Well Read

I have always loved recommending books. I might offer my thoughts to a stranger, a friend over coffee, via a breathless WhatsApp exchange. Usually, unsolicited. I guess the point, to me, is about the sharing of wisdom — a book’s, not mine. After all, we read to be moved, but also, to be wiser in the ways in which we navigate the world.

For me, finding something to read has never been difficult. In fact, I’m prone to the occasional existential crisis over how many great books there are to consume and whether one lifetime will be enough to do so.

One morning I received a phone call from Los Angeles; my friend Sophie was living there with her fiancé, Oscar, in beachfront Santa Monica. They were due to be married in Zihuatanejo, on Mexico’s Pacific coast, in November. We had already done the rounds of several bridal boutiques on her recent visit to Sydney, where she had looked good in absolutely everything and I had been no help whatsoever.

"Oscar and I would love you to read something at our wedding," she told me. Chuffed, and at the time confident that this was very much in my wheelhouse, I thanked her and said I’d send through some options.

I thought I would start, naturally enough, with my own bookshelf, plentiful with the dog-eared collection I had collated over the years. By the end of that exercise, I had unearthed a few weakish contenders, but nothing that really appealed. Not yet discouraged, I extended my search online, where I covered a lot of ground but felt most of the sentiments expressed to be lukewarm, tired, schmaltzy. Done right, weddings are inherently romantic. I didn’t feel the need to gush.

I turned to friends for ideas. This produced a few amusing anecdotes — one told me her father had read a religious text at her staunchly non-denominational wedding and sobbed all the way through; another had read at her brother’s, only to realise as she was doing so that its imagery had turned vaguely sexual. None of this assuaged a mounting sense that I was ill equipped for the job: that I was uncharacteristically flummoxed about what to read.

“What if a wedding reading was the chance to imbue the most important ceremony of our lives with further meaning? Surely I could find something that was didactic... solemn but fun.”

In the mental Rolodex of weddings that I had attended over the last decade or so, my mind had failed to commit to memory a single wedding reading. I could recall epic dresses and speeches. The best dance floors. Which ones had the good champagne. But the wedding reading? It didn’t help that at our own wedding twelve years ago, my husband and I had decided to forgo readings to expedite the ceremony, get ourselves married, and put our hands, as quickly as possible, on the Sgroppinos we were serving before the photos. We had priorities, and they didn’t include Louis de Bernières.

I realised that my own biases remained — that something of the twenty-seven-year-old bride who considered wedding readings archaic, or forgettable filler, lingered. I was older now, and if my teeming bookshelf was anything to go by, I should have been wiser. What if a thoughtful wedding reading was the chance to imbue the most important ceremony of our lives with further meaning? Surely I could find something that was modern and didactic, the right mix of solemn and fun. That spoke to the intentionality, self-awareness, and honesty by which my friend and her fiancé were progressing their love story. Words real and declarative, as distinct from performative.

In the end, I sent through a painstaking selection that included an extract from Henry James’ The Portrait of a Lady: ‘it has made me better, loving you…’; John Steinbeck’s advice to his son in matters of love, an Emily Dickinson poem, a tribute from B.K.S. Iyengar to his departed wife: ‘my soul loved her soul’.

I also sent through, with fingers crossed behind my back, an extract from a New York Times article that a clever friend had pointed me towards, in an unrelated conversation (it seems I am not the only one with a penchant for sharing the writing I have loved). If my other choices were romantic, optimistic, and classic, this piece was (ostensibly) their opposite.

In the article, the public intellectual Alain de Botton says that we will almost always marry the wrong person — because none of us ever completes the debilitating amount of due diligence required to ensure a perfect fit.

It’s funny, but not intended to be disheartening. De Botton assures us that while we will marry the wrong person, it doesn’t matter. Rather, contrary to the romanticised notions of marriage, imperfection is normal and that a failure of our partner to meet every one of our ideals is not a harbinger but an opportunity for something else entirely. He writes: "The person who is best suited to us is not the person who shares our every taste (they don’t exist), but the person who can negotiate differences in taste intelligently; the person who is good at disagreement. Rather than some notional idea of perfect complementarity, it is the capacity to tolerate differences with generosity that is the true marker of the ‘not-overly-wrong’ person. Compatibility is an achievement of love; it must not be its precondition."

The idea that we can love someone we marry more at the end than in the beginning, that where we started is less important than where we end up, is so compelling. He reframes marriage as a lifelong pursuit of understanding and compassion, as opposed to a constant quest to recapture a relationship’s heady halcyon days. A couple becomes ‘compatible’ not because their tastes and inclinations align but because they have learned to peacefully accommodate, and possibly exult in, their inevitable differences.

In preaching pessimism, de Botton identifies the most romantic notion of all. I would love to be able to say that I was receptive to that kind of wisdom prior to my own wedding. Not that it has produced any significant downsides — my husband and I may have rushed to the bar in the beginning, but the road since has been paved with introspection, emotional generosity, and a willingness to lay bare feelings in the hope of always being better.

I was nevertheless thrilled when Sophie wrote back, telling me that de Botton’s words had most deeply resonated with her and Oscar. She was too polite to tell me which of my proposals would never have made the cut, but I have my suspicions that the lyrics to Taylor Swift’s ‘Lover,’ which I had also included, were in that category. That de Botton’s words had already been translated into Spanish — the first language of half the wedding’s attendees — may have been an omen.

When I read them aloud a few months later, in the most cinematic of settings, I was far from the main event, as to be expected. A sporadic public speaker, I think I even managed to mispronounce the Swiss writer’s name. But the words I spoke felt true, not trite. And the truth seems like a good place to kick things off.



This story was originally published in VEIL Issue Two. Discover this story, along with many more inspiring stories, weddings, and editorials in the full issue. Purchase your copy here.