Ratings4
Average rating3.3
Seven essays celebrating the beauty of the imperfect marriage. We hear plenty about whether or not to get married, but much less about what it takes to stay married. Clichés around marriage—eternal bliss, domestic harmony, soul mates—leave out the real stuff. After marriage you may still want to sleep with other people. Sometimes your partner will bore the hell out of you. And when stuck paying for your spouse’s mistakes, you might miss being single. In Wedding Toasts I’ll Never Give, Ada Calhoun presents an unflinching but also loving portrait of her own marriage, opening a long-overdue conversation about the institution as it truly is: not the happy ending of a love story or a relic doomed by high divorce rates, but the beginning of a challenging new chapter of which “the first twenty years are the hardest.” Calhoun’s funny, poignant personal essays explore the bedrooms of modern coupledom for a nuanced discussion of infidelity, existential anxiety, and the many other obstacles to staying together. Both realistic and openhearted, Wedding Toasts I’ll Never Give offers a refreshing new way to think about marriage as a brave, tough, creative decision to stay with another person for the rest of your life. “What a burden,” Calhoun calls marriage, “and what a gift.”
Reviews with the most likes.
It's a book filled with marriage advice - which clearly dooms this book to a purgatory of well-intentioned bromides and Pinterest worthy quotes suitable for placement over a picture of a sun dappled tropical beach. But Ada Calhoun is far smarter and way more real-talk than that.
Her advice on not getting divorced? Don't get divorced. The idea you'd take a bullet for your husband or wife - that bullet is infidelity. No easy advice here - and she backs it up with candid vulnerability and a courageous willingness to share her own experiences.
It's an antidote to the heartfelt admissions couples make at weddings. Ludicrous bargains, impossible standards and smaltzy analogies. When she shares some hard won advice that the first 20 years are the hardest, she's not kidding. She's smart, funny and willing to throw open the doors of her marriage and let us snoop around inside without having tidied everything up first. Hers is messy, chaotic, broken in places, hopelessly mundane in others but still home.