The authors tell us many humorous and thought-provoking stories, raising important questions about marriage, family, and staying single. The book's physical design catches attention quickly: it is two books fused together along a single spine, each one with its own front cover. One book is printed upside-down in relation to the other. I later learned that this design is called tête-bêche, "head-to-toe" in French (cf. https://poetshouse.org/books-in-love-tete-beche-and-dos-a-dos-bindings/). One of the books is called I Do: On Being Married while the other is called I Don't: On Being Single.
The author of I Do is Gayle Certeza, an entrepreneur in the advertising and printing industries who studied Creative Writing and Development Communication in the University of the Philippines (UP). The author of I Don't is Gina Verdolaga, a graduate of the UP College of Business Administration and College of Arts of Letters who currently writes book reviews for children and young adults.
Both authors share anecdotes from their personal lives, describing the factors that contributed to their decisions about marriage and singleness. They also comment on related themes such as finding the right person to marry, the history of women's rights, deciding whether to keep one's maiden name or to adopt a husband's surname, raising kids in a particular faith, and facing the realities of being single beyond a certain age.
Their stories could serve as valuable case studies for people who are training to become mentors and counselors. For these would-be mentors, and for anyone interested in deepening their understanding of the themes in the book, I recommend pairing I Do/I Don't with complementary resources like How To Find Your Soulmate without Losing Your Soul by Jason and Crystalina Evert and Love, Sex and Reproduction: A Case for Catholic Teaching, edited by Erika Bachiochi. The YouTube channel of the Theology of the Body Institute also offers insights that could form a lively conversation with the ideas in I Do/I Don't.