Wedding Toasts I'll Never Give

by Ada Calhoun

  Wedding

  Toasts

  I’ll Never Give

  ADA CALHOUN

  W. W. Norton & Company

  Independent Publishers Since 1923

  New York | London

  For Neal, of course

  Contents

  INTRODUCTION: “Do You Know Why You’re Here?”

  TOAST 1: Paying for Each Other’s Mistakes

  TOAST 2: The Boring Parts

  TOAST 3: Containing Multitudes

  TOAST 4: The Truth About Soul Mates

  TOAST 5: Fighting in Rental Cars

  TOAST 6: Other People, Other Cities

  TOAST 7: “Love Is Strong as Death”

  EPILOGUE: One Toast I Would Actually Give

  APPENDIX: Toward a More Realistic Reception Playlist

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Marriage is a relationship far more engrossing than we want it to be. It always turns out to be more than we bargained for. It is disturbingly intense, disruptively involving, and that is exactly the way it was designed to be. It is supposed to be more, almost, than we can handle.

  —Mike Mason,

  The Mystery of Marriage, 1985

  Introduction

  “Do You Know Why You’re Here?”

  Like everything which is not the involuntary result of fleeting emotion but the creation of time and will, any marriage, happy or unhappy, is infinitely more interesting and significant than any romance, however passionate.

  —W. H. Auden, “Marriage,” 1970

  I NEVER GIVE TOASTS at weddings. I prefer to sit quietly under the twinkling lights, enjoying other people’s efforts. Some are perfect mini-sermons—but better, because at the end there’s champagne. Some go rattling off the rails, and that’s fun, too. At a wedding I attended recently, one groomsman paused in the middle of his toast and—unable to remember the rest of what he meant to say—just sat down.

  At my own wedding, twelve years ago, my Texan father-in-law delivered a biblical homily, my New York father a witty speech, a midwestern aunt a eulogy for a late family member, and my best friend, who lives in D.C., a gentle roast. All lovely. Then an old friend of my husband’s leapt up and surprised us with a poem he’d written about taxis. Fearing that this might devolve into an open-mike situation, I then thanked everyone and announced that it was time to eat.

  Finding something new or helpful to say about marriage feels borderline impossible. “It’s difficult to think about marriage,” says a friend married for thirty years. “It’s like trying to describe your own face.” And so we offer clichéd advice like the dubious Ephesians paraphrase “Don’t go to bed angry.” (Personally, I have avoided many fights by going to bed angry and waking up to realize that I’d just been tired.)

  Now in the second decade of my second marriage,* I can’t look newlyweds in the eye and promise they’ll never regret marrying. (Well, not sober. Maybe this is why weddings correlate with binge drinking.) I adore my husband and plan to be with him forever. I also want to run screaming from the house because the person I promised to love all the days of my life insists on falling asleep to Frasier reruns.

  “The first twenty years are the hardest,” an older woman once told me. At the time I thought she was joking. She was not.

  And this is why I don’t give wedding toasts—because I’d probably end up saying that even good marriages sometimes involve flinging a remote control at the wall.

  During a recent rough patch, my husband, Neal, and I took a road trip to Albany to visit the priest who married us, Father Paul J. Hartt. We stationed our nine-year-old son in the next room with a Lego set and sat on a couch before the man who, more than a decade earlier, had bound us together until death. We asked him to remind us, again, why that had been a good idea.

  Father Hartt told us that the question Do you know why you’re here? is vital to marriage, and is even expressed in the Christian wedding ceremony. He pointed to the Declaration of Consent from the Book of Common Prayer. That’s the section early in “The Celebration and Blessing of a Marriage” that sounds like the vows but isn’t. (It includes the phrase “Will you have this man to be your husband?”)

  “It’s a historical holdover, but it’s worth pondering whether there might be something to it today,” said Hartt. He explained the Declaration’s original purpose via a hypothetical:

  Like, Neal’s dad and your dad decide one day that it’d be a really good thing if you two got married, because it would be good for business. Never mind that Neal’s mentally impaired and you’re fourteen. So your dad one morning says, “Put a dress on. We’re going to the fair.” And next thing you know, you’re in a church getting married. So this Declaration part was supposed to be asking you, “Do you know why you’re here?” If you didn’t, the church was supposed to provide refuge. Some burly deacon would sweep you away into the sacristy while we dealt with your fathers.

  But I honestly believe that there are a lot of weddings over which I preside where I am not altogether sure the people know why they’re there. They’re certainly of age. They’re certainly not imbeciles. But even after the couple has spent a lot of time together, I’m not sure they know. The problem today is that all the focus seems to be on How do you get married? No one’s spending any time on How do you stay married? And I think that’s a cultural crisis, actually.

  “It’s often tough to get couples grappling with any level of theological significance of what they’re doing,” said Father Don Waring, who performs fifteen weddings a year at Grace Church in Manhattan. “Most really don’t seem to be able to articulate what’s going to be different the day after versus the day before. This concept of making a lifelong commitment to each other, they sort of back into it. Their lives are already wound up together. . . . What’s lost is How is our life going to be different after we go through this? I wonder if that loss of ‘before versus after’ is what leads to the dissolution of some marriages. There’s not a grasping of the fact that you’re doing something existential and theologically significant.”

  In the throes of romantic love, we often neglect to ponder the meaning of marriage beyond a vague (and mistaken) expectation that it will make us happy. “I’m afraid I think this rage for happiness rather vulgar,” says one of the more sensible characters in George Bernard Shaw’s play Getting Married.

  “On one hand, I have a lot of compassion for couples early on,” said Rabbi David Adelson. “How could they know? Like all of the challenging and worthwhile undertakings that we engage in in our lives, there’s no way to know what it’s going to be like. On the other hand, I think there are tons of unrealistic expectations. It’s part of my task to introduce realistic ones: Marriage is a microcosm of life. It’s natural to seek stability, stasis, guarantees. We want things to remain okay. But that’s never the truth in any aspect of our lives.”

  The main problem with marriage may be that it’s not better than the rest of life. Suffering occurs in marriage because we think it will be different—purer, deeper, gentler—than other relationships. We expect our partners and ourselves to be better—more patient, more faithful, more generous—than we are. We believe ourselves exceptional, first in the depth of our passion and then in the breadth of our failure. Some marriages really are exceptional failures—too cruel, toxic, or sad to continue. Emotional and physical abuse are clear-cut grounds for divorce. But even in marriages without these profound problems, torment is common.

  “In pastoral counseling around marriages,” said Father Hartt, “I’ve consistently found that people think what they’re experiencing is a sign of their uniquely defective interpersonal drama. One thing about marriages is that they’re am
azingly similar.”

  I’VE ALWAYS FOUND that parties are better on rainy nights. I think it’s because bad weather weeds out the ambivalent, the uncommitted. To leave the house in a storm, you must do the work of finding an umbrella or preparing yourself for a soaking. This requires faith that leaving your dry house will pay off, that you will travel through the cold, dark, unwelcoming night and end up somewhere better than where you left. People who only ever go to parties on sunny days miss the joy of reaching a cozy room during a downpour. People who don’t marry miss both the pelting hardships of marriage and its warm rewards.

  Whether religious or secular, a wedding ceremony casts a spell over the couple, renders them from that instant on apart, a bit, from the rest of the world. Marriage isn’t an achievement, the culmination of a love affair, but, rather, the announcement of an intention to live in a new way.

  Rabbi Lawrence A. Hoffman says the wedding ceremony ritualizes our grandest hopes for ourselves and for those we love: “The reason that people want to get married, I think, though they may not know it, is they have a sense that marriage means more than just the benefits of life they have already—like sharing an apartment and living together, being sexual partners and that sort of thing. They get to the point where they suspect there is more to life than that; they’re looking for ‘the more,’ and that’s what weddings ritualize.”

  The day after a wedding, even if nothing but the jewelry appears different—you’re keeping your names, you already shared a home, a bed, friends—something important has changed. From then on, every day you stay, you keep that vow.

  By staying married, we give something to ourselves and to others: hope. Hope that in steadfastly loving someone, we ourselves, for all our faults, will be loved; that the broken world will be made whole. To hitch your rickety wagon to the flickering star of another fallible human being—what an insane thing to do. What a burden, and what a gift.

  Such are the thoughts I keep to myself, sitting in rented folding chairs, watching friends begin their married lives. To the newlyweds, I say congratulations, and I mean it sincerely. To say out loud the rest of what I’m thinking would be bad manners. And so I’ll say it here instead.

  * In my early twenties, I was married, literally on my lunch hour, to my Canadian boyfriend. We were divorced before we could legally rent a car.

  TOAST 1

  Paying for Each Other’s Mistakes

  If a man could receive the advantages of marriage without the duty of standing day and night at a woman’s side in all sorts of wind and weather, then nobody would hesitate to get married.

  —Theodor Gottlieb von Hippel, On Marriage, 1774

  WHILE AWAY AT A CONFERENCE in Minneapolis, I was awakened at dawn by a call from Neal in our New York apartment. Our son, Oliver, then eight, had just roused him with the suspicion that they might not make their seven-thirty a.m. flight to join me because it was now seven-forty and they were still at home.

  The original plan had us all traveling to Minneapolis together. I would attend my conference. Neal, a musician, would do a show at a cool club. Oliver would get hotel pool time. A triple win. Beyoncé and Jay Z had just completed their “On the Run” tour, baby Blue Ivy in tow. Neal and I joked about how this would be our own version, only we would be playing to crowds of dozens rather than thousands, and instead of occupying five-star hotels, we would be staying three in a room at the downtown Super 8.

  Then Neal was offered a good gig in New York for the same day we were set to leave—so he called to change his and Oliver’s tickets. Changing them, he learned, was going to cost more than buying a new pair of one-way tickets out. So he did that instead, planning to use their original return tickets, not realizing that if you don’t use the first leg, they cancel the second. That meant buying new, last-minute return tickets at a cost somewhere between “Ugh” and “Oh dear God, what have you done?”

  Money has served as a perennial source of stress in our marriage. I grew up middle-class among liberal bohemians in downtown Manhattan. He grew up working-class in a conservative Pentecostal community in the Piney Woods of East Texas. We both freelance, and so our income varies widely from month to month. He feels rich now, while without a financial cushion (more years than not, we haven’t had one at all), I walk around under a cloud of low-level anxiety, positive that we are one missed payment away from destitution.

  My trick for not letting this poison our relationship as much as it could requires engaging in what I call “marriage math”—an advanced-placement calculus designed to quash resentment.

  Sample Problem: The new tickets cost $776. Well, Neal quit smoking in 2006. Minus a relapse in 2009, that’s still nine years of saving $8 a day at least, or $26,280. When Oliver was a baby and I was working full-time, we ordered takeout constantly—maybe $8,320 a year for ages 0–3. Then Neal started cooking, and so we’ve saved most of that every year since—to the tune, over time, of probably about $30,000. He has only one pair of shoes at a time, which saves $400 a year, so over the 15 years we’ve been together, that equals $6,000. And $62,280 minus those tickets . . . he’s still up more than $61K. I owe him a Cadillac.

  But now my family had missed the first leg of the new itinerary, outstripping even my practiced algorithms. I imagined we would have to buy the tickets a third time, and felt the familiar money panic, coupled with rage that his errors were costing me. I’d been taking my hotel-room coffee to go to save a couple of dollars each morning. And for what? Delta owned us now, anyway.

  On hold with the airline, Neal was entertaining himself by texting me sexy emojis.

  Eggplant. Eggplant. Eggplant.

  “Focus,” I replied, with an emoji of an airplane.

  Neal sent me an emoji of a flan.

  We’ve been together since I was twenty-four and Neal was twenty-five. We married in our late twenties. By the timeline of our peers in New York, I was a child bride. A decade later, we find ourselves listening to friends describe all the ways they will excel at being married.

  “I will always be your best friend,” they say, reading from wrinkled pieces of paper held in shaking hands. “I will never let you down.” They use analogies of rivers, of bolts of lightning, of vines wrapping around trees. Drunk on their feelings, they strike elaborate, ludicrous bargains: to never tell a lie, to always think of each other first, to show their love every single day.

  I clap along with everyone else; I love weddings. Still, there is so much I want to say.

  I want to say that one day you and your husband will fight about missed flights, and you’ll find yourself wistful for the days when you had to pay for only your own mistakes. I want to say that at various points in your marriage, may it last forever, you will look at this person and feel only rage. You will gaze at this man you once adored and think, It sure would be nice to have this whole place to myself.

  Over the years, Neal and I have each fallen short of various marital vows, failing each other in significant ways. We have suffered from the stresses of parenthood, work, and coexisting in an apartment so compact it’s been likened to a ship’s cabin. We have had fights about everything from who to be friends with to how to handle our money to whether or not we believe enough in each other to how to park the car. We have shown each other kindness, generosity, and faith, but also irritation, hostility, and white-hot fury.

  We have made big compromises. Perhaps the biggest is that he wanted to wait to have children but agreed to have a baby just two years after we married, and I wanted more kids but agreed to stick with one as long as he would let me amass an army of godchildren. And we make small compromises every day. For example, I tolerate his bags of stuff always spilling out from under our bed, and he puts up with me occasionally reorganizing the cabinets, so that it takes him an hour to find a screwdriver. Usually these things are merely annoying. Sometimes they resemble grounds for divorce.

  In Zen Buddhism, meditation helps practitioners detach from the cycle of desire and suffering. In my brief sti
nt as a religious studies major, I preferred Pure Land Buddhism, an alternate path to enlightenment for people who may find it especially difficult to detach from the world because pain is so often intertwined with joy.

  One of my professors read us a poem by the Japanese poet Kobayashi Issa, who was born in 1763 and, thanks to a run of terrible luck, saw three children and his wife die in the span of just a few years. He wrote, “The world of dew is / A world of dew / And yet, and yet.”

  “Dew is a Buddhist symbol of impermanence,” my professor said. “Issa is saying that one who understands Buddhist philosophy does not necessarily transcend pain and anguish. ‘And yet, and yet’ means ‘I can’t help crying.’ ”

  I think about that all the time: “And yet.”

  Such hedging, to me, is good religion, and also the key to a successful marriage. In the course of being together forever, you come across many doubt-stoking “and yets,” only some of them involving domestic air travel.

  I love this person, and yet when I’m sick, he’s not nurturing. And yet we don’t want the same number of children. And yet I sometimes wonder what it would be like to be single again.

  The longer you are with someone, the more “and yets” rack up. You love this person. Of course you plan to be together forever. And yet forever can begin to seem like a long time. Breaking up and starting fresh—which seemingly half your peers will do by the time your children reach elementary school—can begin to look like a wonderful and altogether logical proposition.