The Marriage Book (2 page)

• You don’t have to tell each other every thought you have.

• Never go to bed angry.

• Combine your bank accounts.

• You can trash your own relatives, but never your spouse’s.

• Have a
weekly date night.

• Share your love with the people around you.

Some of this advice was truly helpful. Some of it we even followed. But one piece of advice we obviously ignored was:

• Never work together.

Why did we tempt fate?

We thought it would be fun. Back on Valentine’s Day in 1997, a flirtation with the notion of editing a collection of love letters evolved into the idea of telling the century’s history in letters.
Letters of the Century: America, 1900–1999
was the result, and along the way, we reveled in the treasure hunt and the pride in a double byline. The book was enough of a success that it spawned another:
Women’s Letters: America from the Revolutionary War to the Present
, and in finding the voices of those women in that research—so often frank and confiding—we ended up thinking that a book about marriage would offer further emotional and admittedly voyeuristic pleasures. Reading about other people’s marriages, we figured, would be a lot like going to a series of dinner parties where the couples have a little too much to drink and you get to spend the ride home dishing about what’s really going on with them.

Frankly, we anticipated that lifting the veil (or the covers) would reveal more lost illusions than fairy-tale moments. What surprised us was the persistence with which the crazy optimism of marriage kept coming through, and the extent to which some of the most distant examples—whether in time or place—held a personal resonance for us. The story of Rachel Calof, for example, seemed thoroughly remote at first: a Russian immigrant homesteader, she was the bride in an arranged marriage who wrote about making lunch for her new husband by gathering garlic, grass, and mushrooms from the untamed North Dakota land, making dough from flour and prairie water, and coffee from ground barley.

Never was there a more delightful dinner than that one. The food was delectable and our shanty was filled with happiness. After we finished our meal, Abe insisted on knowing all the details of my accomplishment. As he listened, his gladness became tinged with a sadness that our condition was such that I was reduced to searching the prairie for food. But nothing could destroy the magic of that hour.

The struggle for the bare necessities of life was something we had luckily never had to experience during our marriage. But Rachel’s journal entry struck a very personal chord. We were moved by the resilience with which she had faced the necessary tasks and by the pride she felt in making
her spouse happy. Mostly we were reminded how the most sublime moments in a marriage can come at the most unexpected times. For us, it’s never been garlic soup on the prairie, but eating Indian takeout while watching
Mad Men
on TV has come pretty close.

Then, too, unless you count the adulterous heroine in one of Lisa’s novels (about whom Stephen has caught no end of flak), neither of us has had any personal experience with adultery. But this book’s entries about famous cheaters—from Hester Prynne to Yves Montand (“I think a man can have two, maybe three affairs. . . . After that, you’re cheating”), as well as the cheated—like Nora Ephron (“the man is capable of having sex with a venetian blind”)—turned out to have personal resonance as well. As cautionary tales, those entries steered us back to the inspirational examples of the two great Homers: the Greek poet who described the fidelity of Penelope as she wove and unwove a burial shroud to keep her suitors at bay; and Homer Simpson, who, when faced with the temptation of a hotel tryst with an office colleague, answered the catcalls of a bellhop with “All I’m gonna use this bed for is sleeping, eating, and maybe building a little fort.”

We are hopeful that readers of this book will be able to build or reaffirm their own marital credos from its pages. For what it’s worth, here are ours:

We believe that “to love and honor” really means to support and, if necessary, forcibly extract the best of each other. Not always simple. It doesn’t just mean remembering to inspire and cheer; it means remembering
what
to inspire and cheer—especially when your spouse falters or forgets. The great poet William Butler Yeats never got to marry the love of his life, but in 1909 he wrote a journal entry that perfectly described how a marriage could uphold this kind of promise:

In wise love each divines the high secret self of the other and, refusing to believe in the mere daily self, creates a mirror where the lover or the beloved sees an image to copy in daily life.

When asked recently what he considered his greatest accomplishment to be, Stephen King said: “Staying married.” We readily concede that many marriages go terribly, even tragically, wrong; that some should never have taken place; that many must end. But we also believe that the vow “as long as you both shall
love
” (which we heard at several weddings some years back) is not a vow but a timid, silly, New Age, cover-your-asses tautology. We believe in “as long as you both shall live”—in staying on the marriage journey if you possibly can. For all the probable detours and delays and wrong turns, the challenge and promise of this journey is perhaps best evoked by Tennyson in his 1867 poem “Marriage Morning”:

Heart, are you great enough

For a love that never tires?

O heart, are you great enough for love?

I have heard of thorns and briers.

Over the thorns and briers,

Over the meadows and stiles,

Over the world to the end of it

Flash for a million miles.

EDITORS’ NOTE

Given the nearly unlimited supply of information and commentary about marriage, our selection of entries for this volume was always going to be highly idiosyncratic. In our research, we tried to cast as wide a net as possible, conceding from the start that our choices would be dominated by text, by nonfiction, and by a decidedly Western perspective. We wanted examples from many media, centuries, and cultures, but because we were not attempting a history book, we felt free to ignore entries that might have filled out the historical or geographical picture but not met our other criteria. And our other criteria were extremely simple. Basically, the entries in this book had to do one of the following four things: advise us, inspire us, amuse us, or appall us.

We found treasures on eBay and Etsy, on Pinterest and HuffPo. With one former literature major and one former lawyer in the house, our bookshelves were their own happy hunting ground; add the fabulous ongoing liberal-arts educations of our children, and we didn’t have to go far to find some of our favorite entries. Invariably a number of other anthologies proved extremely valuable, and we’d like to acknowledge—and recommend—several in particular:
The Oxford Book of Marriage
, edited by Helge Rubinstein;
A Letter Does Not Blush
, edited by Nicholas Parsons; and
The World’s Greatest Letters
, edited by Michelle Lovric. Our search for material also led us through invaluable web databases, including the Ancient History Sourcebook, Early English Books Online, Gale’s 19th Century U.S. Newspapers, Google Books, HathiTrust, and ProQuest.

Whatever the source, when we found a keeper, we tried to track it to its original context, as you’ll see from the introductions to our entries. Sometimes that effort provided surprising results. The Internet is rife with sites dedicated to love, marriage, and weddings. But we soon discovered that a lot of the popular quotes they offer aren’t quite what they seem. One favorite wedding toast, for example, attributed to Oliver Wendell Holmes, is: “Love is the master-key that opens the gates of happiness.” Nice sentiment, except that the full quote turns out to be, “Love is the master-key that opens the gates of happiness, of hatred, of jealousy, and most easily of all, the gate of
fear.”
Likewise, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry is frequently cited for the romantic statement: “Love does not consist in gazing at each other but in looking together in the same direction.” Turns out he wrote it not about marriage, nor even about relationships, but about society at large, and citizens’ obligations to one another. The full quote? “Bound to our brothers by a common goal that is situated outside of ourselves, only then do we truly breathe; and our experience shows us that to love is not to look at each other but to look in the same direction.”

Sadly, we sought in vain for proof that Queen Victoria had ever instructed her daughter to “lie still and think of England” during conjugal sex. Similarly, Margaret Mead is cited all over the Internet for having said: “One of the oldest human needs is having someone to wonder where you are when you don’t come home at night.” We loved the sentiment but couldn’t find the source. And it turned out that Marabel Morgan, famous in the 1970s for advising women to greet their husbands wearing only Saran Wrap, never actually did so; it was a reader who got the idea from Morgan’s other dress-up tips.

As to the texts: except where noted, the ellipses represent our own omissions. Occasionally, for clarity, we have substituted em dashes for ellipses in the excerpts. Except when clarity is deeply compromised, we have kept all original spellings and punctuation, however idiosyncratic or outmoded. In an effort to avoid cluttering the text, we have not used “sic,” nor ellipses at the beginnings or ends of our entries, which often are taken from larger contexts; we are hopeful that in doing so, we have never misrepresented an author’s meaning.

A

ADAM AND EVE

GENESIS 2:18–25

Like so much of the Bible, the appearance of Eve in Genesis, Chapter 2, is subject to debate: Hadn’t God already created “male and female” in Chapter 1? Yet the verses below seem to portray the culmination of God’s creation in the union of Adam and Eve as the very first husband and wife.

The writing of Genesis has been the source of waves of scholarly discussion that date the book to a multitude of points in the centuries before the birth of Christ.

And the L
ORD
God said, It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him.

And out of the ground the L
ORD
God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.

And Adam gave names to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field; but for Adam there was not found an help meet for him.

And the L
ORD
God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept: and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof;

And the rib, which the L
ORD
God had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man.

And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.

Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh.

And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed.

JOHN MILTON

PARADISE LOST
, 1674

John Milton (1608–1674) was hardly the first author—English or otherwise—to produce a literary retelling of Adam and Eve’s fall. But
Paradise Lost
is, at more than ten thousand lines of free verse, certainly the longest version and generally viewed as the greatest. In Milton’s rendition, Adam plays the clearly dominant male role, and yet when Eve eats the apple, Adam follows suit, led by the interdependent nature of their bond. The lines below are spoken by Adam after he realizes what Eve has done.

Among Milton’s many other works were several treatises on divorce, way ahead of their time in suggesting that in addition to adultery and impotence, another acceptable reason for divorce might be incompatibility. Milton’s first version of the epic was published in 1667.

O fairest of Creation, last and best

Of all God’s Works, Creature in whom excell’d

Whatever can to sight or thought be form’d,

Holy, divine, good, amiable, or sweet!

How art thou lost, how on a sudden lost . . .

How can I live without thee, how forgo

Thy sweet Converse and Love so dearly join’d,

To live again in these wild Woods forlorn?

Should God create another
Eve
, and I

Another Rib afford, yet loss of thee

Would never from my heart; no no, I feel

The Link of Nature draw me: Flesh of Flesh,

Bone of my Bone thou art, and from thy State

Mine never shall be parted, bliss or woe.

MARK TWAIN

“EXTRACTS FROM ADAM’S DIARY,” 1893

Samuel Clemens (1835–1910), a.k.a. Mark Twain (see
Endings
), brought his signature style to a short, witty imagining of the Bible’s first couple.

After all these years, I see that I was mistaken about Eve in the beginning; it is better to live outside the Garden with her than inside it without her.