Has Marriage Become the Sacred Cow of Feminism?
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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.
Meghan O'Rourke is a founding editor of Double X and the author of Halflife, a book of poems.
Comments
Re: Loh's negative experience is not a template for change
By: wrongshore | Wed, 06/17/2009 - 20:31
All Loh has achieved is the rejection of something that made her unhappy. How can we take her suggestions seriously?
Would you rather take suggestions from someone who has accepted something that made her unhappy? Rejecting bad things strikes me as evidence of wisdom.
Loh's negative experience is not a template for change
By: grackle | Wed, 06/17/2009 - 18:50
All Loh has achieved is the rejection of something that made her unhappy. How can we take her suggestions seriously? Alternatives to marriage cannot emerge from theory and conjecture. They must emerge from practice. Many people are facing the problems Loh writes about and searching for answers. Frankly, the ones who are the least likely to write about their experiences -- those least bound by theory and appearances, least concerned with fashion, least interested in sweeping conclusions -- are the ones who search most freely.
When I face these problems, I look around for people who have dealt with them successfully, and I try to figure out what I can learn from them. So marriage is miserable for Loh and for many other people. What does this mean to me? Even the "best" way of living, I suspect, will be misery for a sizable minority of people. Now, the fact that some people are happy in marriage -- that is interesting. That is informative. I am much more interested in hearing from people who are happy outside marriage than from someone who is merely relieved to be rid of hers.
Against Love
By: wrongshore | Wed, 06/17/2009 - 17:05
Meghan, you might add to your reading pile Laura Kipnis' Against Love if you've not already read it. Tsing Loh quotes it insofar as to moan that "Relationships take work," but she only hints the critique that Kipnis loads onto that bromide. For Kipnis, companionate marriage reproduces the docility of surveilled industrial work inside the domestic sphere. There is no life outside work -- just two complementary spheres in which action is circumscribed and freedom is nowhere. Like the Foucauldian analysis of liberal society on which it relies, it is much more provocative than programmatic. But it's not very wrong.
Loh was not being individualistic
By: bagel | Wed, 06/17/2009 - 13:19
The author writes that Loh (along with other writers) "was trying to carve out an individualistic response to a social institution."
But that's not at all what Loh did. Her article ends with an exhortation for *all of us* to either accept marriage as dull, loveless "split the mortgage" arrangement, or avoid it all together. She's not trying to carve out a situation that works for her, she's telling the world to abandon marriage because she must.
There's nothing individualistic about affairs or divorce, either - they happen all the time. Carving out a type of marriage that works for the people involved (which is different from deciding you're going to have an affair without regard to your spouse) - rather than being guided by and constantly measuring against some crazy set of expectations - is to me the only way to make things work. But that's not what Loh did, as far I read the article.
Arthurian Legend is full of adultery and messy relationships...
By: grocer | Tue, 06/16/2009 - 22:33
Lancelot slept with Guinevere after she was married to King Arthur in Malory's version...and Arthur was born from a technically adulterous relationship. And then there's the whole Morgan Le Fay business with Arthur sleeping with his half-sister (and all the witches floating around on that side of the family...as rich and powerful, magical women)...personally, I think Arthurian legend is the last place to be looking for any kind of model for marriage...and, overall, early English lit is not exactly paradise...I mean, half the time it's the young dashing knight springing the fair maiden from her marriage to some king to which she was betrothed...in fact, courtly love upended the ideal of marriage as a political and financial tool...something which marriage has now become with the whole idea of co-parenting, co-earning, co-empowering, and so on and so forth. Marriage between professionals is more about a business relationship than ever when it comes to child rearing (the other reason royalty arranged marriages...to join lines and produce heirs).
Love has made a mash of marriage of for centuries, no sense in picking one century's mash over another...
"sacred cow"
By: sun | Tue, 06/16/2009 - 20:22
1) "sacred cow" is an offensive term. please stop using it.
2) if youre talking about the literary origins of "courtly love," your definition of it as "adulterous" is simplistic and wrong. u either havent read chretien de troyes, malory, gawain et al or u entirely missed the point.
In the NY Post's interview
By: Christine | Tue, 06/16/2009 - 18:05
In the NY Post's interview with Alain de Botton yesterday, there was this fun quote: "In the middle of the 18th century, along comes this incredible new idea that you might actually love the person you're married to. Extraordinary! Never believed before in human history."
http://www.nypost.com/seven/06152009/jobs/working_theory_174370.htm