I watched a lot of soap operas, when I was growing up, and a lot of those great serialized soap dramas.

Growing up, I remember watching 'Little House on the Prairie' and 'L.A. Law' and being so obsessed with it.

I talk all the time about how much I read growing up and how much I love Stephen King and how he impacted my work from a genre perspective, but Pat Conroy wrote some of the most magnificent stories about characters who had to deal with dysfunctional families and try to find a place of honor in their own world and the pain of loss.

Because I was such a student of pop culture growing up, I love that on the list of things that I got to work on in my first years out of college were 'Scream' and 'Dawson's Creek' and, ultimately now, 'The Vampire Diaries,' which generations below me grew up on and can quote. I love that. I think that is the coolest thing in the world.

But whether a couple is a man and a woman has everything to do with the meaning of marriage.

All of the troubles that some people have in life is that which they married into.

Women tend to be preservers of the social structure, of marriage. They don't want to upset their husbands or their significant others. They don't want to hurt people.

If I had no family, my wife and I would lead a much more romantic and nomadic existence.