Foreverland

Foreverland is Heather Havrilesky’s attempt at to honestly portray marriage in all its intricacies. As she notes, most media about romantic relationships finish with the wedding. Romantic love is a primordial force, your cells yearning for another set of cells to exchange DNA and produce offspring. Romantic love feels amazing because your brain is soaked in neurotransmitters no different than if you took a heroin needle. Marriage, by contrast, is living with another person over and over again, arguing with them, getting annoyed by them, and unfairly sharing chores with them. No wonder people do crazy things for love, including getting married, and 50% of marriages end in divorce. And even if your marriage goes perfectly, you are signing up to either be heartbroken when your paramour dies, or to consign your paramour to heartbreak when you die.

Yet Havrilesky makes marriage, the good and the bad parts, look like the ultimate act of love. Going on dates, vacations, and having sex is easy. Caring for the other person when they’re pregnant or have cancer, raising kids, aligning on where to live—that is hard. Through each challenge of her life—pregnancy, kids, daycare, moving to the suburbs, cancer, and COVID—she finds her way to her husband. Together they survive each challenge and get closer. I do think Heather’s constant annoyances are overplayed. She admits that her husband Bill is handsome, smart, egalitarian, is great at reassurance, and has only a few negative traits. Yet, from reading the book, Bill comes off as a little villain: inept and unaware. I am not sure if Havrilesky is focusing on the problems because that’s where the drama is or whether her personality is the type to be easily bothered. Perhaps it’s both.

Despite this, it’s hard not to read Foreverland and feel more positive about marriage. For all the petty problems being legally tied to another person brings, Havrilesky‘s story convincingly argues that marriage, at least a good one, is worth it.