Ironically, in a single week I checked out the absolute best book about modern marriage I've read to date, and also the worst. Well, ok, the second-to-worst. That wedding traditions book was far more dreadful.

First, the bad: The Conscious Bride sounded like a thoughtful book of anecdotes by women who had experienced something other than unending joy during their wedding planning. Instead, the author (who only appears to have interviewed a small group of women) includes excerpts from interviews, then offers her own commentary and analysis with a mixture of New Age therapy buzzwords and Greek mythology. I managed to skim about 10 pages before flinging it across the room.

Here's a sample of this woman's bizarre writing, from the first chapter:

Congratulations! If you are holding this book in your hands, it is because you have recently become engaged. Either a proposal was offered to whcih you responded with a "Yes!" or you decided together that it was time to take the next step and move your commitment toward marriage.

This is the first line of the book. Bearing in mind that she continually refers to her audience as "the bride," I guess this means there are no women in her universe who propose to their men.

During my wedding journal I realized that the loss, confusion, and depression that live in the wedding's underbelly have been excluded from the bridal affair.

Wow! I didn't know weddings had underbellies. Is that like a reverse bustle? Good grief.

Then we have the ethereally beautiful A Walk Down the Aisle: Notes on a Modern Wedding, by Kate Cohen. This book could not be more different from The Conscious Bride. Cohen is an intelligent, eloquent woman, and rather than whining about how no one understood how alone she felt while planning her wedding, she explores the mature feelings of confusion, happiness, exasperation, fear, love, and ambivalence she felt when planning her marriage to her significant other.

The best thing about A Walk Down the Aisle, for me, is the way it addresses the issues many women today are coping with. For instance, the author and her boyfriend had been together for years before marrying. They lived together. They had thought a lot about the meaning of getting married before deciding to do so. The issues in this book are far more serious, and relate much more to what it means to be married, not just to get married, than any other book I've found.

Here's a section which I found particularly illuminating, since it summed up many of my own feelings about why I found I wanted to be married to my then-boyfriend. While shopping with her boyfriend for a new car, Cohen felt annoyed that the car salesman tended to ignore her, because her role in the transaction wasn't clear.

"Until then I would have been amused by his confusion; I would have enjoyed wearing the disguise of that hard-shifting, poor-handling word, girlfriend. I would have loved the fact that he couldn't properly categorize me. But now it frustrated me. Didn't he know how important I was? Couldn't he tell I was Adam's life partner, his better half, his ..."

"It was then that I yearned for the word wife."

The marriage vows Cohen and her husband wrote are so moving that I reproduce them here:

We promise each other: I will turn to you when I am in need, and care for you when you are.

We promise each other: I will take strength from who you are, forgive who you are not, and remind you who you want to be.

We promise each other: I will try to remember, whether sunk in sorrow or distracted by the day-to-day, what I feel at this moment--my sense of good fortune, my sheer joy at being with you.

We say to each other: Knowing my family and friends surround me, knowing who I am and who I want to be--with this strength and certainty I say to you: I have only one life, and it is only so long, and I choose to spend it with you.

Posted by Hilary at September 3, 2004 05:24 PM