I want to say that at various points in your marriage, may it last forever," says the essayist Ada Calhoun in her latest book, "You will look at this person and feel only rage."
Elsewhere in her book, Wedding Toasts I'll Never Give, she writes:
"To hitch your rickety wagon to the flickering star of another fallible human being - what an insane thing to do. What a burden, and what a gift."
Ada Calhoun Photo: supplied
Marriage, Calhoun says, is a paradox we still haven't quite figured out.
In our wider society, fewer of us are getting married, but the divorce rate is dropping too.
Calhoun is a New York-based essayist and journalist, and the first essay she wrote in her latest collection, Wedding Toasts I'll Never Give, went viral after it was published in the New York Times' Modern Love column.
That essay chimed with many married people, she says.
“I heard from so many people, who had been married a long time, that they really liked it because they think people don’t talk enough about how when you’re together for a long time you go through these very dark moments.
“It can get very dark and then it’s light again and then it’s dark again and there’s something about that that’s quite beautiful, and interesting and scary when it first starts happening.”
She says more openness about the hard slog it takes to keep a marriage viable and how along the way there’ll be hard times, will help people with their feelings of shame when things are difficult.
“It wasn’t them being bad at being married, it was them being married, and that marriage goes through these weird twists and turns no matter what, no matter how good a marriage it is.”
Calhoun tackles crushes and infidelity, or at least thoughts of infidelity, in her book.
“It just felt like either you are perfectly faithful, without any lapses or anything for 50 years or you’ve completely failed - once a cheater always a cheater - and all this kind of rhetoric or you are this dangerous, nightmare person who is sleeping with everybody.
“There was no room in the conversations I was hearing for something of a middle ground, whether it’s you kiss somebody once at a party five years into your marriage and that was it or whether 15 years into your marriage you and your husband think maybe we should try making out with other people and either you keep doing that or you don’t do that.”
When Calhoun was having similar thoughts in her own marriage, she felt very alone she says.
“There is something in almost every marriage I know about that’s not perfect in that regard, when my husband and I were going through these slightly weird things around other people, I just felt there was no one to talk to about it, I felt very alone.
"It’s about realising these are fantasies and as soon as you stop idealising somebody, as soon as you start actually having a relationship with them, it’s going to be more different problems, it’s not always going to be this dreamy situation.”
So why get married at all? Calhoun says it can be a creative, interesting and deep relationship for the very reason that it is such hard work.
“On the wedding day it’s presented as this rainbows and sunshine happy ending and in reality it’s incredibly challenging, and it’s designed to be incredibly challenging, it’s a hard thing to do to stay loving somebody your whole life, even when they change and you change and the world changes around you.
“For me it was about learning there could be some kind of through line in your life, that could be this other person and in all these changes there’s a real value on holding on to somebody.”
Ada Calhoun, is the author of Wedding Toasts I'll Never Give, as well as an earlier book, St. Mark's is Dead, which was a social and cultural history of St. Mark's Place in East Village, Manhattan.
