From the bestselling author of Home Comforts comes the âtimelyâ (The New Yorker), âfascinating, and morally serious,â (The Wall Street Journal) story of our wedding vowsâwhat they mean and why they still matter.
In the West, marrying is so thoroughly identified with ceremonial promises that âtaking vowsâ is a synonym for getting married. So, itâs a surprise to realize that this custom is actually a historical and anthropological oddity. Most of the world, for most of history, married without making promises. And thereâs a reason for that. Marriage by vow presupposes free choice, and free choice makes a love-match possible. It is a very modern arrangement.
Vows is both a moving memoir of two marriages and an âilluminatingâ (Publishers Weekly, starred review) meditation on marriage itself. Cheryl Mendelson tackles the sociology of commitment through our most traditional promises and shows why they endure. In considering the kind of marriage these vows entail, she helps answer some of lifeâs most urgent and personal questions: Could I, would I, or should I make these promises to someone? Using history and literature, the book describes the parameters of the behavior that traditional vows promise and, in doing so, answers a whole series of other questions: Why did wedding-by-vow arise only in the West? Why are they recited in weddings around the world today? Why have these vows lasted for nearly a thousand years? Why does the kind of marriage promised in the vows survive?