Bride-to-be gets plenty of warning
| • | The Wedding Planner's Web log |
By Tanya Bricking
Advertiser Staff Writer
"I advise against marriage," a colleague on his third one said as I walked out of the office the other day.
The first one or two don't take, he told me.
I explained it was my fiancé's second try, so maybe that was in my favor. Unless I keep writing about him. That could be my downfall.
"Hope springs eternal," my colleague said.
Umm, thanks.
It's amazing the warnings you get when you are about to be married.
A person with colder feet might be frozen by now.
I don't even know how to respond to most of it. I just let it sink in.
But, when provoked by an e-mail from an editor about a new book dissing the institution of marriage, I decided to call Laura Kipnis, the author of "Against Love: A Polemic" (Pantheon, $24), and see what was so wrong about tying the knot.
Kipnis, a professor of media studies at Northwestern University, says her book is more a political argument than one trying to give anyone advice about anything.
"I'm not trying to dissuade anyone against getting married," she said. "I think people are so desperate for advice that they're trying to make it into an advice book."
It's a good thing I'm not looking to her book for words of wisdom, because it says marriage takes too much work. She reminds her readers that half of all American marriages end in divorce. She praises adultery as "the nearest thing to a popular uprising against the regimes of contemporary coupledom." And although she admits that because it's a polemic, her argument is stylized and sometimes overstated, she says it's not meant to be tongue in cheek.
Then she congratulated me on my impending nuptials.
Umm, thanks.
Tanya Bricking writes about relationships for the Advertiser.
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