They may go together like a horse and carriage, as the song has it. But love, when it's meant to last a lifetime, can be messy, painful, even deadly dull. Two new books offer a complicated take on marriage that's much more genuine--and more interesting--than the traditional fairy-tale narrative.
Essayist Ada Calhoun admits the truth: marriage is foundational and nourishing, but it's also frustrating and just plain hard. Calhoun's essay collection Wedding Toasts I'll Never Give (Norton, $24.95) delves into the facets of marriage that starry-eyed couples don't always want to acknowledge. These include paying (literally) for a spouse's mistakes, daydreaming about other partners (and other lives) and slogging through what she bluntly calls "the boring parts" of wedded bliss. "Dating is poetry," Calhoun writes. "Marriage is a novel. There are times, maybe years, that are all exposition." Her mock "toasts" brim with wit, wisdom and gut-level honesty about the trials of staying married and the quiet rewards of remaining faithful, however imperfectly. 
Renowned couples therapist Esther Perel explores a more dramatic but no less sticky aspect of long-term commitment--infidelity and its fallout--in The State of Affairs (Harper, $26.99). Drawing on her years of work with couples (of various ethnicities and sexual orientations) who have dealt with infidelity, Perel explores the reasons people seek extramarital relationships and analyzes their effects. Despite the pain they cause, she insists that affairs provide "a window, like none other, into the crevices of the human heart." Her clients' stories have many different endings, but most, encouragingly, are still in progress: an affair can expose the fault lines in a marriage, but doesn't have to mean total destruction. Both Calhoun and Perel present clear-eyed yet ultimately hopeful perspectives on marriage as a tough, flexible and ultimately life-giving endeavor. --Katie Noah Gibson, blogger at Cakes, Tea and Dreams
