{"id":1074,"date":"2016-06-21T11:11:52","date_gmt":"2016-06-21T16:11:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.paulstanley.org\/blog\/?p=1074"},"modified":"2016-06-21T11:11:52","modified_gmt":"2016-06-21T16:11:52","slug":"chapter-2-the-perfect-couple","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.paulstanley.org\/blog\/2016\/06\/21\/chapter-2-the-perfect-couple\/","title":{"rendered":"Chapter 2 &#8211; The Perfect Couple"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Below are excerpts from my upcoming book, <em>The Extortion of Forgiveness<\/em>:<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;August twenty-second of 1998 was a perfect day for a perfect couple. I stood with my closest family and friends, about to make Kristi my wife\u2014not far from the cramped, campaign office in &#8220;Old Germantown&#8221; where we&#8217;d first met. We were about to exchange vows\u2014in sickness and in health\u2014for better or for worse. I knew what better meant, but worse \u2013 that I could not imagine. Not that day. Yet the vows we made before God ended up making us face the ultimate test, when \u201cworse\u201d would be defined years later.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Where exactly did our ball of yarn &#8211; our marriage begin to unwind? That\u2019s hard to say, but my lack of patience and inflated expectations of how our life should have been scarred and wounded both of us. Instead of light scratches, our injuries turned into deeper wounds, the kind that are hard to heal and easy to reopen and inflict greater damage each time. Maybe it was my constant pursuit to build a perfect life on an imperfect foundation, with imperfect materials, all handled by imperfect people.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Below are excerpts from my upcoming book, The Extortion of Forgiveness: &#8220;August twenty-second of 1998 was a perfect day for a perfect couple. I stood with my closest family and friends, about to make Kristi my wife\u2014not far from the cramped, campaign office in &#8220;Old Germantown&#8221; where we&#8217;d first met. We were about to exchange vows\u2014in sickness and in health\u2014for better or for worse. I knew what better meant, but worse \u2013 that I could not imagine. Not that day. Yet the vows we made before God ended up making us face the ultimate test, when \u201cworse\u201d would be defined years later.&#8221; &nbsp; &#8220;Where exactly did our ball of yarn &#8211; our marriage begin to unwind? That\u2019s hard to say, but my lack of patience and inflated expectations of how our life should have been scarred and wounded both of us. Instead of light scratches, our injuries turned into deeper wounds, the kind that are hard to heal and easy to reopen and inflict greater damage each time. Maybe it was my constant pursuit to build a perfect life on an imperfect foundation, with imperfect materials, all handled by imperfect people.&#8221; &nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[2],"tags":[28,243,524,327,523,450],"class_list":["post-1074","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-by-paul","tag-author","tag-kristi-stanley","tag-kristi-stanley-brown","tag-paul-stanley","tag-the-extortion-of-foregiveness","tag-writer"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v26.9 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Chapter 2 - The Perfect Couple - Paul Stanley<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.paulstanley.org\/blog\/2016\/06\/21\/chapter-2-the-perfect-couple\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Chapter 2 - The Perfect Couple - Paul Stanley\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Below are excerpts from my upcoming book, The Extortion of Forgiveness: &#8220;August twenty-second of 1998 was a perfect day for a perfect couple. 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