Boring Marriages vs. Failed Relationships

Hanna, just so you know, I wasn’t calling your marriage “boring”; Cristina Nehring was. No, in all seriousness, I’m glad you posted in response to Loh and to my piece about The Vindication of Love, the provocative new book arguing that we need to be less obsessed with “successful” relationships and more open to passion—in part because, Nehring argues, it leads to greater creativity. Your point that for every crazy artist in a series of chaotic relationships there’s one in a stable partnership is well-taken. Virginia Woolf, no slouch in the achievement department, may have had one of the most boring marriages of all time. But she liked it. It worked for her. Meanwhile, many partnerships you mention—like Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne—were hardly boring. As Nehring herself would concede, supportive relationships are key to survival and self-development. But I like that she wants to remind us that that support can take more forms than we sometimes think. To me, the really interesting point in her book is her idea that we don't "fail" when love doesn't work out. It's just part of growth.

Photograph of couple in kitchen by Getty Images.

Tags: cristina nehring, divorce, marriage, the atlantic, tsing loh

VIEW THIS CONVERSATION

Meghan O'Rourke is a founding editor of Double X and the author of Halflife, a book of poems.

Comments

just for the record

By: cristina nehring | Thu, 07/09/2009 - 07:33

I'd just like to voice a modest objection. If Meghan is not calling your marriage boring, Hanna, please believe that I'm not doing so either. A Vindication of Love has several glowing profiles of long-term marriages--or marriage-like relationships. The book closes on a half-chapter-long celebration of the multi-decade marriage of Hannah Arendt and Hermann Bluecher. It explores at length the more tempestuous but also enduring marriages (they were married twice!) of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, as well as the moving if unconventional wedlock of Edna St. Vincent Millay and the man who she became increasingly devoted to the longer she wore his ring, Eugen Boissevain.

Meghan speaks--in her wonderful, penetrating review---of my overlooking, perhaps, the beauty of "an aging husband who cares for his dying wife"--and yet that is exactly what Eugen Boissevain did with Edna in the example I extol in the pages of Vindication. When Edna--then elderly, decrepit, falling out of public favor--became addicted to morphine, Eugen purposefully addicted himself to the drug in order to show her (not theoretically, but practically, by example!) how to rid herself of its chains. If he ended up dying before her, it is only because he averted her Micheal Jackson-esque premature death by his altruism, by his loving, for-the-long-haul husbandly care.

Vindication of Love is not a celebration of affairs (though it does examine some). It is certainly not an attack on "companionate marriage"--which term neither appears in its pages nor in the vocabulary of its author. For what it's worth: I heard the term first on Double-X! As I wrote Vindication I was thinking far more, I will admit, of the cagey, embarrassed, safe-love-obsessed dating behaviors of my immediate peers than of the behaviors of long-married couples. That said: I do not exclude marriage from my argument; neither, however, is it a primary target. There are surely as many lame, self-protective, pragmatic affairs out there as there are tired marriages--witness the couples in the film version of He's Just Not That Into You.

What I try to do in Vindication--as Meghan remarks--is to make the point that "Love can be a form of Feminism"--i.e. it can be a courageous, intellectually charged goal as opposed to a distraction from such goals, as it has been often deemed in the careers of women. With this point in mind, I look, in various chapters, at love's heroic provenance ("Love as Heroism"), its capacity to lend acute insight ("Love as Wisdom") and high creativity ("Love as Art"), to bridge power differentials that would be debilitating in ordinary life ("Love as Inequality), and sometimes, yes, to risk our very skins or souls ("Love as Failure)--without, for that reason, constituting a regrettable accident.

If critics have concentrated a great deal on the "Failure" chapter, it is perhaps because most resonates--or most surprises. But it is not the only chapter--and surely it does not summarize my view of love. Nor does the hospital room stand in for my love nest. In one of the exactly three autobiographical sentences at the very end of Vindication, I say that I have been "derailed by love, hospitalized by love...overjoyed, inspired, unsettled by love". These sentences have been quoted back to me in every interview and review. Indeed, I have spent a week in the hospital for love. I have also spent 20-odd years awakened, empowered, illuminated by it. More than a polemic, I hope Vindication to be a book of inspiration.

(Final note to Hanna: Please don't send "mustachioed strangers". Maybe it's the German thing, but I have never gone for a guy with a mustache.:))

Obsessive Relationships

By: Potterchik | Tue, 06/23/2009 - 04:17

This book might as well have been called "The Case for Miseery." Seriously, what a crock. When I was younger, I spent some time in high-drama, obsessive relationships. They don't leave a whole lot of time or energy to do anything else. I (finally) took a long break to get my head on straight, and am now in a joyful marriage, the deep peace of which allows me a solid mooring from which to pursue creative impulses.