The Marriage Book Read Free

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
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    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