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A review by wordsmithreads
Wedding Toasts I'll Never Give by Ada Calhoun
4.0
In December of 2017, I got engaged to someone I had been dating for three years. During the three year engagement, friends of mine got engaged, got married, some even had babies. I felt stalled, felt like I was working So Hard to make a square peg fit in a round hole. “Is it supposed to be this hard?” I asked myself. “Maybe this is just what being in a long-term relationship is like.”
Calling off my engagement made me feel like a failure, like I had fallen off the wagon while my other girlfriends had won the race. Calhoun cautions against this without knowing my story:
Marriage isn’t an achievement, the culmination of a love affair, but, rather, the announcement of an intention to live in a new way.
I’ve heard it before that marriage doesn’t really change anything, is just a legal piece of paper. I’ve thought the same. But Calhoun makes it clear, almost romanticizes (to the chagrin, most likely, of those against the institution) that being in a serious relationship is different (or at least should be) than being married:
Making a relationship official and public changes it. When you have witnesses from both families, each person’s tribe is on its own side, and when the couple walks back up the aisle after getting married, they’re like the pull tab on a zipper, merging the two sides into one family for the rest of human history.
Calhoun writes extensively about affairs, something I haven’t experienced in a relationship. She hammers home that marriage is not all love and sunshine: you will hate your spouse at some point in your life.
To be clear: relationships are work, but it shouldn’t feel like beating your head against a wall (at least not all the time). Calhoun paints a picture of marriage that I *can* get on board with: you will fall out of love with your person sometimes, but if you stick it out and it’s the right person, you can make it.
She writes:
Sex advice columnist Dan Savage says that everyone talks in their wedding vows about how they would “walk through fire” or “take a bullet” for each other without realizing that more often than not, the bullet and the fire is your spouse saying to you, “I have feelings for another person” or “I slept with someone else.” Many of us who have been through this would prefer a literal bullet to the metaphorical one.
I wholeheartedly believe in monogamy. I am greedy; I do not want to share. Calhoun likes it for a different reason:
That, for me, may be the most persuasive argument for monogamy: it lets you keep all your inside jokes in one place.
I will say, Calhoun writes about infidelity in a way that changed how I thought about it. Of course I don’t want to be on the receiving end of the news “I slept with someone else,” but I think it could potentially be weathered based on how Calhoun’s philosophies set it up. Because the alternative to infidelity is still being able to fall in love with other people:
And yet being happy with the same person forever requires finding ways to be happy with different versions of that person, and avoiding panic when the person you’re with becomes someone you dislike. Maybe you’ll enjoy the next person they become. Maybe the person you’re on your way to becoming will like this new partner better.
All in all, I think this should probably be required reading for those in long term relationships or who plan to get married. It’s not the most amazing thing I’ve ever read, but I laughed out loud at it and learned a lot from it.
A final quote:
“The hardest lesson in a marriage,” says my friend Asia, “is understanding the truth of the other person, believing in your heart that they are as real as you are, and their feelings matter as much. We all think that when something is wrong it will feel wrong to us, but that’s the biggest lie. So many things that your partner will see as betrayal will feel to you like nothing. One of the biggest challenges of marriage is to acknowledge that your own feelings aren’t the end of the story. We have to hold so many realities at once: here’s me, here’s you, here’s us, here’s the rest of the world.”
Calling off my engagement made me feel like a failure, like I had fallen off the wagon while my other girlfriends had won the race. Calhoun cautions against this without knowing my story:
Marriage isn’t an achievement, the culmination of a love affair, but, rather, the announcement of an intention to live in a new way.
I’ve heard it before that marriage doesn’t really change anything, is just a legal piece of paper. I’ve thought the same. But Calhoun makes it clear, almost romanticizes (to the chagrin, most likely, of those against the institution) that being in a serious relationship is different (or at least should be) than being married:
Making a relationship official and public changes it. When you have witnesses from both families, each person’s tribe is on its own side, and when the couple walks back up the aisle after getting married, they’re like the pull tab on a zipper, merging the two sides into one family for the rest of human history.
Calhoun writes extensively about affairs, something I haven’t experienced in a relationship. She hammers home that marriage is not all love and sunshine: you will hate your spouse at some point in your life.
To be clear: relationships are work, but it shouldn’t feel like beating your head against a wall (at least not all the time). Calhoun paints a picture of marriage that I *can* get on board with: you will fall out of love with your person sometimes, but if you stick it out and it’s the right person, you can make it.
She writes:
Sex advice columnist Dan Savage says that everyone talks in their wedding vows about how they would “walk through fire” or “take a bullet” for each other without realizing that more often than not, the bullet and the fire is your spouse saying to you, “I have feelings for another person” or “I slept with someone else.” Many of us who have been through this would prefer a literal bullet to the metaphorical one.
I wholeheartedly believe in monogamy. I am greedy; I do not want to share. Calhoun likes it for a different reason:
That, for me, may be the most persuasive argument for monogamy: it lets you keep all your inside jokes in one place.
I will say, Calhoun writes about infidelity in a way that changed how I thought about it. Of course I don’t want to be on the receiving end of the news “I slept with someone else,” but I think it could potentially be weathered based on how Calhoun’s philosophies set it up. Because the alternative to infidelity is still being able to fall in love with other people:
And yet being happy with the same person forever requires finding ways to be happy with different versions of that person, and avoiding panic when the person you’re with becomes someone you dislike. Maybe you’ll enjoy the next person they become. Maybe the person you’re on your way to becoming will like this new partner better.
All in all, I think this should probably be required reading for those in long term relationships or who plan to get married. It’s not the most amazing thing I’ve ever read, but I laughed out loud at it and learned a lot from it.
A final quote:
“The hardest lesson in a marriage,” says my friend Asia, “is understanding the truth of the other person, believing in your heart that they are as real as you are, and their feelings matter as much. We all think that when something is wrong it will feel wrong to us, but that’s the biggest lie. So many things that your partner will see as betrayal will feel to you like nothing. One of the biggest challenges of marriage is to acknowledge that your own feelings aren’t the end of the story. We have to hold so many realities at once: here’s me, here’s you, here’s us, here’s the rest of the world.”