Wedding Toasts I'll Never Give

by Ada Calhoun

  123 “To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow”: Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping (New York: Macmillan, 2004), p. 152.

  126 the 80/20 rule: Why Did I Get Married?, written and directed by Tyler Perry (2007).

  TOAST 7: “LOVE IS STRONG AS DEATH”

  128 “No long-term marriage is made easily”: Madeline L’Engle, The Irrational Season (1977; repr., San Francisco: Harper, 1983), p. 88.

  130 “Marriage is built upon grace”: Edward S. Gleason, Redeeming Marriage (Cambridge, MA: Cowley, 1988), p. 123.

  130 “moments of great intensity”: Both quotes appear in Virginia Woolf, A Writer’s Diary (1953; repr., New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2003), p. 97.

  131 “Wowsers!”: Calvin Trillin, About Alice (New York: Random House, 2006), p. 5.

  133 “My beloved spake”: Song of Solomon, 2:10, King James Version.

  135 “Had I known then that my wife was dead”: Excerpt from Man’s Search for Meaning, quoted in Dana Mack and David Blankenhorn, The Book of Marriage (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2001), p. 596.

  138 Some Native American ceremonies use blankets: Cherokee.org.

  139 “Ritual can be a sacred drama”: Interview with Rabbi Lawrence A. Hoffman by the author, July 28, 2016. This is from an e-mail he sent me with an excerpt from his book All the World: Universalism, Particularism, and the High Holy Days.

  139 Sarah has been married to seven men: The Book of Tobit, 7:6–14.

  141 “Love takes off the masks”: James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (1963; repr., New York: Knopf, 2013), p. 95.

  142 My right knee has started to hurt: Judith S. Wallerstein writes about similar pain in the “Marriage as a Transformative Experience” chapter of her book The Good Marriage (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1995; written with Sandra Blakeslee), p. 327, leading me to believe that one way to better appreciate your marriage is to have your knees give out.

  144 “To love somebody is not just a strong feeling”: Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving, (1956; repr., New York: Harper Perennial, 2006), p. 52.

  149 The long-married sometimes die at the same time: Lisa Grunwald, “The Married Couples Who Even Death Cannot Part,” Time, May 6, 2015.

  149 A California couple: “California Couple, Married 67 Years, Die Holding Hands,” Reuters, February 26, 2015.

  149 “I felt that if Andrew died, I would die, too”: Molly Haskell, Love and Other Infectious Diseases (New York: William Morrow, 1990), p. 159.

  150 “There are a lot of really broken people”: Interview of Father Paul J. Hartt by the author, January 23, 2016.

  151 the years zip by: Gretchen Rubin’s brief video The Years Are Short, about taking her daughter to school, is one of the more effective tearjerkers of all time. YouTube; uploaded on June 15, 2012.

  151 they’d considered divorce: More than half of married people say they have considered divorce, and yet more than 90 percent of couples who stayed together through serious trouble were glad they hadn’t divorced. See the National Divorce Decision-Making Project, What Are They Thinking? A National Survey of Married Individuals Who Are Thinking About Divorce (Provo, UT: Family Studies Center, Brigham Young University, 2015), and C. A. Johnson and S. M. Stanley, eds., “The Oklahoma Marriage Initiative Statewide Baseline Survey” (Stillwater, OK: Bureau for Social Research, Oklahoma State University, 2001). Of those who considered their marriage to be seriously troubled at some point (34 percent), 92 percent said they were glad they’d stayed married. In another study, 64 percent of those who said they were unhappy but stayed together reported they were happy five years later and another 25 percent reported improvement in their marriage. Linda J. Waite and Maggie Gallagher, The Case for Marriage (New York: Doubleday, 2000).

  151 “Many times, it simply seemed easier to stay”: Elinor Nauen, “I: Inertia,” in My Marriage A to Z: A Big-City Romance (El Paso, TX: Cinco Puntos Press, 2011). And interview by the author, February 4, 2016.

  152 “That it isn’t about the Golden Anniversary at all”: Leah Furnas, “The Longly-Weds Know” in To Love One Another: Poems Celebrating Marriage, ed. Ginny Lowe Connors (West Hartford, CT: Poetworks / Grayson Books, 2002). See also the Paul Muldoon ten-year-anniversary poem “Long Finish.” Paul Muldoon, Poems, 1968–1998 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001).

  155 Thomas Jefferson sat by his wife’s bedside: Thomas Jefferson, directed by Ken Burns (Public Broadcasting Service, 1997).

  EPILOGUE: ONE TOAST I WOULD ACTUALLY GIVE

  157 “There is sure to be another flood”: William Shakespeare, As You Like It, Folger Shakespeare Library edition (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997), pp. 191–92 (act 5, scene 4, lines 39–41).

  161 “The estate of marriage has universally fallen”: From Martin Luther, The Estate of Marriage (1522), in Luther’s Works, vol. 45, ed. Walther I. Brandt (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1962).

  162 “That marriage is a failure none but the very stupid”: Emma Goldman, Marriage and Love (New York: Mother Earth, 1914), p. 4.

  162 “This at last is bone of my bones”: Genesis 2:18–24: English Standard Version. A discussion of this passage and its relevance to the Catholic wedding ceremony appears in Joseph M. Champlin, Together for Life (Notre Dame, IN: Ave Maria Press, 2012), p. 18.

  162 “a moment of eternity and eternal return”: Jacob Neusner, The Enchantments of Judaism: Rites of Transformation from Birth Through Death (New York: Basic Books, 1987), p. 65. There’s a great description of the meaning behind the Jewish marriage ceremony in chapter 4, “The Marriage Ceremony: You and I Become Adam and Eve.”

  163 “The Jewish way of appreciating life at its finest”: Interview with Rabbi Lawrence A. Hoffman by the author, July 28, 2016.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  167 No. 41: Ari Isaacman Astles, Samarth Bhaskar, and Danny DeBelius, “The Top 100 New York Times Stories of 2015, by Total Time Spent,” New York Times, December 29, 2015.

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