Tough Love

...It's hard to imagine a reflective person reading through this chapter and failing to emerge slightly sobered, his consciousness raised about the destructive potentialities of the married state—but his awareness heightened, too, that some ways of managing it hold more promise than others...

...Where the Kasses, alarmed by the confusion about "relationships" they had long observed among their students, compiled a collection that seems to hold up the marital ideal and cry, "Look here...

...Mack and Blanken-horn's book differs from the Kasses', too, in being a shade less highbrow and approaching its task from a slightly different angle...

...Mack and Blankenhorn end the chapter with an entirely practical selection: a fifteen-page excerpt from The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work (1999), by John Gottman, a psychologist who has spent years studying the interactions of stable couples...

...The Kasses concentrated on Claudia Winkler is a managing editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD...

...And this, one suspects, is the purpose of all the chapters in The Book of Marriage...

...It is loaded with quotations from figures in church history acknowledging marriage to be both a trial and a peril...

...While the Kasses' selections were all Western, the new anthology includes pieces from Asian, African, and South American sources, from Hindu and Islamic scriptures as well as thoroughly secular thinkers...

...If a good marriage is slavery," asked Ambrose, fourth-century bishop of Milan, "what is a bad one in which they cannot sanctify each other but cause each other to perish...

...Do it thoughtfully...

...He urges the husband to distinguish between "infirmity" on his wife's part, which is to be borne, and "malice," which must be counteracted...

...Divided into ten chapters, the new book covers such subjects as reasons to marry, intermarriage, money, the headship of the family, and the challenges of old age...

...We see her keeping up appearances before the world but inwardly desperate, and spiritually "in as complete a solitude as a man in a lighthouse...

...Luther fears that by "softheartedness," the young man has "turned into tyranny that Christian service" that a husband owes his wife...

...We find ourselves grieving that so many perish on it and seeing so few travel it in the right way...

...courtship and the decision to marry, with just one of their seven sections devoted to married life itself...

...Take care...

...Just a year : after Leon and Amy i Kass of the University of ; Chicago produced Wing to Wing, Oar to \ Oar: Readings on Courting and \ Marrying, a sophisticated six-hundred- ; page collection of texts from literature and philosophy, what place can there possibly be for The Book of Marriage: The Wisest Answers to the Toughest Questions, edited by Dana Mack and David Blankenhorn, a volume of similar length and format, drawing on many of the same classic sources, and all to the same end of spurring reflection on our most basic ; human arrangement and social institution...

...And where the Kasses' own passionate commitment to the traditional marital ideal was palpable in their book, Mack and Blankenhorn stress their determination not to be starry-eyed: "What we have tried to achieve," they write, "is a source-reader on marriage as realistic about its rewards as about its perils, uplifting in its assertion of the viability of the institution of marriage in contemporary society, yet cautious and aware of the vulnerability of that institution to decay...

...For Mack and Blankenhorn, ; who are respectively affiliate scholar at and president of the Institute for American Values in New York, have addressed a somewhat different subject...

...Mack and Blankenhorn concentrate instead on the married state full blown, from vows, through children, to death or divorce...

...From there, the chapter moves to Edward Albee's twentieth-century take on boozy domestic barbarism in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf...

...locked in with the humiliation of having chosen this course despite knowing of her husband's longtime mistress and four children, and the further humiliation of knowing that he and his loathsome secretary know that she knows...

...At the same time you will recognize how sincerely I wish you to come to an agreement and Satan to be driven off...

...The letter ends, "You are an intelligent man, and the Lord will enable you to understand what I write...

...Farewell in Christ...

...The first of its six entries is an excerpt from a 1964 history of Christian attitudes toward sex and sanctity in marriage written by a Jesuit priest (who later left his order and married) named Joseph Kerns...

...For cold realism—and for a taste of the range and imagination of these anthologists—turn to Chapter Eight, on fighting...

...Next, Mack and Blankenhorn offer a fascinating 1528 letter of pastoral counsel from Martin Luther to a young man whose wife of four years has refused to move to the town where he has a new job...

...The lessons he has distilled about "emotionally intelligent marriages," where partners disagree and even argue without damaging their deep friendship, are set out in straightforward prose, accessible—and beneficial—to almost anyone...

...The answer, it turns out, is a place of honor side by side with the Kasses' ! work...

...Here is lovely, gifted, vain Gwendolen Harleth, now Mrs...

...Grandcourt, locked in her golden cage with the reptilian rich man she has married to escape being a governess...

...Then we hear from that acute student of unhappy marriage George Eliot, in a chilling passage from her last novel, Daniel Deronda (1878...

...It is clear that the road is dangerous," wrote the great Cistercian, Bernard of Clairvaux, seven hundred years later...

...Don't miss this!," Mack and Blankenhorn seem rather to be addressing an audience inured to divorce yet desirous of marriage, and saying to them, "You can do it, but it's bigger than you realize...

...And then, at last, a breath of air: The comic actor Bill Cosby, of all people, is enlisted to convey the flavor of everyday wrangling and making up between long-married spouses, in an engaging passage from his book Love and Marriage aptly entitled "Your Beloved Foe...