Even if you hold no religious beliefs, you might want to consider adopting some simply for the sake of your wedding. That’s the conclusion I reached after attending several secular nuptial ceremonies in the years after college. There was little worse than listening to vows that had been made up by the bride and groom. Even the ones that are written by professionals are pretty bad—like this one I came across while researching a book on interfaith marriage:
Listen without judging? Who are these people kidding?
In her new book, Wedding Toasts I’ll Never Give, essayist Ada Calhoun calls this gilding the lily. She instead advises an engaged friend: “Saying you’re going to stay together is plenty. . . . ‘I do’ covers it.”
Calhoun, whose book weaves together a number of essays she wrote for the New York Times “Modern Love” column, has learned a few things about marriage over the past dozen or so years since she herself tied the knot. She tends to roll her eyes at the couples who “talk about how they will gracefully succeed where nearly everyone in human history has floundered.”
But she has learned to keep her mouth shut and says, “I only wish I could tell them that in this marriage, occasionally they will suffer—and that not only will they likely endure sitcom-grade squabbles, but possibly even dark-night-of-the-soul despair.” She adds, comfortingly, “That doesn’t mean they are condemned to divorce, just that it’s unlikely that they will be each other’s best friend every single minute forever.”
But these expectations are not surprising. In the past few decades, marriage has become what sociologists refer to as a “capstone” event. That is, couples wait longer and longer to get married—if they decide to do so at all. Both husband and wife want to ensure that they have completed their educations, are financially stable, own a house, and perhaps even have had children before they decide marriage is for them. If they expect marriage to be perfect, it is only because they have spent so long preparing for it.
Calhoun, on the other hand, got married younger than most of her friends and she seemed rather unprepared for grown-up life. She thought she would never be bored with her husband Neal because he was a cool musician who had a childhood so different from her own. He was raised going to church three times a week and lived down the street from David Koresh. He was almost shot by police and at the age of 18 had a child.
So Calhoun was surprised by what she calls the “boring parts” of marriage. “There is the boredom of responsibility: crafting a budget, planning meals, arranging child care, cleaning.” Fortunately for the reader, Calhoun finds witty ways to describe the boring parts. When Neal finds her on the floor sorting Lego pieces from Playmobil ones and asks what she’s doing, Calhoun replies, “A dramatization . . . of why there are no Great American Novels by women.”
Calhoun’s boredom periodically—or constantly; it’s hard to tell from the book—makes her wonder about other men. When arguing about broken sink faucets or changing the radio in the car, Calhoun writes, “Other men, I think at such moments, wouldn’t care if I broke a faucet. And if they did, I could find someone else, leapfrogging from one lily pad of tolerance to the next. Or I could be alone, in which case I could break all my faucets and no one would say a thing.”
At the beginning of her marriage, Calhoun and her husband seem to have had a fairly fuzzy agreement about fidelity. And that leads at one point to her making out with a guy she meets on a book tour. It also leads Neal to flirt with another woman while Calhoun is away. The ensuing guilt and arguments and “processing” are endless and difficult for both husband and wife to bear. Calhoun’s astonishing conclusion—“Infidelity: not the best idea. Stop the presses.”
The fact that Calhoun needed to figure this out on her own is telling. It’s not that we are experiencing an epidemic of infidelity. In fact, recent statistics suggest that younger married couples cheat less than older ones. It’s that we’ve left young people stumbling when it comes to how to behave in a marriage. And it’s also that despite the generally stable marriages of our cultural elites, they enjoy writing and talking about how alternative arrangements might be just as good. Two big articles published in recent months—“Is an Open Marriage a Happier Marriage?” in the New York Times Magazine and “How Researching the Science of Boredom Prepared Me for Marriage” in New York magazine—are exercises in wishful thinking by reporters with conventional romantic lives who fantasize about what their relationships would be like without all of the constraints of conventional romance.
When the man she once nearly cheated with comes later to visit her town, Calhoun, with the help of a few friends, has figured out what to do: “I made sure I was away. . . . No good could come of it.” Or, as one friend says, “If you hang out in barbershops, eventually you’ll get a haircut.”
While it’s nice—maybe even admirable—that Calhoun has been able over time to understand the benefits of monogamy, it is worth noting that these would hardly be newsflashes to women of a few decades ago. So what’s changed? For one thing, the opportunities for cheating have probably expanded. Even once you are off the market there is a whole world of single men and women (including on dating apps) who seem like potential alternatives. Picking a spouse can be like choosing shampoo on Amazon: It takes forever to make a decision and as soon as you come to one, you immediately start wondering whether you should have chosen something else.
Calhoun interviews older married couples and finds that they have experienced plenty of pain and boredom in their relationships—but they stayed married simply by not getting divorced. Maybe this sounds too simplistic. But the research bears out such a strategy. A recent paper released by a British pro-marriage organization finds that couples with newborns who were unhappy in their marriages but who stayed together were actually likely to be happy a few years later. The authors write that of the unhappiest parents—“those scoring 1 or 2 on a 7-point scale—only 7 percent of these said they were still unhappy 10 years later, regardless of whether they stayed together or split up. Two thirds said they were happy or very happy, scoring 6 or 7.”
Of course, we don’t really need social scientists to tell us such things. We just need to look with clear eyes at human nature and the possibilities real life affords us. Calhoun eventually recognizes this herself. “At forty,” she writes, “I’m slowly coming to terms with the elementary notion that being in this world means giving up on other worlds.”
Naomi Schaefer Riley, a senior fellow at the Independent Women’s Forum, is the author of The New Trail of Tears: How Washington Is Destroying American Indians.
