Wedding Toasts I'll Never Give
By Ada Calhoun
2017
First Published
3.73
Average Rating
192
Number of Pages
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.”
Avg Rating
3.73
Number of Ratings
3,785
5 STARS
24%
4 STARS
37%
3 STARS
30%
2 STARS
8%
1 STARS
2%
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Author
Ada Calhoun
Author · 8 books
Ada Calhoun is the author of Also a Poet, named one of the best books of 2022 by the New York Times, NPR, and The Washington Post; longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Nonfiction; and featured on the TODAY Show and PBS News Hour. Other books include New York Times–bestseller Why We Can't Sleep, Wedding Toasts I'll Never Give, and St. Marks Is Dead.
