Wedding Toasts I'll Never Give

by Ada Calhoun

Inspired by her wildly popular New York Times essay The Wedding Toast I’ll Never Give, Ada Calhoun provides a funny (but not flip), smart (but not smug) take on the institution of marriage. Weaving intimate moments from her own married life with frank insight from experts, clergy, and friends, she upends expectations of total marital bliss to present a realistic—but ultimately optimistic—portrait of what marriage is really like. There will be fights, there will be existential angst, there may even be affairs; sometimes you’ll look at the person you love and feel nothing but rage. Despite it all, Calhoun contends, staying married is easy: just don’t get divorced.

Wedding Toasts I’ll Never Give offers bracing straight talk to the newly married and honors those who have weathered the storm. This exploration of modern marriage is at once wise and entertaining, a work of unexpected candor and literary grace.

Genres: Nonfiction, Essays, Memoir, Audiobook, Marriage, Humor, Self Help

192 pages, Hardcover

First published May 16, 2017

About the author

Ada Calhoun is the author of the novel Crush. Her memoir Also a Poet was named one of the best books of 2022 by the New York Times, NPR, and The Washington Post. Prior books include New York Times–bestseller Why We Can't Sleep, Wedding Toasts I'll Never Give, and St. Marks Is Dead.

Reviews

[Brandice · Rating 3 out of 5]

Wedding Toasts I’ll Never Give was much different than I was expecting. When I first heard of this book a few years ago, I assumed it would be funny, or at least have a solid slice of sarcasm. I actually found it to have neither - maybe just a sliver of sarcasm, but it was not what I anticipated. Not outright depressing, but a “gloom” factor was definitely present.

The easiest solution to making a marriage work according to Calhoun’s book? Don’t get divorced. She speaks on observations from her own marriage, conversations with friends, and a collection of other sources. Some of it was memories, some of it advice, Some what ifs, and a solid focus on infidelity.

A lot of this book felt piece-y. This jumpy, scattered musings style of book is Not. For. Me. With the amount of books I’ve read, you’d think I’d know better by now. However, this one did take a positive turn - Slowly but surely, I became interested in Calhoun’s story and wanted to see it through. I hadn’t heard of her prior to finding out about Wedding Toasts I’ll Never Give, so I was not aware that it was inspired by an earlier column she wrote until I finished it and read the acknowledgments.

”Staying married is a decision, an active choice at once creative and brave. It can be rewarding, distressing, mystifying, enlivening, or all those things at once.”

[Diane · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a charming memoir about marriage and what it takes to stay married. The humorous advice commonly given is, "Don't get divorced," and most of this book is about how that joke is both true and also ridiculously oversimplified.

Ada Calhoun begins the book by admitting she doesn't give toasts at weddings:

I prefer to sit quietly under the twinkling lights, enjoying other people's efforts. Some are perfect mini-sermons — but better, because at the end there's champagne. Some go rattling off the rails, and that's fun, too. At a wedding I attended recently, one groomsman paused in the middle of his toast and — unable to remember the rest of what he meant to say — just sat down ...

Finding something new or helpful to say about marriage feels borderline impossible. "It's difficult to think about marriage," says a friend married for thirty years. "It's like trying to describe your own face." And so we offer clichéd advice like the dubious Ephesians paraphrase "Don't go to bed angry." (Personally, I have avoided many fights by going to bed angry and waking up to realize that I'd just been tired.)

Now in the second decade of my second marriage, I can't look newlyweds in the eye and promise they'll never regret marrying ... I adore my husband and plan to be with him forever. I also want to run screaming from the house because the person I promised to love all the days of my life insists on falling asleep to Frasier reruns.

"The first twenty years are the hardest," an older woman once told me. At the time I thought she was joking. She was not.

And this is why I don't give wedding toasts — because I'd probably end up saying that even good marriages sometimes involving flinging a remote control at the wall.

If you enjoyed reading that passage, you will probably like this memoir. The book is a mix of amusing stories from the author's life and advice about marriage, culled from friends and literature. It's a relatively short book, which makes sense because it was originally an article in The New York Times, and then Ada had the chance to turn it into a book.

I often smiled and chuckled while reading the book, and would recommend it to others. Finally, I have to agree with Ada: I'm not giving any wedding toasts.

More Good Quotes
"The main problem with marriage may be that it's not better than the rest of life. Suffering occurs in marriage because we think it will be different — purer, deeper, gentler — than other relationships. We expect our partners and ourselves to be better — more patient, more faithful, more generous — than we are. We believe ourselves exceptional, first in the depth of our passion and then in the breadth of our failure."

"By staying married, we give something to ourselves and to others: hope. Hope that in steadfastly loving someone, we ourselves, for all our faults, will be loved; that the broken world will be made whole. 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."

"Dating is poetry. Marriage is a novel. There are times, maybe years, that are all exposition."

"The most persuasive argument for monogamy: it lets you keep all your inside jokes in one place."

[Elyse Walters · Rating 3 out of 5]

Library overdrive Audiobook…read by the author Ada Calhoun
3 hours and 17 minutes

“The Wedding Toasts I’ll Never Give”, by Ada Calhoun came as a recommendation from a friend -(thank you Ellyn)….
Plus … I had listened to Ada Calhoun read another book awhile back called:
“Why We Can’t Sleep” (had enjoyed it), so I thought,
“Great, not too long (3 hours goes by fast, walking, soaking, cleaning)”…
But…
truthfully I was bored.
Yes… there was humor, personal stories, explorations about marriage from many angles—a type of ‘couple therapy’ even….
and would be a great book for young couples who were newly married-
but I’ve been married almost 43 years (next month’s anniversary coming up)…
it’s not as though I haven’t been around the block a few times —(I could probably write a lofty sermon about healthy marriages myself)
so …
although I can appreciate the candor of ups and downs of marriage ….which the author addresses… (she does a fine job with the balance of humor and seriousness),….
there really wasn’t anything ‘freshly-new’ to me.

My personal final thoughts:
“Being Bored”….reading an advice book about marriage is pretty cool: as in HIGH FIVE for me….
I’m honestly grateful for our marriage—
I treasure Paul - us - daily!
We still ‘like’ each other lots!! We’re both independent, yet emotionally connected in the areas that count….
We know how to do marriage in ways that work for us!!

I figure ‘boredom’ is a HIGH GRADE … of success.

Happy is … as happy is!!! 🕺🏼💃

[Carolyn Marie · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting insight into marriage, relationships, and family.

This book didn’t resonate with me, but I still enjoyed thinking about the topics discussed.

[Rene Denfeld · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a deceptive book. You might think from the title it will be cutesy, but it is not. Instead it is filled with warmth and wisdom—not just about marriage but all kinds of relationships, from parenting to friendships. Calhoun writes with grace and humor. She dismantles the cultural expectations of relationships deftly, but leaves plenty of room for hope. I often think of this book when navigating the rough but rewarding waters of foster parenting.

[Sara · Rating 2 out of 5]

I think I'm definitely in the minority here, but this book was just not funny or 'gosh this girl is so smart about marriage and she's cheeky about it too!' for me.

I found the second chapter, or toast, to be the best; the one that I really understood and felt strong, positive feelings towards. It made me feel optimistic, rather than depressed and out of my depth about marriage, reading as a single girl in her younger twenties.

A lot of this information about how marriage is a struggle and 86.9% of the time you'll want to kill your partner that you made the conscious decision to spend your life with seemed kind of ridiculous. For some reason, I find that if marriage sucks so hard, we, as a species, would stop doing it, but we don't and we won't. Maybe I'm naive. Maybe it's the way American marriages are supposed to be. I don't really care, I'd just rather find someone who I don't feel like smothering in their sleep to spend the rest of my days with. Yes, I know marriage is not about endlessly blissful couples that never argue, but it can't be as dire as Calhoun makes it out to be.

Moreover, the author didn't read as a very likeable person, and more often than not I was left wondering, why on earth does her husband stay with her? Why on earth does she stay with him? Ms. Calhoun made herself and her partner seem like people I'd never want to know.

However, what this book did provide was examples of the type of person I never, ever want to be, and the type of people I never, ever want to settle down with.

Thank you to the publishers for sending me a copy of this book to review. I'm sorry I didn't like it more.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's a book filled with marriage advice - which clearly dooms this book to a purgatory of well-intentioned bromides and Pinterest worthy quotes suitable for placement over a picture of a sun dappled tropical beach. But Ada Calhoun is far smarter and way more real-talk than that.

Her advice on not getting divorced? Don’t get divorced. The idea you’d take a bullet for your husband or wife - that bullet is infidelity. No easy advice here - and she backs it up with candid vulnerability and a courageous willingness to share her own experiences.

It's an antidote to the heartfelt admissions couples make at weddings. Ludicrous bargains, impossible standards and smaltzy analogies. When she shares some hard won advice that the first 20 years are the hardest, she's not kidding. She's smart, funny and willing to throw open the doors of her marriage and let us snoop around inside without having tidied everything up first. Hers is messy, chaotic, broken in places, hopelessly mundane in others but still home.

[Scott · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wish Ada Calhoun and I were actual friends, because she's smart and clever and perceptive and likes to talk for a long time about things like the history of the East Village and how the fact that NYC is always changes isn't necessarily "bad" (this was in the fantastic St. Marks Is Dead) and, now, in the slight but effortlessly engaging and insightful Wedding Toasts, about the complicated nature of love and sex and relationships--specifically, in the context of marriage--and what they do to people's bodies and minds and emotions. AND how maybe, if we can overcome our instincts, we can actually make happy, satisfying, LONG marriage a reality. Most of the "advice" (couched in more interesting terms) is a bit obvious--it boils down to acceptance, gratitude, and stick-with-it-ness--but that doesn't mean it isn't correct, nor that's it not worth hearing again, even for the hundredth time.

Calhoun structures Wedding Toasts as a kind of relationship memoir, with each chapter (or, toast) dealing with a different crisis (eg, emotional and/or physical infidelity) or success (eg, staying with a moment long enough to experience the joy in it) in her marriage with Neal Medlyn aka the legendary Champagne Jerry. She also casually talk to tons of friends and adds their experiences to the mix. And she dives into history every once in a while, pulling quotes from long-ago guides to see how people have thought about the institution over the ages (spoiler: pretty much the same).

I was married for 10 years, now divorced for more than 12, have two amazing daughters and no current significant others, not even dates. I also never clicked through to read Calhoun's "viral" Modern Love column until its inclusion here (not even sure which one it was, to be honest). But I do love romance, and clearly have a crush on Calhoun, so even though the most obvious target for this book is decidedly not me, it still gave me goose bumps and brimming-with-tears eyes (and made me think) enough times to warrant a full five stars.

[B · Rating 2 out of 5]

Tom Hanks told me to read this book.

Bold move, Tom Hanks.

Bad move, Tom Hanks.

Wedding Toasts I'll Never Give is a collection of anecdotes wherein Ada Calhoun shares that she cheats on her husband sometimes, but then flips out when another woman finds him attractive.

Girl gets points for being honest in a world where people like to pretend that, unless you never fight and never think of someone else naked, your marriage is a failure. We're all animals: we are going to fight and we are going to want other people - but no one likes to admit that out loud. So thank you, Ms. Calhoun, for beginning that conversation. But your navel-gazing, self-aggrandizing bullshit is nothing short of infuriating, so that severely undercut any good this book could have done.

Thanks for nothing, Tom Hanks.

[Janssen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not my usual, but quick and thought-provoking.

[Lindsay Detwiler · Rating 5 out of 5]

"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's frank, eye-opening, and deeply thought-provoking Wedding Toasts I'll Never Give truly sucked me in from the first page. I'm not a huge fan of books that give marriage advice because in reality, I've found them to usually be condescending in nature or too "prim and proper." Ada Calhoun shattered all of those ideas I had about marriage books with this blunt but real look at what marriage truly is all about.

Ada's writing style is engaging and exciting. She weaves her own anecdotes with advice from experts and experiences of her friends carefully together. In a way, each chapters is its own standalone story, but when you finish the book, all of the chapters weave seamlessly together into a quilt of knowledge about married life. I felt like Ada put into words so many things I feel as a married woman but can't quite express--or don't have the courage to. She is honest and raw in her revelations, letting the reader into her marriage from a unique vantage point and allowing us all to benefit from her wisdom and her mistakes.

I love that she never has a "know it all" attitude about marriage. She doesn't claim to be an absolute expert. Instead, she presents information and various perspectives, allowing the reader to digest it at his or her pace. I could connect with so many of the stories in the book and loved the humorous asides presented.

I also think Ada Calhoun approaches marriage from a courageous perspective. Few are willing to admit some of the difficult realities she does while also holding the stance that marriage is worth it. I love that she doesn't claim marriage is all rosy, but she also doesn't claim that marriage is worthless, horrible, or hopeless. She strikes the perfect balance, showing the reader that all marriages are a struggle, but are also worth it. She gives the reader permission to be imperfect while also inspiring the reader to work hard at marriage.

There are so many beautiful quotes in this book that made me reflect on my own relationship. I really liked the section on J.R. R. Tolkien and the phrase "companions in shipwreck not guiding stars." What a powerful statement and reminder; the book is filled with tons of valuable phrases like these.

Ada Calhoun presents her ideas in a skillfully crafted story that doesn't feel "preachy" or "overly academic." Instead, I felt like I was talking to a close but wise friend about love, marriage, and all of the things so many people are afraid to say.

Thank you, Ada Calhoun, for being brave enough to say the things about married life so many shy away from. Thank you for giving us permission to accept that we may never be the perfect wife, husband, or couple, but that is perfectly beautiful and okay in its own way.

I recommend this book for anyone who is married, has been married, or is considering marriage. I think this should be a wedding gift for every newly married couple because it is just that good, real, and important.

[Kathryn Santos · Rating 1 out of 5]

Trash. She really hates her husband. All the good take always were quotes from incredible authors, not her.

This was depressing to read.

[Terzah · Rating 5 out of 5]

The idea that my marriage could end terrifies me. Yes, I know many people are caught in marriages that *should* end, and that a marriage ending isn't the end of the world--people recover and even thrive afterwards. Nonetheless, I love my husband, and one of the great goals of my life is to be with him and only him, truly, until death do us part. I believe in the promise I made to him almost 13 years ago. And it makes me sad, every time, when the marriages of family members, friends and acquaintances end.

Enter this great collection of essays on what marriage is really like, the good and the bad. I loved the author's candor, and I loved how universal the sentiments behind her particular experiences felt, even when they weren't experiences I have shared or want to share. There's a lot of erudition here, too--she quotes rabbis, priests and J.R.R. Tolkien, among others. But her own writing also holds up well: "....a marriage is made up...of moments of grace...when you suddenly see the person you've always known just as you've always known them but also as someone surprising, someone brand-new."

Of a wedding she attended, she writes (in a toast she says she *would* give): "Remember this--how surprising and miraculous and startling grace feels. Especially remember it when your wife tells you you've done everything wrong or your husband loses his passport or when your attractive colleague sits next to you at a work conference or for whatever other reason you feel the urge to get on a plane and fly as far away as possible. You need something in those moments to hold on to, so you can remember why it might be better to stay."

And then there is this one: “By staying married, we give something to ourselves and to others: hope. Hope that in steadfastly loving someone, we ourselves, for all our faults, will be loved; that the broken world will be made whole. 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.”

I recommend this to anyone who has been married for a long time, who has been married just a little while or who preparing to get married. It's not all romance and rainbows and chemistry, but that's not really what lasting love and marriage are about anyway (though I do believe if you send the kids away sometimes, you'll find the romance and rainbows and chemistry come back!).

[Snem · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some of this was charming, some of this was funny, all of it seemed honest. Marriage is complicated because relationships are complicated. At first glance this seemed like advice or self-help, but really it’s more like a memoir with anecdotes from other people mixed in.

It was a little preachy, it was a little doom and gloom, but I think my main problem with this book is that it lacks structure. It feels like stray thoughts about marriage were just plucked from the air and jotted down. I didn’t find this as funny as most did.

I should mention that I’m not married and have no desire to be so maybe much of this was lost on me. It seemed candid and I wasn’t at all alienated by the subject. It was good, not great and a quick read.

[Laura Jean · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is NOT a book to give newlyweds.

Tomorrow, I will be 3 months into my second marriage. I loved it though perhaps that's because my first marriage was over a decade long, so I am familiar with what a long term marriage entails. But for those newlywed and still full of young love and hope and without the disillusionment that reality inevitably brings, this book is not for you.

It is for anyone else who has been married for a while. The author looks at marriage and the struggle of marriage. The reasons they fail and the choice we make to keep it alive. It's a great book, full of wisdom from ancient authors to Tolkien. I truly enjoyed it.

[Kaya · Rating 3 out of 5]

I don’t know what I was expecting but I wasn’t ready for straight up marriage advice.

Calhoun presents seven personal essays, framed as "toasts.” Each essay mixes components of memoir and self-help, drawing on insight from Calhoun's own marriage as well as the wise thoughts of priests, J.R.R Tolkien, Sanskrit texts, married couples, and many others... almost to the point of being “piece-y.”

Wedding Toasts I’ll Never Give offers an honest 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.”

[Samcwright · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’ve never been married. But I’ve had a lot of discussions and heard a BOATLOAD of advice from married friends. I’ve also observed and listened to them as they’ve gone through the highs and lows of their marriages. I’ve sat with them through divorce. I don’t read many marriage books, but this is one of the best I’ve read on what I’ve heard and observed. It’s a short book. And you may not agree with certain comments (especially her approach to her husband’s affair), but I suspect the book will resonate with many who have been married longer than 3 years (possibly less than that) and help everyone just fee a little more comfortable in how they feel about their marriage. I definitely recommend it.

[Suep · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a witty? read about marriages and the challenges faced. I liked it; didn't love it.

[Pia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved this. It's a lovely elegy to marriage, why we choose people to stay with for the rest of our lives and why the best marriages are irregular and strangely shaped.

[magdalena · Rating 3 out of 5]

didn't make me want to get married but it also didn't make me not want to get married. the biggest takeaway from it was probably to do with navigating relationships in your adult life which is something i'm always eager to read about even if i dont really get on with the book as a whole.

it started off strong with a nice balance of personal anecdotes mixed with an analytical approach to the subject but quickly became a collection of essays on the author's own marriage and family life, neither of which i can relate to and so attempts have been made to find analogies between that and my own experiences. it can only get you so far.

it makes sense that this book was inspired by one of calhoun's essays for the new york times's "modern love" column but it doesn't quite work as a long-form piece, at least for me. memoirs structured in such a way can sometimes become pretty repetitive, which is something this one has also fallen victim to. found myself astonished at the author's take on monogamy, infidelity, having feelings for other people despite being committed to someone etc. as it was almost presented as something that is bound to happen sooner or later in any relationship, so whilst i appreciated the realistic approach to a mututal long-term bond, with all its bumps, challenges, idle moments and the hard-work that goes into it, I could not get past the negative (or at the very least drab) overall outlook on marriage. she made sure to write about the beautiful bits and things she's grateful for, but i'd rather look at things through the prism of the good stuff that happens and face the challenges with that in mind.

2.75/5

[Nathan Bartos · Rating 4 out of 5]

I think reading this while I'm planning a wedding was great timing, as there's some really practical and useful advice, though wrapped in a very honest and not always hopeful package, so I understand why they wouldn't be great fits for wedding toasts/speeches. Sometimes funny, sometimes emotional, and always bluntly honest. A great collection of essays on marriage and partnership.

[Rachel · Rating 3 out of 5]

I thought this book would be funny- I guess I didn’t quite realize what I was getting into. Some interesting musings, but a bit too much moving all around for my taste.

[Megan · Rating 1 out of 5]

Remind me to never get married. I thought this was going to be a heartwarming memoir on beautiful wedding toasts and grand stories of marriage. Turns out it’s a woman who says nothing positive in 200 pages and claims everyone who is ever married cheats. Maybe in 50 years when I’m jaded by my own marriage this memoir will hit. But for now it reads as a bitter woman trapped in an unloving marriage of her own devices.

[Cat · Rating 4 out of 5]

Marriage is hard. It's not glamorous to talk about at the wedding, but I liked this author's premise of what could/should be said but isn't usually discussed. I don't agree with her on some of what is or isn't healthy in a marriage, but I enjoyed her exploration of what had been hard and what's been helpful in her own relationships.

[Laura Kealey · Rating 4 out of 5]

I picked up this book after reading a couple of articles by Ada Calhoun in the Modern Love section of the New York Times. I really like her writing and her observations about relationships and marriage. The essays are both funny and thoughtful. Maybe I am old fashioned (and I am clearly not living nearly as an exciting life as the author where she seems to often have to fight off temptation), but I did not really relate to the parts where she discussed levels of infidelity. Nevertheless, I enjoyed the majority of the book and underlined many parts despite it being short in length. Here are some that I will likely refer back to:

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.

Dating is poetry. Marriage is a novel. There are times, maybe years, that are all exposition....Exposition establishes the plot. The boring parts don't last forever. In retrospect, they aren't even boring.

[A]t various points in your marriage, you will look at this person and feel only rage. You will gaze at this man you once adored and think - it sure would be nice to have this whole place to myself.

My trick for not letting this poison our relationship as much as it could requires engaging in what I call "marriage math" - an advanced placement calculus designed to quash resentment.

As married people, we dwell on a spectrum between happy and unhappy, in love and out of love, and we move back and forth on that line decade by decade, year by year, week by week, even hour by hour.

Nostalgia - which generally goes hand in hand with resentment toward change - is a natural human impulse. And yet being happy with the same person forever requires finding ways to be happy with different versions of that person.

We do well to remember that what we do for a living, what hobbies we prefer, what we weigh, what kind of mood we're in - it's most likely temporary....Spread out over the years, I'm a harem.

In my head, I began to mentally compose a book titled "All the Problems with You: A Definitive List".

One of the biggest challenges of marriage is to acknowledge that your own feelings aren't the end of the story.

And while not about marriage, I thought this was an insightful quote about suicide: Suicide doesn't always happen all at once; sometimes the person leaves the world little by little.

[Ellyn Lem · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book illustrates why used bookstores are the best. I wandered into one with my son near the University of Minnesota campus looking for nothing in particular, especially not a non-fictional account of marriage. And, yet, the title intrigued me and the first page, and the next, and I went ahead and thought, "What the heck? One more for the pile." And then, recently, I picked it up and was drawn in to Calhoun's honest and insightful look at marriage from so many angles, including her own. The wisdom never stops and her style is extremely engaging--wrapping anecdotes from her relationships and others she has researched with great minds taking on this subject for hundreds of years. One of my favorite aspects of the book is a part that talks about problems one might have staying 100% on board with one's partner all the time--the frustrations of living with one person and expecting all needs to be met with that person; she talks about having a number of complaints one moment, but, then, there are the "and yet" reflections that make the undesirable parts manageable. There are too many quotes I loved from the essays here--toasts that she will never give at weddings because she might be perceived as a killjoy--to select just a few. I texted many of them to my husband because I appreciated that Calhoun ultimately fights for marriage while recognizing why it at times feel impossible to continue. As she says in the conclusion: staying married is a decision, an active choice at once creative and brave. It can be rewarding, distressing, mystifying, enlivening, or all those things at once. Just writing these words makes me want to start the book over again to relive it. How often does that happen?

[Jenna · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some strong essays, and the author's surprisingly frank discussion of marriage and monogamy is refreshing, but overall I found the tone to be smug and self-satisfied. Despite having married and divorced in her early twenties before entering her current marriage at 28, Calhoun seems to view herself as some kind of marriage guru, and her writing suggests that she views marriage as a stepping stone into adulthood, something single or merely "coupled" but unmarried people are incapable of fully experiencing.

I was disturbed by this interview with a "Father Hartt":
"So many people I know by all rights should have been married. They're sad. They're alone. They're hurt. They're angry at all the sexual passing along...So let's have another reason for marriage. Even people who are divorced have a certain dignity around the fact that that had happened." He goes on to discuss the idea that marriage is a public recognition of the "preciousness" of individuals and their unions, and that the "cultural disposability" that never-married people may experience may be alienating - but I honestly can't tell whether he (and Calhoun) are being critical of this situation, or viewing it as another point in favor of marriage. More time could have been spent developing this concept.

[Katie · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was disappointing. I like the concept of this book- taking an honest look at the realities of marriage- but Ada Calhoun is not the person to write it. She presents the realities of her marriage as if they're typical of loving marriages when they're...really not. It's not normal to kiss someone else when you're in a monogamous marriage. It's not normal to kick your husband out because he's having an affair and reconcile later. It's not normal for both people in a marriage to have married and divorced other people at ridiculously early ages. Basically, while her points about things like recognizing that your spouse will change a lot over the course of the marriage and having to deal with your spouse's mistakes are valid, her own marriage sounds pretty awful to me. My brother-in-law's friend once confessed that he was only happy with his girlfriend 60% of the time (thankfully, they broke up and he's married to someone else now), which isn't even a passing grade in relationship happiness. But Ada seems like someone who would rationalize that 60% is more than half the time and continue with a 40% miserable relationship.

[Gillian · Rating 1 out of 5]

I listened to the audiobook of this, and I, like others have mentioned, thought this would be a funny satirical book about marriage. Wrong!

Before I knew it we were on a one way track discussing kissing other people when married and comparing marriage to quoting smoking. My favorite part was when she expressed her desire for someone to state in their wedding vows that they love their soon to be spouse so much they they will NOT go and flirt with another attractive person. Not my cup of tea at all but honestly it was only a 3 hr 17 min audiobook and it was still less painful to listen to than other things. However, this book has left a significantly bad taste in my mouth for Calhoun’s writing that I am extremely worried to read any of her other books.

[Zachary Littrell · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not really as funny as the title made me hope. It's really a memoir of Calhoun's own marriage with some quotes intersprinkled. Her takeaway seems to be...marriage isn't really fun, and you make it work by basically not getting divorced. Or, "How do you avoid affairs or wanting to murder your spouse? By not doing those things." Which, sure. I guess. But I dunno how terribly useful this is when it's the marriage equivalent of the "Doctor, my arm hurts when I do this" joke.

That said, Calhoun's a pretty good writer, so I went through the whole thing anyway. It's well-meaning, if not exactly ground-breaking.