Ira Glass

Okay, here's the speech.

Okay, so that is obviously just the beginning of that speech.

This is just a sample of the bonus episode that we made for our life partners.

If you want to hear the whole thing and support our show, go to thisamericanlife.org slash lifepartners.

That'll unlock the full bonus episode, and then you get dozens more.

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We do not wish to be in the business of serving addicted gamblers.

I have 75,000 people that work with me who go home to their families and kids like I do.

None of them want to go home thinking that they've just helped an addicted gambler do further harm to themselves or their families.

So our objective is to try to identify addicted gamblers as best we can and encourage them to seek treatment and help.

And to the degree they're willing to identify themselves as addicted or troubled gamblers, not serve them in any fashion, not market to them, not lend them money, and where the law allows, not permit them in the casino.

It was a while ago, the spring of 2009, that a writer named Jessica Pressler noticed a small cultural shift going on in the waiting pages of the New York Times, the section that the paper calls the Vow section.

The shift, it happened at a time when, I don't know, for whatever reason, there was a rush of news stories about famous and powerful people cheating on their partners.

South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford publicly confessed that his soulmate was a woman in Argentina who was not his wife.

Nevada Senator John Inson admitted paying $96,000 in cash to his former mistress and her husband.

Reality TV stars John and Kate had just split after reports that he'd had an affair.

And so it was in the middle of all that that Jessica Pressler noticed in the wedding pages of the New York Times that there were couples getting married who cheerfully told the newspaper as part of their meet-cute story

that the way they got together was that one of them cheated on a spouse or a longtime partner.

Jessica Pressler wrote up her discovery on the New York Magazine blog, Daily Intel.

She noted that there was a kind of code language in all these wedding articles.