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Dahlia, you ask, "Why do we want to cast our marriages in such cartoonish extremes?" I think the gray area—where a marriage is neither deliriously euphoric for years on end, nor a bastion of bitterness, infighting, and "divorce dreams"—may not be written about partly because those extremes sell better but also partly because they're easier for the writer. It's a lot harder to be realistic about the gray area. Because that gray area lets on that, heaven forbid, your marriage might not be perfect. It's as though if you acknowledge that a gray area exists, you come off looking like you're trashing marriage—your own.
The closest analogy I can think of, I hate to say, is the various plot endings of the recent Sex and the City movie (note: major spoiler alert), which focused a lot on fairy-tale endings of deliriously happy marriages (or one in particular). As much as it pained me to see Carrie marry Big in the end—not only because he'd consistently screwed her over throughout the series, but also because, after leaving her at the altar, it didn't make any sense (why not live together happily ever after if he's that freaked out by marriage?)—I was heartened to see the ending written for Miranda and Steve. Contrary to the foolish, the-bad-guy-will-change-for-you message sent by the valentine that is Carrie's marriage, Miranda and Steve seem to really struggle and really try to work it out (at the very end) after Steve's affair. Granted, the circumstances of one party cheating are much more dire than the vanilla-esque gray area items I'm mulling over (like leaving the cap off the toothpaste), but it's not too often, especially on the big screen, that you see the struggle and mediocrity of a marriage—along with the moments that endear the betrothed to each other, by the way—getting equal airing. It was a refreshing antidote to the overblown central story line, yet it hardly got any attention.
Perhaps the reality of it is just too banal and maybe, as Dahlia again pointed out, we might need to stake out outrageously simple positions to get published. But I think there could be more to it than that. (I also add that my own marriage is a bed of roses every single day. Seriously.)
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Jesse Jackson says he wanted to "cut off" Barack Obama's "nuts" because the presidential contender has been saying black men have to take more responsibility for their behavior, stop acting "like boys," and not father and abandon children. Jackson said that Obama was "talking down to black people" with these remarks. In a turgid apology, he explained, "My appeal was for the moral content of his message to not only deal with the personal and moral responsibility of black males, but to deal with the collective moral responsibility of government and the public policy which would be a corrective action for the lack of good choices that often led to their irresponsibility.'' So we are to understand that it was "government and the public policy" and a "lack of good choices" that led in 2001 to Jackson, who was then a famous, wealthy, 59-year-old, issuing another apology and withdrawing temporarily from public life when he had to reveal—because the tabloids got hold of the story—that he had fathered a toddler out of wedlock. This is in addition to his apology in 1984 for calling New York "Hymietown." At least this time Jackson didn't have to be forced to apologize.
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Like Emily Y., I did not exactly grow up planning my wedding—or picking out baby names, for that matter. In fact, the whole time I was single, I had this recurring nightmare that it was my wedding day and there was nothing I could do about it. Even as the actual day approached, I was completely terrified, and vividly remember a conversation I had with a photographer I worked with at the time, about how scary it was to think I’d never have another relationship with anyone else, ever. “Statistically unlikely,’’ she said, and somehow, that made me feel a lot better. And it still does—and that’s no reflection on my marriage. Which I guess is why I take these pieces about moron husbands no more seriously than I take the opposite kind. (Have you ever noticed how super-mushy book dedications seem to be a pretty good predictor of divorce within the year?) The impulse to make our marriages out to be worse than they are, rather than better, also just seems to be a part of this culture of competitive griping we've got going; even after I wrote about a love affair that ended badly, in an assisted living facility, for heaven's sake, between an 82-year-old woman and a 95-year-old man, I can’t tell you how many (apparently happily married) people in their 40s said wow, hubba hubba, they just couldn’t wait. … And none of them meant it, I'm pretty sure.
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Well, what confused me is that Tien does not describe her marriage as a bad marriage, or her predicament as particular. "Don't misunderstand. I would not, could not disparage my marriage," she writes, after spending 500 words describing her husband as a drivelling idiot. And then: "Nor is Will the Very Bad Man that I've made him out to be. Rather, like every other male I know, he is a Moderately Bad Man." And then she has a scene in which she and her friends are standing around and one of them announces she is getting divorced, and none of them expresses shock or pity. Instead, their faces show "could it be?—yearning?" Now the fact is, in our class and generation of women, and presumably Tien's, far fewer marriages actually do end in divorce. (Ten percent is the lowest statistic I've seen.) So maybe this is all about fantasy, and thus harmless. The flip side of this argument is Roiphe's—that in our child-centric culture when a woman with a child does actually get divorced, she suffers a fair amount of scorn and stigma. So the surprise for me was that even in couples with decent marriages—or who seem to have decent marriages—women spend a lot of time hating their husbands and fantasizing about divorce but not actually pursuing one.
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It seems we are having two discussions here: writing about a rotten marriage, and having one. I agree with Hanna, I don’t know how you write a piece that begins, “I contemplate divorce every day” and not end up writing the sequel, “How I Chose My Divorce Lawyer.” Hanna, you quote Ellen Tien’s assertion, “Beneath the thumpingly ordinary nature of our marriage—Everymarriage—runs the silent chyron of divorce," and wonder if those of us whose running chyron is saying “I am so lucky I am married to this man” are deluded. I agree with you, Hanna, that Tien is deluded to think there are no happy marriages, and that it demonstrates a rather narrow worldview not to understand there are many couples, who even in their worst moments, have never contemplated divorce. On the other hand, how (and why) do you write about your happy marriage? It would feel like one of those gloating Christmas letters. I grew up with a terror of marriage. My parents’ was comprehensively awful. The only thing that seemed to keep them together for 20 years was that it took them that long to finish shredding each other. I didn’t get married until I was 38, and the miracle of my life is that we have been happy for the 14 years since. But maybe this is due to the fact that early on, while watching A Few Good Men, we decided we needed a motto for our marriage and took Jack Nicholson’s line: “You can’t handle the truth!”
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Forgive me for wondering whether the whole “women-who-crave-divorce-in-print” boomlet we’re contemplating here is yet another manifestation of the “mommy wars” phenomenon. That is the media-created dustup wherein approximately 18 women (all of them upper-middle-class residents of Manhattan) purport to speak for all American women, in describing a nonexistent raging conflict between stay-at-home and working mothers. It turns out they speak for precisely nine women at each end of the bell curve—the nine women who stay at home and hate working moms, and the nine women who work and hate stay-at-home moms.
But the huge bulge on the bell curve that is the mass of part-time, flex-time, volunteer, work-from-home, struggling-along, working-it-out, too-busy-to-care moms nevertheless watch in awe as the caricatures play out in fiction and in the media. We can’t get enough of those mommy-wars stories!
Even casting this current discussion as a choice between “I contemplate divorce every day" and “my husband and I never fight" highlights the problem: Why do we want to cast our marriages in such cartoonish extremes? I find myself wondering whether women need to take this sort of outrageously simple position (“I hate my kids” “I loathe my husband”) in order to get published, or if we like to read about complicated subjects rendered in cartoonish ways?
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Well, I suppose that through a certain feminist lens everything looks like progress (From Anna Karenina to Ellen Tien). There was a time when any literary heroine who attempted some escape from the confines of a dull, loveless marriage wound up dead or alone or trapped in a dull, loveless marriage anyway. Then came the silent sufferers of the John Cheever era. And now we have our raging house bitches, freed by the pen. And I suppose there's a certain justice in that. Men don't do it because it still seems petty or pathetic or somehow beneath them to trash their wives in print (i.e., Philip Weiss' condescension). With women, the act still carries an outrageous glamour. (Katie Roiphe wrote a recent essay in New York about how happy she was about her divorce. Claire Bloom's memoir about her marriage to Philip Roth, among others, is a classic, and Roth only sought revenge obliquely, through a fictional Eve.) But I guess I don't see the liberation or happiness at the end of this road. Freedom from housework, freedom from the sole responsibilities of child-rearing, freedom from semi-arranged marriages. I'm with you. But freedom from intimacy? Freedom from love? And then what?
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Ann and Meghan, when I tried to come up with male journalists and essayists who run down their wives last night, Norman Mailer kept popping into my head. Wrong era (and maybe wrong kind of misogyny). The men's companion volume to The Bitch in the House, as I recall, was mild and mewling by comparison. Do women bitch more because they're bitchier or because they have more to bitch about? I like Ann's image of Iron Women wives clubbing their plankton husbands, but I wonder if those are mostly literary poses. Another thought: Writers like Ellen Tien are practicing self-deprecation run amok and misdirected to include not only themselves but the men near and dear to them. When I wrote recently about parents who dissect their family lives in print, the writers I interviewed unfailingly told me that they themselves, and their failings, were the real subject. The Bitch writers seem to depart from this model all too readily. Maybe that's because they extend their unflinching self-analysis to their husbands and marriages. Their men's pores and warts are as coldly exposed as their own, but maybe somehow that seems OK, because the whole thing originates in self-critique, even if it ends up somewhere else entirely.
Hanna, I don't know about you, but I feel like among the married women I know, contemplating divorce is a huge fault line. For some women, it's like prodding a sore tooth—both irritating and somehow comforting. And for other women, it's just not part of their universe—not today or yesterday or 10 years from now. Tien implies there's no real understanding among women across this divide, because she can imagine only one side of it. Is that right? I hope not, but I'm not sure.
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Meghan, you ask how male writers treat their wives in print, and I can't say I've been browsing the magazine racks. But for a recent sample, I looked back at Philip Weiss' New York magazine piece on "the trouble with sex and marriage," which supplied us here at XX with a lot of grist not so long ago. I thought I'd recalled squirming at his portrait of his wife. Here's how he and his friend describe their spouses: "He and I love our wives and depend on them. In each of our cases, they make our homes, manage our social calendar, bind up our wounds and finish our thoughts, and are stitched into our extended families more intimately than we are. They seem emotionally better equipped than we are. If my marriage broke up, my wife could easily move in with a sister. I'd be as lost as plankton." It's a far cry from trashing, but it's rather narcissistic damning with condescending praise, isn't it? And I wonder if it might go some way to explaining why so many writing wives don't hesitate to eviscerate: Maybe a new power dynamic, at least in the world of dual-career couples, spurs Ellen Tien, et al., on. Do they assume that hubbies, desperate to avoid the plankton fate, will put up with a lot? How ironic, yet classic, if the dependence of empathy-challenged guys is goading women to violate those famously wound-binding ways of females.