You’ll Do

Every writer loves a wedding. Whether our medium is books, television, theater, or movies the drama of two people – two families! – joining together during one extremely overpriced party is hard to beat. Yet, as every writer also knows, the plot behind the plot is often where the real story lies. Love marriages are a relatively new concept, and even those often have other motives lying beneath the hearts and roses. In You’ll Do, author Marcia A. Zug chronicles a host of reasons other than love for which people have been marrying for centuries. The real life cases are often more compelling than fiction.

In the intro, and possibly most Jewish part of the book, Zug reveals that a family member of her own married in order to skirt immigration quotas and help another Jewish person escape Nazi Germany. The chapters that follow detail couples who married for money, child custody, inheritance, and yes immigration purposes. If this shocks you, I think you’ll find as you read the chapters that it should not. Instead, I am hoping your shock will turn towards the horrific laws like have made marriage often the only tool for safety and advancement available to many women and immigrants, and how the cult of love marriage has stripped even more rights away from these vulnerable populations.

There is one big caveat, which the author herself points out. Religious motivations for marriage are not covered in the book. Many people marry because they feel it is Gods will, or because they believe sex outside of marriage is a sin. I understand why religion was left off as a motivator, since the topic could span an entire book of its own, I simply hope Zug decides to make a companion book and cover the topic in it.

As you can tell from the title, You’ll Do, tackles a tricky topic with humor. The writing is clear and concise, and the examples really bring the topics home. I chose to listen to the book on audio and the narrator, Leigh Serling, has a nice smooth voice that keeps even the more boring topics interesting. It was a good match for my commute.

While we have come to think of anything but a love marriage as abusive, You’ll Do challenges us to rethink those thoughts, to judge less, and maybe look at our own notions of marriage with a more critical eye. As a writer, I can say it opened up about fifty more plot lines in the proverbial wedding setting. For this, I am grateful.

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