With This Ring

With This Ring: A Portrait of Marriage - Revised and Updated Second Edition

By Mary Motley Kalergis

Marriage is where many family stories begin-not with children, but with a choice. A moment, sometimes impulsive or sometimes hard-won, when two people decide to build a life together.

In With This Ring: A Portrait of Marriage, award-winning documentary photographer Mary Motley Kalergis travels into the heart of that choice and beyond, pairing striking black-and-white portraits with unflinching, often tender interviews. Couples from across America share what brought them together, what sustains them, and what nearly broke them-speaking with candor about love, change, resilience, and the daily work of building a shared life.

Originally published by the Chrysler Museum of Art and now reimagined as the first volume in Kalergis' five-part Building a Family series, this edition preserves the honesty and intimacy of the original while framing it as the opening chapter in a larger story about birth, motherhood, adoption, and parenting.

In these pages, you will meet newlyweds, long-married partners, blended families, and couples who have endured illness, tragic loss, and incredible joy. Some stories are raw, others luminous-but all are real. Together, they form a testament to what it means to commit and to remain committed over time.

This is not a book about weddings. It's a book about what happens after the vows-when love must grow up, bend, endure, and sometimes reinvent itself. For anyone interested in the human truths behind marriage, these images and voices offer something rare: a clear-eyed, compassionate portrait of the everyday courage it takes to build a life together.

Perfect for:

• • Anyone curious about the human realities behind the idea of "happily ever after"
  • Couples at any stage of their journey
  • Readers drawn to oral history and documentary photography