"Marriage is intimate. Marriage is hard": sober thoughts for a time when movies and television tell us that love is supposed to be romantic and fun.
In this eclectic blend of playful and earnest storytelling, social commentary, and fierce argument, Kurt Armstrong offers an up-close look at real-life marriage and the countless ways it differs from what the advertisers tell us it should be. With wisdom, wit, and profound honesty, he explores the aching beauty of love, the ongoing struggle to maintain vows, and the reality of death as the finishing line of covenant. "Even if love one day fills my heart full of grief," says Armstrong, "it is still the only thing worth living for."
This moving, honest, heartfelt look at real-life marriage will strike a chord with single men and women, young couples, and seasoned veterans of married life.
Kurt Armstrong is a builder, teacher, and an editor at Geez magazine. He lives with his wife and two kids in Winnipeg, Manitoba.
"Awfully good. In the often brutally candid (and therefore redemptive) witness of Kurt Armstrong, there are no corners of human experience beyond the interest and affection of God's inescapably earthbound economy. With wit, verve, and eye-rubbingly honest straightforwardness, Armstrong presents the self (his self and ours) as the inescapably social gift of others and life in God as the identity we hold to loosely to find, again and again, in the sacred everyday. With one feat of attentiveness after another, he expands the space of the talkaboutable."
--David Dark
author of The Sacredness of Questioning Everything
"Somehow, after reading Why Love Will Always Be a Poor Investment, marriage as we know it in North America is no longer possible, and that's a good thing. With wit, imagination, satire, and a brilliant awareness of the cultural hurdles we face, Armstrong clarifies what a new faithfulness might mean for those of us seeking to be married in these times. Thank you Kurt Armstrong for this book!"
--David Fitch
author of The Great Giveaway
"Armstrong's reflections on love and marriage are romantic and cynical, restless and content, sentimental and pragmatic. His recollections are an exercise in making sense of it all. Marriage is life. He wants to pass on to us, not self-help or relationship techniques, but a habit of thinking. Marriage offers the depth of life, both sin and grace, and to examine it more deeply is to live it more fully."
--David M. McCarthy
author of Sex and Love in the Home
"In the tradition of writers like Wendell Berry and Kathleen Norris, Kurt Armstrong here presents a gathering of carefully crafted essays which take life, marriage, parenthood, and language itself, with deep seriousness. While this young writer challenges consumerist assumptions with conviction, his voice never becomes pedantic. Coupled with deep conviction and sincerity is a kind of vulnerability and transparency that keeps his own humanity fully in view. In a day of flippant wisecracking about even sacred subjects, Kurt Armstrong's lucid and honest pieces come like a cool stream, refreshing our spirits while renewing our vision. We will look for much more from this young writer."
--Maxine Hancock
editor of Christian Perspectives on Gender, Sexuality, and Community
"Kurt Armstrong makes an eloquent case for marriage as a life-long commitment and radical act against the background of our consumer culture. His arguments are fleshed out, lovingly, in the story of his own marriage, the place where he has found his home. It's a book that will inspire and encourage readers in their own journeys."
--Sharon Gallagher
editor of Radix magazine
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