When I was reading Sandra Tsing Loh's article in the Atlantic that we've all been discussing, I found myself getting distracted by a lot of things, among them the ostentatious dishes of the male cook in the household she visits for dinner. I know she emphasized this for bitter effect, but it did ring true in that it sometimes strikes me that when men cook, they like to cook fancy—as opposed to women, who are what one food editor I know calls the "little brown wrens" of the cooking world: long accustomed to cooking nourishing but non-showy meals, night after night after night. But never mind. That is doubtless an unfair, essentialist generalization. I do know men, come to think of it, who are their household's cooking mainstay, and who do it quietly and without fanfare. OK. I know at least one.

Mostly, I found myself wondering what exactly is her current set up in terms of who is living where. In a riveting video that's attached, Tsing Loh talks about having her stuff put in the driveway after her transgression was discovered—she narrates the video from her new storage cubicle, surrounded by the neatly packed detritus of her married life. But the piece suggests that she sometimes still occupies her old digs, when she writes, "My children seem relatively content as long as they remain in their own house, their own beds, and their own school, with Mom and Dad coming and going as usual (and when Dad’s in the house, I pick them up from school every day so they always see me)."

This confused me. It suggests that sometimes she is the one who is "in the house" even if a lot of her stuff is not. I know that one theory of how to have a relatively successful divorce—at least where the kids are concerned—holds that the parties who should shuttle back and forth between households are not the children, but the parents. That is, the blameless children should get to stay in the household they've always lived in, and the at-fault grown-ups should be the ones who have to move in and out, depending on who has custody that week or day or whatever. This makes moral sense, but I've always wondered how it works out in practice—whether that really does make things easier on kids, who are less likely to lose their backpacks or sneakers, or whether it's just adults working too hard and unrealistically to relieve the effect of divorce on children.

In a "divorced but living serially in the same house" set up, what happens when your ex gets a new significant other? How does the shuttling work when there's evidence of this new, third person in the communal household? Is an excessively child-centered marriage simply being replaced by an excessively child-centered divorce? Anyway, I had a hard time figuring out what was happening here, room-and-board wise. Maybe, since her husband travels so much, she moves in when he is away and moves out when he's back? How long can an arrangement like that hold up? Perhaps we'll find out.

Tags: divorce, marriage, sandra tsing loh

Dahlia, Hanna, Jess, Abby: This debate over marriage arrives as I am in a perfect storm of marriage-related texts. In addition to Tsing Loh’s provocative piece about why everyone should get divorced, I’m in the middle of Thy Neighbor's Wife, Gay Talese’s controversial account of the 1960s sexual revolution, and Christina Nehring’s excellent A Vindication of Love, a polemic making the case for the importance of love—messy, violent, volcanic, inequitable love—in women’s lives. Perhaps I, too, have read too many books, but I don't quite agree that a) the real drag is children, not marriage or b) that Tsing Loh is a victim of magazines that peddle a vision of a life of “perfect romantic intimacy” and “perfect mothering.” Taken together, all this material suggests just how idealized the "companionate" marriage has become. So let me ask: Could she just have decided that such a marriage is, well, not for her? And that—gasp—she was going to be arch about what has, after all, become the sacred cow of feminism?

Her piece is most interesting to me for the personal corrective it offers to the view that a present-day equitable partnership between a man and a woman is the ideal arrangement to which all of us should aspire. In a sense, Tsing Loh is just writing about the old division between passion and intimacy / security. She doesn’t have much new to say (this has been a debate forever, and at some point someone—me—inevitably reminds us all that “courtly love” was originally adulterous love, an ameliorative balm to the tedious social arrangements that were marriage). But I found it refreshing to hear a woman confess so baldly that she doesn’t want to “work” on her marriage anymore—and, what’s more, that an affair led her to this realization. I am not “approving” of Tsing Loh’s personal choices, just as I am not judging them; I merely want to make the observation that this rhetorical stance is less than usual in our culture. (Instead, wives tend to criticize their husbands in public without leaving them, as we’ve discussed before.)

Her point resonates with the issues Talese and Nehring deal with. In Talese’s book, all sorts of folks are trying to work out whether a little adultery might not be “healthy” for a marriage. Their non-possessive approach to love sounds good until you remember watching Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice and reading, say, Rick Moody’s The Ice Storm. Nehring is making a more complicated argument. Her main point is that we have devalued passionate love in our age of fairness and rationalism. As she compellingly argues, romantic love depends on power imbalances, on compulsion, on passion (which, let’s recall, means the same thing as “suffering”)— the very things that feminism has tried to strip out of women’s lives, because they are messy, confusing, and cannot be legislated like domestic chores. An afterward makes it clear that Nehring herself has an unconventional arrangement; she has a child but does not seem to be married.

The reason her book and Tsing Loh’s article spoke to me, whatever their flaws, was that each was trying to carve out an individualistic response to a social institution. These writers remind us there is no “right” thing. There’s just a confusing life in which we may be foolishly influenced by the idea of achieving ongoing romantic intimacy peddled in magazines, but also genuinely crave, from within our sloppy, needy souls, passion, renewal—even independence. Even, perhaps, independence from the most companionable of partners. Even if it comes with pain, heartache, and loneliness—emotions Tsing Loh notably, and evidently purposefully, steered clear of describing in her piece.

Tags: christina nehring, divorce, marriage, sandra tsing loh, the atlantic

I found myself gagging at the first line of Sandra Tsing Loh's article where she says, "Sadly, and to my horror, I am divorcing." Something about that horror part got under my skin—that she was trying to convince us, her readers, that divorce was something that "just happened" to her, outside of her control. And that was only the beginning of the pity-party. Having an affair, she confesses, "was a surprise." Her decision not to rebuild her marriage: "heart-shattering." Words to induce our pity, to absolve her responsibility to her committment, her husband, her friends, and her children. The whole article, to me, read as Sandra Tsing Loh's attempt to absolve her guilty conscience. Call in the anthropologists! My friends are doing it too! Husband travels too much! The kids are fine! But you do have to give the woman props. She somehow convinced the Atlantic to let her write a couple thousand words justifying her bad behavior and blaming it on everyone else but herself—and got a paycheck for it.

I'm with you, Jess, that it's not realistic to try to work full-time, nanny, clean, cook, chauffeur, and maintain a marriage. But I somehow doubt that Ms. Tsing Loh's marital problems would have been solved by a nanny. If she did have one, I have the feeling that poor employee would be just another person to blame.

Tags: atlantic, divorce

Hanna, I read the Sandra Tsing Loh piece not as a condemnation of modern marriage, and not even as a parable about the impossibility of modern motherhood, but as a cautionary tale about building your life around what Tsing Loh describes as a life spent “taking with me ... to my bed, a glass of merlot and a good book.” Because the only villains in this piece are the books—the piles and piles of books that she uses to arrange her life. From what she depicts as her “lazy, undisciplined attachment parenting” to the nearly pornographic, Pottery Barn descriptions of her friend’s kitchen renovation, the story leaps from one fashionable marriage book to the next. She won’t hire a nanny because of Barbara Ehrenreich’s dictum that she’d “never let another woman scrub her toilets.” Her friends’ absurd husbands are either “cheating” with subscriptions to gourmet magazines or bookmarked porn sites. Whole conversations with her girlfriends turn on books about the human sex drive and the impossibility of marriage. These are marriages built on the not-too-solid foundation of using books to build a better life.

There isn’t a sentence in this piece that isn’t profoundly shaped by media expectations of perfect parenting, perfect romantic intimacy, happening in perfect kitchens full of perfect lemon zesters. Any marriage predicated on the idealized images of glossy magazines, the dopey optimism of parenting books, and the dispassionate analysis of whatever Marriage Sucks book is in vogue that week is almost doomed to fail. We have no idea from this piece what Tsing Loh wants for herself or for her life. It’s just a catalog of failures; failures to look like a catalog. Perhaps it’s no accident, then, that Tsing Loh takes comfort that her children aren’t suffering too badly from the divorce because “their most ardent daily fixations continue to be amassing more Pokémon cards and getting a dog named Noodles.”

Nobody is saying modern marriage is easy. But maybe if your “staggering working mother’s to-do list” isn’t built on hitting media-invented benchmarks of perfect intimacy, partnership, and material success, the probability of feeling like a bitter failure diminishes.

Tags: atlantic, divorce

Late last Friday, in a development that hasn't gotten enough attention, a judge appointed by George W. Bush breathed a big breath of life into a lawsuit that seeks to hold John Yoo accountable for the abuse suffered by Jose Padilla, one of the Bush administration's most notoriously mistreated one-time enemy combatants. I've written about Padilla's suit against Yoo for Slate. When it was filed, Padilla's lawyers were accused of abusing the legal system by going after Yoo, a sole former Bush lawyer who is on the faculty of Berkeley's law school. (Disclosure: Padillla's counsel include Jonathan Freiman, who is a friend of mine, and students in a Yale Law School clinic, where I'm a fellow.) Let's just say that last week's ruling by Judge Jeffrey White is a major victory for Padilla and sweet vindication for the lawyers who represent him. The judge rejected all but one of Yoo's claims of immunity and said that the suit should go forward. His opinion begins by framing the case in terms of the tension "between the requirements of war and the defense of the very freedoms that war seeks to protect." And then he rejects the government's claim that national security necessarily trumps Padilla's claims. This isn't just a repudiation of the past stance of the Bush administration. It also turns aside Obama's lawyers, who are fighting hard against Padilla.

What should happen next is discovery—the gathering of evidence to prove Padilla's claim. If Padilla could actually get access to still-secret memos and other documents relevant to his hellish stay in a military brig, this suit could yield more truth-telling about the Bush admininstration decisions that led to torture. (It already has: three of the Department of Justice memos on torture that the Obama administration released in April were made public because of the suit.)

What's likely to come first, however, are appeals. Yoo will probably appeal the ruling that he's not immune to suit. The Obama administration could appeal by asserting, yet again, the blanket state secrets defense. Let's hope, though, that Padilla gets to start pulling the skeletons out of the closet that has Yoo's name on it.

Tags: department of justice, john yoo, jose padilla, torture

Hanna, I too read the Sandra Tsing-Loh piece in the Atlantic, and I think she's missing part of the point. It's not modern marriage that's the problem, it's modern child rearing. Motherhood and marriage are inextricably linked in Tsing-Loh's piece, and while she never explictly says it, she chooses modern motherhood over her marriage:

Given my staggering working mother’s to-do list, I cannot take on yet another arduous home- and self-improvement project, that of rekindling our romance. Sobered by this failure as a mother—which is to say, my failure as a wife—I’ve since begun a journey of reading, thinking, and listening to what’s going on in other 21st-century American families.

But even though Tsing-Loh complains about the "staggering working mother's to-do list," she refuses to get a nanny because she "secretly worried that using domestic help was exploitative"; she describes children with an "extraordinarily challenging roster of extracurricular activities and a quarterly testing schedule." And everyone seems to want to have sex ... until children come along.

This is obviously a debate of privilege, but all the women Tsing-Loh describes in her piece can afford a nanny, a housekeeper, or a baby sitter. I don't think it's so much that the idea of a life-long partner is out of date. It's that women need to hand over some of the child-rearing duties, and perhaps let little Timmy play baseball in the yard rather than signing him up for the elite traveling team; to let little Timmy study for his tests on his own, rather than getting so freaked out about his "quarterly testing schedule." If those things are more important to you than working on your marriage, that's your choice, but it's not the fault of the institution.

Tags: divorce, motherhood, sandra tsing-loh, the atlantic

In this month’s Atlantic, Sandra Tsing Loh writes about her recent divorce from her husband of 20 years. Divorce is not, for her, what it was in the Gloria Gaynor days, a path to delirious freedom and dramatic rebirth. Instead, her marriage dissolves the way it was lived, with haggling over domestic tedium. Tsing Loh, who had the affair (as she confesses obliquely), guiltily offers to keep changing the kitty litter.

What’s ultimately distressing about her essay is not the details of the divorce (affair, alienation, what to do with the kids) but her dismal portrait of the modern American marriage. Long-term monogamy is obsolete and unnatural in any age, she argues, with some support from anthropologists. But in our age, when relationships are governed by children’s needs and defined in management speak, they are doomed.

“Given my staggering working mother’s to-do list, I can not take on yet another arduous home and self improvement project, that of rekindling our romance,” she writes.

The piece has its exaggerations and tropes—for example the scene where her group of girlfriends, who stand in for all womankind, suddenly break down and confess that they, too, are dying to get divorced.

But many of the details in her very vivid and damning portrait are bound to resonate. The most common and seemingly happy marriages are “companionate” marriages, where two people co-parent, co-clean, co-work, co-everything. These are the kinds of marriages middle-class feminism fought for and won, and yet ... they are miserable, in her telling, and particularly miserable for women.

The endless exhortations to “work” on a marriage, the chore that is “date night” (take heed, Obamas), the “perfect” husband who helps with the kids and cooks but then chides his wife because she forgot to deglaze the pan (“kitchen bitch,” she calls him), the wife pacing the kitchen at night eating mini Dove bars because her husband won't sleep with her. “Long-married husbands and wives should pleasantly agree to be friends, to set the bedroom aglow at night by the mute opening of separate laptops,” she writes.

How did this happen? How did the drive for equality land us here? How is it that even when we free ourselves, we do it with a whimper? Have we lost even the hope for a Gloria Gaynor-style anthem of liberation?

Photograph of couple fighting by George Doyle/Stockbyte/Getty Creative Images.

Tags: atlantic, divorce

Yes, Vanessa, you are right that the Iranian elections are an argument against "U.S. interference" as a tool of democratization—if, by that, you mean U.S. military intervention. However, they are an excellent argument in favor of more peaceful forms U.S. democracy promotion, by which I mean radio programs like Radio Free Europe's Radio Farda, support for human rights websites (such as the excellent iranrights.org) based outside the country and training and other kinds of support and training organized by the National Endowment for Democracy and similar groups. The point of such exercises is to help and assist indigenous movements, and they only work in places where the indigenous civil society is already strong (in Ukraine, for example, but not in Belarus). This is the sort of thing that the U.S. used to be rather good at, but lately has become less interested in; the decline began towards the end of the Bush administration, and has now, unfortunately, accelerated. The Obama administration has so far expressed little enthusiasm. Perhaps Iran will change their thinking.

One further point: Even the Bush administration didn't advocate "democracy at the point of a gun," as you put it; in fact the elections in both Afghanistan and Iraq, held under U.S. military supervision, were extremely popular with Afghans and Iraqis. Much less popular were the weak governments those elections subsequently produced. But the cause of their weakness was not democracy; quite the contrary.

Tags: democracy, iran, Iranian election

So Iran's Guardian Council has agreed to do a partial recount of the votes, according to the New York Times and other sites, in response to street riots and protests larger than any in the country since 1979. If you haven't yet seen pictures of what's taking place, you have to check out this gallery from The Big Picture. (The image of the protestor helping the injured riot officer is amazing.) As everyone else has already noted, too, it's fascinating that social networks like Twitter, Facebook, and blogs have helped fuel protests and fervor. It's become a cliche that Twitter is an ideal news tool in moments like this (you can clamp down on reporters, maybe, but you can't silence every single Tweet); but we hear less about how Facebook personalizes the narrative, bringing faces and stories to what's taking place, allowing for actual debate, in some cases, and maybe in others just stoking more anger, for better or for worse. I'm sure many PhD students are hard at work on studying how on-line identity—which is so different from in-person identity, according the theoreticians like Sherry Turkle and others—shapes these moments of national fervor or political resistance; I'm already hungry to know more.

Tags: ahmadinejad, election, iran

I have a strange fascination with Eliot Spitzer. There, I said it. It's true. I suppose that's in part due to the fact that when Spitzergate roared its way into the headlines, I was running a project in which I was (for reasons that now escape me) collecting e-mails from men who had paid for sex about why they had paid for sex. Spitzer was one of those guys. I mean, he didn't send me an e-mail (not that I'm aware of, anyway), but he was one more john who had paid for sex, and the only difference was that A) he had gotten caught and B) he was famous.

Since, I've followed the guy's fall from grace and heady reascent to Slate columnist. Most recently, the kids over at Vanity Fair took him out to lunch, and John Heilpern succeeds in getting the former governor to open up over hotdogs. These days, Spitzer works for his father, a real estate tycoon. He's worked doggedly to rehabilitate his reputation, but his candor is surprising (for a politician, at least). "What I did was heinous and wrong," he has concluded. Apparently, he's got a shrink, or something like it. "But I don’t view it like, 'Gee! I’m in therapy,'" he protests.

He appears to be most ashamed of having successfully ruined his own hard-won legacy. "And that is a very hard thing to live with," he notes. "When he turned away," Heilpern observes, "I could see he was in tears." It was a moving scene. Or maybe just the crocodile tears of a narcissist who had lost the spotlight.

Tags: Eliot Spitzer, politics, Vanity Fair