Wedding Toasts I'll Never Give

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In her autobiographical collection of essays, Calhoun writes candidly about the beautiful struggle that is marriage. Rarely do we acknowledge that a marriage can be miserable and maddening and humbling and still filled with love and happiness. Calhoun does so with humor and finesse. Recommended By Moses M., Powells.com

Poignant and witty essays on the beautiful complexity of 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, acclaimed for her provocative essays in the New York Times Modern Love and Lives columns, 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."

"By turns hilariously candid, thought-provoking, and romantic, Wedding Toasts I’ll Never Give gave me a richer view of the joys and challenges of marriage — especially my own marriage." Gretchen Rubin, New York Times best-selling author of The Happiness Project

"Ada Calhoun is the friend we all need — the one who lets us behind the curtain of her good marriage to help us better understand our own. She’s smart, funny, and, best of all, willing to bare all." Emma Straub, New York Times best-selling author of Modern Lovers

"Ada Calhoun has written the definitive meditation on marriage in all of its mystery and imperfection. It should be required reading for anyone considering it, and highly recommended for those who want to be reminded of why they did it in the first place." Molly Ringwald

Ada Calhoun has written for the New York Times, New York magazine, and the New York Post. Her book St. Marks Is Dead was named a New York Times Editors’ Choice and a Boston Globe Best Book of the Year.

My new book is an essay collection called Wedding Toasts I’ll Never Give. In 2015, I wrote a Modern Love essay about fighting with my husband of 12 years while we were attending a bunch of starry-eyed weddings. I kept sitting there thinking about all the things I wanted to say to the newlyweds...

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