10 Novels That Teach You Something About Marriage

The Age of Innocence, by Edith Wharton
Lesson: Marriage is a marathon, not a sprint. Many people see Wharton’s high society tale of a man who yearns to throw over his wife in favor of her more alluring cousin as the story of an unhappy marriage. But read it again after being married a while, and you see a heightened version of what everyone goes through: moments of doubt, when escape seems like your only option. The real lesson is that marriage is about more than romantic passion: it’s time plus partnership, weaving together into a life.

Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen
Lesson: Family matters. From the moment you start dating someone, their family looms in the near distance. The initial meetings, the sizing up, the parental approval—you are never just marrying a single person. You are marrying their whole family. This is a lesson that Austen’s classic brings home with poetic power. If you find yourself denying that someone’s family issues (yours or theirs) matter … you’re lying to yourself, and need to re-read P&P immediately.

Big Little Lies, by Liane Moriarty
Lesson: The grass is always greener. Every married couple has at least one other couple they see socially whom they love/hate because they seem too perfect. They are financially affluent, they have great taste, their kids behave well, they are obviously affectionate. As Moriarty’s great novel reminds us, that’s often window dressing. Everyone has problems. Some of us are just better at hiding them.

Gone Girl, by Gillian Flynn
Lesson: You can never really know someone. Deciding to marry someone is a big step, and is reserved for people you know as well as you possibly can. After all, you’re linking your lives together in a myriad of ways—neither of you will ever be the same. Flynn’s ingenious thriller reminds us, however, that you will never know everything about your spouse. There’s a secret or two there, trust us, and if you discover it, you might find yourself uncertain whether you really know them at all.

The Yellow Wall Paper, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Lesson: Take your spouse seriously. Getting married is sometimes described as two souls becoming one. Ha ha, no. No matter how close you are, you remain two separate nervous systems filtering everything through unique perspectives. Thus it will always be easy to dismiss a spouse’s concerns, worries, or fears as unfounded or silly. Don’t do this. Doing this is how people wind up crawling around on the floor muttering about wallpaper.

Fates and Furies, by Lauren Groff
Lesson: There are two sides to every marriage. Extending the previous idea a little, never assume that your spouse sees the marriage exactly like you do. There have been too many complacent spouses, certain that their relationship was fantastic, only to find themselves served divorce papers. In Groff’s fantastic novel, a husband and wife offer their own perspective on their marriage, and it’s interesting to see where they agree—and where they diverge.

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, by Edward Albee
Lesson: Fighting in public makes you bad people.Albee’s searing story of middle-aged resentment and passive-aggressive subtext made howling text is a blistering read. You’re really watching four lives descend into chaos in front of you, but along the way he reminds us of a fundamental truth: fighting with your spouse at a party, or out at dinner, or in the movie theater, or literally anywhere but in your house when you’re alone, is a jerk move.

Macbeth, by William Shakespeare
Lesson: Don’t push your spouse outside their comfort zone. The day you wake up and realize you wish your spouse were more…anything is a dark day indeed. In the Scottish Play, Lady Macbeth wishes her husband were a bit more ambitious and murder-y, and her pushing him to grasp more than his reach can handle is what sets the violent tragedy in motion. Lesson? Remind yourself that you might be projecting your own issues on your spouse.

The War of the Roses, by Warren Adler
Lesson: Talk now or burn down your house later. Adler’s novel about a wealthy couple who go to war amid a divorce is black comedy at its best, but the chaotic, mean-spirited, and shockingly violent way the Roses go after each other holds a potent lesson: if you’re unhappy, say something. If you’re going to split up, start labeling your books today.

Middlemarch, by George Eliot
Lesson: Marriage is an ongoing process, and both partners will evolve. Middlemarch is a novel about marriage as much as it’s about anything else, and the basic lesson that Eliot imparts is that all marriages are different, and all people are different, and every day you’re going to wake up next to someone who is slightly different than the person you went to bed with the night before, and will be yourself a little different. Scary? A little. But also kind of exciting, no?