Love Is a Temporary Madness

Still in copyright. It is a passage from Captain Corelli's Mandolin — print it from the book and give it to the reader in advance.

Pieces still in copyright are listed by title and author only — we name them and tell you where to get them, but we do not reproduce the words. Public-domain text is printed in your script in full.

The passage comes from Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, Louis de Bernières’s novel first published in 1994.

In the novel this is a father talking to his daughter, and he is not gushing. He tells her that falling in love is a kind of temporary madness that flares up and then dies down, and that the real question comes afterwards: whether two lives have grown so tangled together that parting would be unthinkable. Being in love, he says, is the part anyone can manage. Love itself is what remains when the excitement has burned off. He uses an image of two trees whose roots have grown toward each other underground until they are one, and he speaks from his own marriage, which ended with his wife’s death.

The unsentimental one, about what is left after the fireworks. Read at a wedding ceremony. Themes: love after the madness passes · roots grown together · unsentimental · an older couple.

Couples who distrust sentiment and want a reading that admits romance fades. It is a favorite for second marriages, long engagements and couples marrying later in life, who know exactly what it describes. A father or an older relative reading it echoes the scene in the book. It is a poor fit for a couple who want pure celebration with no shadow in it.

Works well as the second reading, after something lighter, or as the only reading before the vows. A parent, grandparent or long-married friend is the natural reader, since the passage is advice handed down.

Allow about a minute and a half at a ceremony pace of about 130 words a minute, from the reader’s first word to their last.

• The speaker is blunt and a little gruff. Do not read it softly; read it like someone who has earned the right to say it.
• The tree image near the end is the payoff. Slow down there, and give the final sentence a beat of silence before you close the book.
• Check the edition the couple have; some printings and wedding sites trim the opening lines. Agree where to start before the rehearsal.

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