idea of a lifetime commitment felt when it could still fall apart in year 20,

or year 30, or 35.

My own parents' marriage, of course, never made it that far.

But some of my aunts and uncles did.

I want to start with two of their stories,

my mother's oldest siblings,

because these are the marriages that lasted the longest, only to find that

after all that, they too were better off apart.

Forever is a long time.

Part 3.

Aunt Mia and Uncle Paul.

Feels like one of those last fleeting days of fall.

...