by Ada Calhoun
Parrott, Les, and Leslie Parrott. Saving Your Marriage Before It Starts. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1995.
Paul, Pamela. The Starter Marriage and the Future of Matrimony. New York: Villard, 2002.
Perel, Esther. Mating in Captivity. New York: Harper, 2006.
Plump, Wendy. Vow: A Memoir of Marriage (and Other Affairs). New York: Bloomsbury, 2013.
Pollitt, Katha. Learning to Drive. New York: Random House, 2007.
Pontano, Giovani Giovano. On Married Love and Eridanus. Translated by Luke Roman. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014.
Ponteri, Jay. Wedlocked. Portland, OR: Hawthorne, 2013.
Renou, Louis, ed. Hinduism. New York: George Braziller, 1962.
Roiphe, Anne. Married: A Fine Predicament. New York: Basic Books, 2002.
Rosen, Ruth. The World Split Open. New York: Penguin, 2000.
Rothbart, Davy. My Heart Is an Idiot. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012.
Rubin, Lillian B. Just Friends. New York: Harper & Row, 1985.
Ruiz, Don Miguel. The Mastery of Love. San Rafael, CA: Amber-Allen, 1999.
Rush, Norman. Mortals. New York: Vintage, 2003.
Ryan, Christopher, and Cacilda Jetha. Sex at Dawn. New York: Harper, 2010.
Ryerson, James. “Love in the Time of Monogamy,” New York Times, April 5, 2016.
Savage, Dan. The Commitment. New York: Dutton, 2005.
Scharfstein, Ben-Ami. Ineffability. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993.
Schlessinger, Laura. The Proper Care and Feeding of Husbands. New York: Harper Perennial, 2006.
Schnarch, David. The Passionate Marriage. New York: W. W. Norton, 1997.
Schwartz, Lynne Sharon. Rough Strife. New York: Harper & Row, 1980.
Shapiro, Dana Adam. You Can Be Right (or You Can Be Married). New York: Scribner, 2012.
Shaw, George Bernard. Getting Married. Studio City, CA: Players Press, 1995. Originally published in 1908.
Stephens, Autumn, ed. The Secret Lives of Lawfully Wedded Wives. Maui: Inner Ocean, 2006.
Stevenson, Robert Louis. Virginibus Puerisque and Other Papers. London: C. Kegan Paul & Co., 1881.
Stopes, Marie Carmichael. Married Love: A New Contribution to the Solution of Sex Differences. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1931.
Strayed, Cheryl. Tiny Beautiful Things. New York: Vintage, 2012.
Strossen, Nadine. Defending Pornography. New York: New York University Press, 2000. Originally published in 1995.
Talese, Gay. Thy Neighbor’s Wife. New York: Harper Perennial, 2009. Originally published in 1980.
Taylor, John. Falling: The Story of One Marriage. New York: Random House, 1999.
Texier, Catherine. Breakup: The End of a Love Story. New York: Doubleday, 1998.
Thorold, A. W. On Marriage. New York: H. M. Caldwell, 2010.
Townsend, John. Boundaries in Marriage. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2002.
Traister, Rebecca. All the Single Ladies. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016.
Trillin, Calvin. About Alice. New York: Random House, 2006.
Turnbull, Colin M. The Human Cycle. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1983.
Tyler, Anne. Breathing Lessons. New York: Ballantine, 1988.
Updike, John. Too Far to Go. New York: Fawcett, 1982. Originally published in 1979.
Utley, Ebony A. “When Better Becomes Worse: Black Wives Describe Their Experiences with Infidelity.” Black Women, Gender, and Families 5, no. 1 (Spring 2011), pp. 66–89.
Van de Velde, Th. H. Ideal Marriage: Its Physiology and Technique. Translated by Stella Browne. New York: Random House, 1930.
Viorst, Judith. Grown-up Marriage. New York: Free Press, 2003.
Waldman, Ayelet. Bad Mother. New York: Doubleday, 2009.
______. “Truly, Madly, Guiltily.” New York Times, March 27, 2005.
Wallerstein, Judith S., and Sandra Blakeslee. The Good Marriage. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1995.
Weil, Elizabeth. No Cheating, No Dying. New York: Scribner, 2012.
Weisser, Susan Ostrov. Women and Romance: A Reader. New York: New York University Press, 2001.
Yalom, Marilyn. A History of the Wife. New York: HarperCollins, 2001.
Yates, Richard. Revolutionary Road. New York: Vintage, 1961.
Yuknavitch, Lidia. The Chronology of Water. Portland, OR: Hawthorne, 2010.
Additional Praise for Wedding Toasts I’ll Never Give
“An uncommonly gracious invitation to rethink our relationship to an institution that often seems to have us doomed before we begin. There’s been so much cant, as they used to say in the 19th century, written about marriage, but Ada Calhoun’s book is honest about the struggle to love another person without congratulating itself for being honest, and if that isn’t a spiritual discipline, I don’t know what is.”
—Carlene Bauer, author of Frances and
Bernard and Not That Kind of Girl
“This unflinchingly honest, astutely balanced probe of a most perplexing institution asks all the right questions. It sets up a conversation with the reader, who is challenged to reflect at each point, choosing between ‘No, that’s not me’ and ‘How did she know that?’ Most of the time, she knows.”
—Phillip Lopate, author of The Art of the Personal Essay
“True, funny, and wise, Ada Calhoun’s insight into the nature of marriage is a compulsively readable and sneakily profound primer on all interpersonal relationships. She should be required to give a toast at every wedding, Bar Mitzvah, and funeral she attends.”
—Leah Carroll, author of Down City:
A Daughter’s Story of Love, Memory, and Murder
“This really spoke to me. It’s a beautiful love letter to what marriage is. Ada Calhoun seems like she’d be a ball to hang out with. Marriage: not so bad, guys.”
—Kathryn Hahn, actress (Transparent, Crossing Jordan)
Also by Ada Calhoun
St. Marks Is Dead
A version of Toast 1 ran in the Modern Love column of The New York
Times as “The Wedding Toast I’ll Never Give,” on July 16, 2015; Lines
in Toasts 2 and 6 appeared in the Modern Love column of The New York
Times as “You May Call It Cheating, but We Don’t,” on September 14,
2012. Part of Toast 4 appeared in the Lives column of The New York
Times Magazine as “Misery Games,” on October 21, 2012.
Copyright © 2017 by Ada Calhoun
All rights reserved
First Edition
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book,
write to Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue,
New York, NY 10110
For information about special discounts for bulk purchases, please
contact W. W. Norton Special Sales at [email protected] or
800-233-4830
Book design by Kristen Bearse
Production manager: Julia Druskin
Jacket Design by Darren Haggar
ISBN: 978-0-393-25479-2
ISBN: 978-0-393-25480-8 (e-book)
W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110
www.wwnorton.com
W. W. Norton & Company Ltd.
15 Carlisle Street, London W1D 3BS