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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC on this last day of our spring membership drive. During the drive, we've been featuring interesting new books from The Brian Lehrer Show Spring Bookshelf during this period. We've got our last author with us now. As we approach the June wedding season, Cheryl Mendelson, best known for her book, Home Comforts: The Art and Science of Keeping House from Back in 1999, returns with her new book that also has a domestic theme, Marriage Vows. Just as Home Comfort was not an instruction manual on how to use your vacuum cleaner, rather a deep, I think it was 900 pages, dive into how we live in our domestic spaces.

Her new book, Vows, is not just about the words that different people say to proclaim I do, but the very idea of coupling in something called marriage from the earliest records of human history to the recent renewal of marriage as cool as a result of gay marriage, a case of the progressive world flocking to marriage rather than away from it as a chosen lifestyle. The words in the vows do seem to have enduring cultural meaning even as they have changed over time, but part of the point of the book is they've changed surprisingly little over time. The full title of the book is Vows: The Modern Genius of an Ancient Rite. Cheryl Mendelson joins us now. Thanks for coming on and congratulations on the book.

Cheryl Mendelson: Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be here.

Brian Lehrer: What made you want to take a close look at marriage vows now?

Cheryl Mendelson: I learned a general book on marriage, but when I began to work my, I guess, personal biography, gave me specific interests. The more I did research, the more it concentrated on these vows that so tripped me up early in life and that I returned to later in life.

Brian Lehrer: I think maybe your personal story, in brief, is worth telling a little bit because, as I read it, it was like, your first marriage was a mistake, and as you were taking your vows at the altar, it was cringy for both of you, and then your second marriage, it was a moment of joy.

Cheryl Mendelson: That's exactly right. They were almost the same words. Yes, there was a hasty, panicked decision to marry. Not from a pregnancy, but from, "Shall we break up, or shall we stay together forever?" It was a very immature decision. We decided to go ahead with it. Having decided to marry, my first husband immediately became angry about it. In the middle of the vows ceremony, we were in a judge's chambers. The judge is there in his black robes with his black book held in front of him. My first husband interrupted the ceremony to ask, "What's a troth?" When the judge asked him, "Do you pledge your troth?" Which was part of the ceremony.

Things only went downhill from there in every way. My parents apologized to the judge for his behavior as we left the room. It was a trauma, and of course, the marriage ended in a divorce, and of course, time went on. I thought about all this. I then found someone else to love and marry. We tried to write our own vows, and we just couldn't do it. We tried and tried and for days, we wasted. I can't tell you how many hours, and then finally my now husband said, "Well, look at The Book of Common Prayer." I learned at this moment, to my surprise. I knew what The Book of Common Prayer was, but I had not known that it had the traditional wedding ceremony.

That's where it came from, 1549. I thought, "Good heavens, how old it is." There it was, the same words from the first failed marriage. Then I discovered as I looked into this, became quite interested, that this wasn't the start of it all, that, in fact, Archbishop Kremer didn't write it, but he borrowed most of it from a long tradition. That tradition went back a thousand years. There are lines in that that were there in the year 1125 or so. There are five vows that my husband and I took that were there 800 years ago. It's really an extraordinary rite that it's lasted. In fact, if you look at what the vows are, they're still what people want to say when they get married.

Brian Lehrer: I love the appendix to your book, which is just a text of several of these classic vows from over hundreds of years. Listeners, we can take a few phone calls for Cheryl Mendelson. Tell us about your own wedding vows, if you like, and what they meant to you. I will follow up with Cheryl in a minute about what she just said about trying to write their own vows and deciding that the classic ones were better for them. How about you? 212-433-WNYC. Did the words that might seem proforma before you said them somehow come to be meaningful to you as you said them? Cheryl had that experience.

Did you write your own original vows, listeners? Is anyone listening right now who's about to get married maybe this June, and who wants to describe how you are approaching your vows? Maybe you're not even thinking about it. The efficient they come with the vows, and that's not your part of the wedding planning. 212-433-WNYC, call or text, 212-433-9692. Has same-sex marriage changed the meaning of marriage for you if you're gay or even if you're not? Has the movement for its legalization affected how you think of marriage itself as an institution that may be progressive as well as sometimes considered regressive?

212-433-WNYC. We have time for a few stories with Cheryl's story. 212-433-9692. Cheryl Mendelson, the author of Vows: The Modern Genius of an American Rite. You mentioned Bishop Cranmer, and one of your chapters is titled How Thomas Cranmer Brought Love to Marriage. Who was Thomas Cranmer, and what do you mean he brought love to marriage?

Cheryl Mendelson: It's one of my favorite stories. He was Archbishop of Canterbury during the reign of Henry VIII, appointed by Henry VIII. Cranmer, he became a protestant and Reformationist, and he revised the religious rights to suit these new ideas. He put them all in English so that all people could understand them, and this was The Book of Common Prayer. He tweaked things as he went through the traditional rite, and he inserted the words love and cherish into the promising, into the, "I take you as my husband or wife," part of the vows.

This is a fascinating story because Thomas Cranmer's entire life was dominated by weddings and marriages. He was the guy who was handling marriage matters while Henry VIII was going through his many wives, the two beheadings of the wives, the two annulments of marriages and the rest. It was all politically very fraught. All during this, he himself, as a Catholic priest, was secretly married and in constant danger of being exposed and not only losing his position but worse, imprisoned perhaps, executed at certain times in the history. It's an extraordinary life dominated by an issue that we cannot imagine today.

Brian Lehrer: Let's take a phone call from someone who says they're getting married on Sunday. Roni in Washington Heights, you're on WNYC. Hello there and congratulations.

Roni: Hi. We're getting married this Sunday.

Brian Lehrer: Congratulations.

Roni: Thank you.

Brian Lehrer: Have you decided on vows?

Roni: We're doing traditional Jewish wedding vows which are in Hebrews or behold, you are sanctified to me in the tradition of Moshe and Moses and the Jewish people. That's the traditional vows that are usually said. We're actually adopting it to be gender-neutral because as a trans-person, the language isn't quite right for me. We're adopting the traditional language to be more fitting to our relationship.

Brian Lehrer: Roni, thank you very much, and I hope it goes great and congratulations. She talked about adapting the language in the vows to be more gender-neutral. How about your study of vows over time? One would think that in medieval times, which you write about, and you say vows that you found from then were surprisingly not offensive in some respects to modern sensibilities, but so often, marriage is thought of as an institution that whatever else it does has subjugated women.

Cheryl Mendelson: Yes, and indeed it had this business about obey and serve and also to be Bonnie and [unintelligible 00:10:00] and so forth. All that came out except for the word obey when Thomas Cranmer redid it, but at no point did the vows ever include anything that would've forbidden gay marriage, never. You could take the whole traditional right as it is. I understand what the color was saying about getting the pronouns and great that we can do that. In fact, there's nothing in there that would require adjustment just for the fact of same-sex marriage, which is lovely.

Brian Lehrer: Listener writes, "Hi, Brian. I just got married in November, and we wrote our own vows. They were my favorite part of our day. We didn't show each other or anyone in advance, and the fact that they fit together so well felt really special, people laughed and cried. I love when couples write their own vows. It's always my favorite part of a wedding." Your book is really not about that. Honestly, that's what I thought I was going to find when I cracked your book. Everybody's creative original wedding vows, but it's sort of the opposite of that.

Cheryl Mendelson: The reason why I wanted to-- The traditional vows, why have vows at all is the question. The reason was to establish the terms of the marriage in a public setting where everyone would know, "This is our relationship, and this is what we're going to do." This is an idea that has gotten away so that now when people take vows, they're not announcing the terms of their marriage as the case that you just described illustrates because they didn't even know what the other one was going to say, and they're not going to wait until the day of their wedding to find this out.

It was considered. I do think that it's a good thing to say just what we understand our relationship to be to say it in public and in of a very serious way. However, there's no reason why you can't do all these things. You can have your cake and eat it too in a marriage because a lot of people write very beautiful and wonderful vows, and they add a lot to the day.

Brian Lehrer: Kylie in Northern Virginia, you're on WNYC. Hi, Kylie.

Kylie: Hello, so this is a fascinating conversation for me. My husband and I were discussing burial plots, and he in a tongue-in-cheek way said, and our vows we said, "Till death do we part." [laughs] We don't actually need to agree on burial plot. It started a really interesting conversation, and he's technically right. We use traditional vows in a Christian Church, and we said, "Till death do we part." I'm now a little bit obsessed with this obsession about eternity because that's not what our wedding vow say.

Brian Lehrer: You mean you and your husband want to get buried in different places or have different things done with your remains?

Kylie: He's from a different country. That was how it came up because he was discussing where he wanted to be buried, and I was like, "Well, I don't want to be buried in that country." Again he said it tongue in cheek, but he said, "Well, that's okay." Because we didn't talk about eternity.

Kylie: Till death do we part.

Brian Lehrer: [crosstalk] talked about this life.

Brian Lehrer: That's a hilarious story. Kylie, have you ever heard anything--

Cheryl Mendelson: It's up to death, it only counts till then.

Brian Lehrer: Kylie, thank you very much. Any good vow stories or vow developments in society that you document associated with same-sex marriage? Because I really do think it's brought a different kind of joy and different kind of attraction to the institution, a revitalization in a certain respect.

Cheryl Mendelson: For me, gay marriages are marriages with the same joys as everyone else. I haven't noticed other than the fact that it is liberating to know that everyone who loves someone else this way can have this recognized union that has the same status in the eyes of the world as everyone else's. That is a tremendous joy and a tremendous liberating feeling. For the sake of the wedding itself and for the sake of the couple themselves, I think that what they have together is what everyone else has had together, and that's the beautiful thing about it. Nothing new on the intimate level. It's all on the social level that it comes in. It's very important that it happened.

Brian Lehrer: I think Mark in Englewood is going to tell a story of his daughter and son-in-law taking vows that went viral on TikTok, and then they wound up talking about them on TV. Mark, do I have that right?

Mark: You do, Brian. Hi, how are you? Yes, they got married back in November, and they each wrote vows that they wanted the other person to read. Neither of them saw the vows until the moment of, and no one in the wedding party aside from the officiant who was the groom's brother knew that this was going to happen. My son-in-law read his vows first that she wrote for him to say about her, and she was hysterical, and then obviously vice versa, and he was hysterical.

The entire audience was apoplectically excited. It was just incredible. The photographer filmed it and video and photography and posted it to her TikTok page. It received hundreds of thousands of views immediately, and now it's well over a million something.

Brian Lehrer: Do you have a soundbite-length quote from either his or her vow?

Mark: Oh, "You look incredibly beautiful. I can't believe I met you. I'm so fortunate that you were on," whatever dating site they met on, or, "You were there within the parameters of what I posted. I wanted you to be under 30, and you happened to be 29.5 at the time," things like that. What was interesting is that the video that got the most views was actually him reading. Counterintuitive you would think it would be the bride reading the vows, but the groom reading what she wrote and then watching her reaction was what sparked so much interest because they posted the reverse video, and it didn't show it have as many views.

Brian Lehrer: Mark, thank you for telling your story. Cheryl, we're just about out of time, but I don't know maybe that's the modern world. Instead of a marriage made in heaven, a marriage made on a dating app and TikTok.

Cheryl Mendelson: [chuckles] They're all made in this world.

Brian Lehrer: The book is called Vows: The Modern Genius of an Ancient Rite. The author is Cheryl Mendelson. Thank you for sharing this with us.

Cheryl Mendelson: Thank you.

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