So what if you held onto a high-school crush? Under what conditions would it never go away? Tobias Wolff reads a short story called "Kiss." (38 minutes)

In her forties, Jill Ciment wrote about the love of her life.

We turn now to one of the loneliest experiences a person can have: marriage. Ira listens to two people trying to break through what’s going wrong in their marriage, an excerpt from a new podcast in which real couples have a real therapy session with a real therapist, Esther Perel.

Kristen Finch was a speech therapist who sometimes worked with kids with Asperger Syndrome, symptoms of which include emotional distance, inflexibility and missing social cues. Kristin and her co-workers often joked that all their husbands had Asperger's, since the symptoms overlap with stereotypically male personality traits.

Host Ira Glass interviews author Alain de Botton about why so many of us choose the wrong spouses. Botton is the author of the new novel The Course of Love.

Linda Howard and Richard Bloom, in Boca Raton Florida, had been married years when she started flirting with another man.

Adam Felber explains how legalized gay marriage are ruining his marriage with his wife. (His comments first appeared on his blog felbers.net.) And Ira talks about legal strategies with Matt Staver, the head of the group defending traditional marriage in the California lawsuits; and with David Cruz, a law professor at the University of Southern California.

Scott Carrier's wife and mother-in-law insist that Scott's three-and-a-half year old daughter enroll in swimming classes.

In the wake of the tsunami and nuclear disaster at Fukushima, some people suspected that Japanese government officials have not been forthcoming about the actual level of danger from radiation. No one, however, is suggesting a cover-up as extreme as what happened in the Soviet Union after the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster.

Ira with Elizabeth Joseph, who is in a polygamous marriage with eight wives and one husband. She says polygamy is the ultimate feminist lifestyle.

It's possible to turn off your emotions and go on autopilot for brief periods with the people you love, and it's possible to shut them down completely. Writer Dani Shapiro reads from her memoir Slow Motion: A True Story.

A woman, who got in a car accident and was in a coma for 52 days, woke up having forgotten the last two years of her life — during which she'd divorced her husband. Producer Miki Meek spent a week with this family, in the midst of their difficult situation.  (14 minutes)

When it comes to love, coincidences tend to loom extra-large. Stephen Lee tells about the time his parents first met his fiance’s parents, and his future mother-in-law dropped a coincidence bomb.

When Emily Helfgot was ten, her dad was a sex therapist on a call-in radio show, which thoroughly embarrassed her. He also kept a stack of Playboy magazines in their house, in plain sight.

Sarah Vowell tells the story of Page Smith and Eloise Pickard Smith. They were married for over five decades, and died a day apart.

Ian Brown of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation on the normal struggle most people experience when they try to stay monogamous.

When Gene Cheek was ten years old, his mother began dating a black man. It was 1961, in North Carolina.

Writer Achy Obejas reads a piece of short fiction from her book, We Came All the Way from Cuba So You Could Dress Like This? (11 minutes)

The tendency toward self-reinvention is so deep in American culture that we have an entire industry, a self-help industry, telling us how to transform ourselves into someone new. And usually, we see this as a positive thing.

The small town dilemma.

In the early stages of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, there was a period when one of the questions raised by the whole affair had to do with monogamy. Around that time, Roy Romer, the Governor of Colorado and Chair of the Democratic Party, admitted that for 16 years he'd had a relationship with an aide that his wife and family knew about.

Host Ira Glass talks with This American Life producer Julie Snyder about a personal regime change that happened when she was a kid, after her parents got divorced and her stepdad came on the scene. She says that by the time her parents separated, literature on what to tell the children was everywhere, and the kids took it relatively well.

What divorce looks like from the dog's point of view. (5 minutes)This monologue was performed by Merrill Markoe and recorded at Un-Cabaret in Los Angeles.