Wedding Toasts I'll Never Give

by Ada Calhoun

  I wrote this book in the glorious New York Public Library’s Allen Room—the best place in the world to work, and located conveniently across the street from my publisher.

  W. W. Norton & Company is just the greatest. I adore the whole gang, especially Meredith McGinnis, Nomi Victor, Kyle Radler, Elisabeth Kerr, Steve Colca, eternally vigilant assistants Ryan Harrington and Sarah Bolling, and enchantingly compulsive copy editor Bonnie Thompson. Most of all, thanks to my literary soul mate Tom Mayer, the kind of insightful, creative, generous editor they say doesn’t exist anymore.

  Thanks to my parents for their good advice. Most of all, thank you to Neal, Blake, and Oliver, for being the best things that ever happened to me.

  Notes

  Entries correspond to the print edition of this book. You can use your device’s search function to locate particular terms in the text.

  EPIGRAPH

  11 “Marriage is a relationship far more engrossing”: Mike Mason, The Mystery of Marriage (Portland, OR: Multnomah Press, 1985), pp. 34–35.

  INTRODUCTION: “DO YOU KNOW WHY YOU’RE HERE?”

  13 “Like everything which is not the involuntary result”: W. H. Auden, Introduction to “Marriage,” A Certain World (New York: Viking, 1970), p. 248.

  14 Finding something new or helpful to say about marriage: The best-man speech Benedict Cumberbatch delivers in Sherlock is a pop-culture wedding toast gold standard. “The Sign of Three,” season 3, episode 2, January 26, 2014.

  14 “Don’t go to bed angry”: “Let not the sun go down upon your wrath,” Ephesians 4:26, King James Version.

  15 the question Do you know why you’re here? is vital to marriage: Interview of Father Paul J. Hartt by the author, January 23, 2016.

  16 “I am not altogether sure the people know why they’re there”: Pope Francis has said something similar, going so far as to say that today’s young couples, having grown up in a world where so much is disposable, don’t grasp the permanence of marriage, rendering their unions “null.” He added, “The crisis of marriage is because people do not know what the sacrament is, the beauty of the sacrament; they do not know that it is indissoluble, that it is for one’s entire life.” Cindy Wooden, “Too Many Couples Do Not Understand Marriage Is for Life, Pope Says,” National Catholic Reporter, June 18, 2016; accessed online.

  16 “It’s often tough to get couples grappling”: Interview of Father Don Waring by the author, December 7, 2015.

  17 “I’m afraid I think this rage for happiness rather vulgar”: George Bernard Shaw, Getting Married (1908; repr., Studio City, CA: Players Press, 1995), p. 73.

  17 “On one hand, I have a lot of compassion”: Interview of Rabbi David Adelson by the author, March 7, 2016.

  17 The main problem with marriage may be: “Most of the complaints about the institution of holy matrimony arise not because it is worse than the rest of life, but because it is not incomparably better,” note John Levy and Ruth Monroe. “We don’t expect life to be all sunshine and roses, or even beer and skittles [an old term for bowling]. But somehow we do expect marriage to be that way.” The Happy Family (New York: Knopf, 1945), pp. 46 and 65.

  19 “The reason that people want to get married”: Interview with Rabbi Lawrence A. Hoffman by the author, July 28, 2016.

  TOAST 1: PAYING FOR EACH OTHER’S MISTAKES

  21 “If a man could receive the advantages of marriage”: Theodor Gottlieb von Hippel, On Marriage, trans. Timothy F. Sellner (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1994), p. 83.

  21 While away at a conference in Minneapolis: A version of this essay ran in the New York Times Modern Love column as “The Wedding Toast I’ll Never Give,” July 16, 2015.

  22 Money has served: People tend to marry within their class, limiting economic mobility. Rich Morin, “New Academic Study Links Rising Income Inequality to ‘Assortative Mating,’ ” Pew Research Center, January 29, 2014.

  26 “Dew is a Buddhist symbol of impermanence”: I exchanged e-mails with my old McGill University professor Victor Hori, and he confirmed that this was a viable reading of the Issa poem. For more on Issa, he recommended the Taitetsu Unno book River of Fire, River of Water. He also said: “Issa had tried to start a family late in life. He married at age forty-nine or fifty. His firstborn died, and then his daughter died. . . . When Issa says, ‘The world of dew is / A world of dew,’ he is saying that the Buddhist picture of the world indeed is true; Buddhist philosophy is correct. But one who understands Buddhist philosophy does not necessarily transcend the pain and anguish one feels when a baby dies. ‘And yet, and yet’ means ‘I can’t help crying.’ Unno says that one reader said this shows that Issa did not really understand Buddhism. But Unno himself says that a Buddha feels that emotional pain. So I think Unno would agree with you. Marriage is not all pleasant; it’s a very rocky road; there is lots of venting of anger—and yet, and yet.” E-mail exchange January 25–28, 2016.

  27 “You don’t get divorced”: In the 2011 Martin Scorsese movie George Harrison: Living in the Material World, Olivia Harrison, speaking about how they stayed together in spite of his affairs, says, with a smile: “What’s the secret of a long marriage? You don’t get divorced.” In the background, you can hear members of the crew cackling.

  27 “We never wanted to get divorced at the same time”: British Glamour, June 2013.

  29 “Mary and I have been married forty-seven years”: Irving Fein, Jack Benny: An Intimate Biography (New York: Putnam, 1976), p. 56.

  30 “All blessings are mixed”: John Updike, Too Far to Go: The Maples Stories (1956; repr., New York: Fawcett, 1982). This quote appears in the foreword (written in 1979): “That a marriage ends is less than ideal; but all things end under heaven, and if temporality is held to be invalidating, then nothing real succeeds. The moral of these stories is that all blessings are mixed.”

  TOAST 2: THE BORING PARTS

  32 “Each of us must live with a full measure of loneliness”: Jim Harrison, Dalva: A Novel (1988; repr., New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989), p. 71. See also Henry Green, “Falling in Love,” Esquire, 1955, in Matthew Yorke, ed., Surviving: The Uncollected Writings of Henry Green (London: Chatto & Windus, 1992), pp. 192–93. Green writes, “We are all animals, and therefore, we are continually being attracted. That this attraction should extend to what is called love is a human misfortune cultivated by novelists. It is the horror we feel of ourselves, that is of being alone with ourselves, which draws us to love, but this love should happen only once, and never be repeated, if we have, as we should, learnt our lesson, which is that we are, all and each one of us, always and always alone.”

  39 “walk through fire” or “take a bullet”: Savage says: “You know when people always say, when they talk about the people they love most in their lives, ‘I would take a bullet for this person, I would walk through fire for this person’? That’s hurt. You’re saying, ‘I would hurt for this person.’ In a really profound and life-threatening way. ‘I would take a bullet. I would walk through fire.’ Infidelity, when people believe in monogamy and monogamy is what they want, infidelity is that bullet. . . . If you look at your partner and think, ‘I love you so much I could take a bullet for you,’ just if and when it happens, remember that feeling, because that’s the moment where you take the bullet.” Dan Savage, “An Open Letter to People Thinking About Checking to See if Their Husbands or Wives Were on Ashley Madison,” The Stranger, August 19, 2015. He also says something similar in “Cheating Happens,” Death, Sex, & Money podcast, February 25, 2015.

  39 Newt Gingrich said: James V. Grimaldi, “Marianne Gingrich, Newt’s Ex-Wife, Says He Wanted ‘Open Marriage,’ ” Washington Post, January 19, 2012.

  40 evidently less of an embarrassment: Dan Savage, “Voters Prefer Newt Gingrich’s Adultery to Open Marriage,” New York Times, June 20, 2014.

  40 “I am stating that emotional entanglements”: Levy and Monroe, The Happy Family, p. 100.

  41 at least one in ten: In a Washington Post article, the au
thor cited Shere Hite’s 1991 study saying that 70 percent of married women have cheated and a 2004 University of Chicago study saying that 72 percent of married men have had at least one affair. Eric Anderson, “Five Myths About Cheating,” Washington Post, February 13, 2012. The psychologist and researcher Geneviève Beaulieu-Pelletier told me that the probability of reporting at least one lifetime incident of what she calls “extradyadic” sex is 19 to 34 percent among married people (per an oft-cited study Michael W. Wiederman, “Extramarital Sex: Prevalence and Correlates in a National Survey,” Journal of Sex Research 34, no. 2 (1997): 167–74). Interview of Geneviève Beaulieu-Pelletier by the author, March 25, 2016. See also Beaulieu-Pelletier et al., “The Role of Attachment Avoidance in Extradyadic Sex,” Attachment & Human Development 13, no. 3 (May 2011), 293–313. And: University of Montreal, “Infidelity Dissected: New Research on Why People Cheat,” ScienceDaily, September 13, 2008.

  42 “the things that nurture love”: Interview of Esther Perel by the author, September 9, 2016. See also her book Mating in Captivity.

  44 the free-love Kerista Commune: There’s a record of the commune at Kerista.com. Under the headline it reads, in tiny print, “We didn’t save the world. We didn’t even try. We talked about it a lot.” I want that on a mug. Retrieved July 10, 2016.

  46 Friends and colleagues can’t take refuge: In 1894, Edward Carpenter (called “the gay godfather of the British left”) wrote, “Love is fed not by what it takes, but by what it gives, and that excellent dual love of man and wife must be fed also by the love they give to others.” This quote appears in Marie Carmichael Stopes, Married Love (New York: Putnam, 1931), p. 120. The Book of Common Prayer has the congregation pray that the married couple find “wisdom and devotion in the ordering of their common life,” such that they may “reach out in love and concern for others.”

  49 “Marriage involves more suffering than most”: Sparrow, letter to the author, June 7, 2016.

  TOAST 3: CONTAINING MULTITUDES

  54 “Marriage is people”: Maurice Lamm, The Jewish Way in Love and Marriage (Middle Village, NY: Jonathan David Publishers, 1991), p. 117: “Marriage is people. Like sex, marriage cannot be abstracted from character. Good people make for good marriages, just as good children generally make good parents. Selfishness, immaturity, and an undisciplined, instinctual lifestyle are early indicators of possible failure in marriage.”

  56 “When I look at him I notice only how fat and bald he has got”: David L. Cohn, Love in America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1943), p. 152.

  56 “For he is in the trap”: Elisabeth Abbott, translator. The Fifteen Joys of Marriage. New York: Bramhall House, 1959.

  56 that person doesn’t seem familiar anymore: The biological anthropologist Helen Fisher in her book Anatomy of Love (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992, p. 57) cites research that indicates that romantic love wanes after one to three years.

  56 “Human beings are works in progress”: Daniel Gilbert, “The Psychology of Your Future Self,” TED Talk connected to his book Stumbling on Happiness, March 2014.

  57 I wrote a book: Ada Calhoun, St. Marks Is Dead: The Many Lives of America’s Hippest Street (New York: W. W. Norton, 2015).

  61 “I’ve had at least three marriages”: In the 1960s, Mignon McLaughlin wrote, “A successful marriage requires falling in love many times, always with the same person” (“Accent on Living,” Atlantic Monthly, July 1965). She also said, “Youth is not enough. And love is not enough. And, if we could achieve it, enough would not be enough” (Atlantic Monthly, February 1966).

  68 “a craftsman’s task, a goldsmith’s work”: “Address of Pope Francis to Engaged Couples Preparing for Marriage,” February 14, 2014.

  TOAST 4: THE TRUTH ABOUT SOUL MATES

  70 “Love is something ideal”: Siegfried Unseid, Goethe and His Publishers, trans. Kenneth J. Northcott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 42.

  70 In 1997, soon after Nick and I: A version of the first part of this essay ran as a Lives column in the New York Times Magazine, under the headline “Misery Games,” October 21, 2012.

  74 If soul mates are real, statistically speaking: Randall Munroe, the author of the wonderful science-questions book What If?, writes: “Given that you have 500,000,000 potential soul mates, you’ll only find true love in one lifetime out of ten thousand”; https://what-if.xkcd.com/9/.

  74 “Ronald [as he was known] would have to tolerate”: Humphrey Carpenter, J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), p. 74.

  74 “Only a very wise man”: All the Tolkien quotes in this chapter are from one letter: “To Michael Tolkien, March 6–8, 1941.” Letter number 43 in The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, ed. Humphrey Carpenter (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981).

  77 Tolkien and his wife bickered: Humphrey Carpenter, J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography, p. 160.

  77 One visitor recalled: Ibid., p. 161.

  77 On summer evenings: Ibid., pp. 246–47.

  79 The soul mate ideal appears in: Plato, Symposium, 360 B.C. Translation by Benjamin Jowett; http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/symposium.html

  79 “In order not to be miserable”: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Letters, Conversations and Reflections of S. T. Coleridge (London: Edward Moxon, 1836), pp. 88–89.

  79 “If you agree to harbor another person’s soul”: Thomas Moore, Soul Mates (New York: Harper Perennial, 1994), p. xviii.

  83 “couples that divorce after the death of a child”: One study suggested that a couple that suffers the death of a child is eight times more likely to divorce. Other studies have said that this number is inflated but agree that it is more likely. Catherine H. Rogers et al., “Long-Term Effects of the Death of a Child on Parents’ Adjustment in Midlife,” National Center for Biology Information, 2008.

  86 Tolkien believed that original sin was responsible: Carpenter, J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography, p. 101.

  TOAST 5: FIGHTING IN RENTAL CARS

  87 “To the end, spring winds will sow disquietude”: Robert Louis Stevenson, Virginibus Puerisque and Other Papers (London: C. Kegan Paul & Co., 1881), p. 26. And on p. 3 he says, “Marriage is terrifying, but so is a cold and forlorn old age.”

  89 Red Badge of Courage audiobook: Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage, unabridged, read by Anthony Heald, Blackstone Audio.

  90 “We crucify one another in marriage”: Interview of James Krueger of Mons Nubifer Sanctus by the author, August 4, 2016.

  90 “Quarrels,” wrote Ovid, “are the dowry”: Ovid, The Love Books of Ovid (Cheshire, CT: Biblo & Tannen, 1932), p. 144.

  91 “Nothing,” he said: Claire Dederer suggests that those two lines—“What?” “Nothing?”—could constitute an entire play about marriage. Claire Dederer, Poser (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), p. 183.

  92 “For some unknowable reason—which may have to do with the sex act”: Sparrow, letter to the author, June 7, 2016.

  94 picked up the flag and charged: I recently exchanged e-mails with the Stephen Crane scholar Paul Sorrentino, who told me, “More than any other battle during the Civil War, this one [the Battle of Chancellorsville, on which Red Badge is based] revealed the tragic irony of combat. Although Robert E. Lee won the battle, it was a Pyrrhic victory. The Confederate army suffered enormous casualties and lost its brilliant General ‘Stonewall’ Jackson, who was accidentally wounded by his own men during the battle and died shortly thereafter.” E-mail to the author, August 31, 2016.

  96 “We reach out for help at odd points”: Frank Bruni, “The Myth of Quality Time,” New York Times, September 5, 2015. See also Edward S. Gleason, Redeeming Marriage (Cambridge, MA: Cowley, 1988), p. 143: “There is no such thing as ‘quality time.’ All time is of even quality, by definition, and if we invest more in some hours than in others, then we rob ourselves and our marriage. The basic unit is time, and for one to know another and to continue to live and grow and to know more of the other, there must be time invested.”

  TOAST 6: OTHER PEOPLE, OTHER CITIES />
  99 “O happy girls, discreet in joviality!”: “Monogamy I” in Gerald Gould, Monogamy: A Series of Dramatic Lyrics (London: Allen & Unwin, 1918), p. 3.

  101 “Despite the fact that the real Nala is standing right in front of her”: Deven Patel, Text to Tradition: The Naisadhiyacarita and Literary Community in South Asia (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), p. 140.

  107 against the law in twenty-one states: Give or take a few; the law is changing. Jolie Lee, “New Hampshire Senate Votes to Repeal Anti-Adultery Law,” USA Today, April 17, 2014.

  110 attraction comes on like a flu: Bits of this chapter and Toast 2 come from a New York Times Modern Love column I wrote called “You May Call It Cheating, but We Don’t,” September 14, 2012.

  111 the Kinsey scale: “The Kinsey Scale,” KinseyInstitute.org. Retrieved May 21, 2016.

  112 Can’t I even be free when I’m asleep?: On the you’re-still-married-when-you’re-asleep tip: According to Edward Gleason’s book Redeeming Marriage, when we’re married, sleeping in the same bed counts as time together (Cambridge, MA: Cowley, 1988, p. 151).

  116 “I learned that you have to pay for indulgence”: “Episode 95: Monogamy,” transcript, This American Life, NPR, March 6, 1998.

  117 “The gate or fence did not grow there”: G. K. Chesterton, The Collected Works of G. K. Chesterton, vol. 3 (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1990), p. 157.

  118 “Yes, your friend is exactly right”: Dr. Kelly Roberts, interview by the author, March 1, 2016.

  122 “Man, I really need to give up cocaine”: Rick Shapiro made this joke often in his weekly Sidewalk Café set, circa 2001. When I fact-checked the joke, his publicist told me I had it right but insisted I mention he’s been sober for thirty years.

  122 “one tends to think of it only in connection with”: Joan Didion, “On Self-Respect,” Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968; repr., New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008), p. 145. See also: “To become civilized is to establish relationships that are not merely physical, biological or instinctive; it is to establish human relationships, relationships of an essentially symbolic kind, defined by tradition and convention and rooted in respect and obligation.” Herbert Fingarette, Confucius: The Secular as Sacred (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1972), p. 76.