After our debate on this site about Sandra Tsing Loh's Atlantic piece about her liberating divorce and Christina Nehring's book about the death of passion in the modern marriage, I kept waiting for someone to write about the other side. Now Elizabeth Weil has finally done it in her upcoming New York Times Magazine story, taking us deep inside her relatively happy, companionate union. This is a truly fascinating piece about what you discover when you put a perfectly good thing through the test:

I started wondering why I wasn’t applying myself to the project of being a spouse. My marriage was good, utterly central to my existence, yet in no other important aspect of my life was I so laissez-faire. Like most of my peers, I applied myself to school, friendship, work, health and, ad nauseam, raising my children. But in this critical area, marriage, we had all turned away. I wanted to understand why. I wanted not to accept this. Dan, too, had worked tirelessly — some might say obsessively — at skill acquisition. Over the nine years of our marriage, he taught himself to be a master carpenter and a master chef. He was now reading Soviet-era weight-training manuals in order to transform his 41-year-old body into that of a Marine. Yet he shared the seemingly widespread aversion to the very idea of marriage improvement. Why such passivity? What did we all fear?

Conversation page photograph of couple by Stockbyte/Getty Images.

Tags: companionate marriage, elizabeth weil, marriage therapy

Hanna, I agree that Elizabeth Weil's piece about putting her perfectly serviceable marriage through the therapy wringer was an interesting read, and it sure does tell us a lot about the modern companionate marriage. But for me, it worked mainly as a reminder of why I want to avoid the whole institution of marriage, even as I envy the goodies that it provides those who make the leap. (Insurance, respect from outsiders, the assurance that someone likes you enough to marry you.) Putting that much hard work into a relationship troubles me; can't any part of our lives be an escape from the relentless pressure to work hard and achieve some kind of outsider-defined perfection?

Call me a romantic, but I see romantic love as an opportunity to create something idiosyncratic, and the institution of marriage enforces conformity. That Weil struggled with the idea of what a "good" marriage is indicates this. God forbid it be something as simple as making you happy. Requirements like having the right amount of intimacy, the proper sex life, and the blissful acceptance of all parts of a person probably do kill plenty of marriages that would be perfectly happy if the participants in them had more realistic expectations.

Weil captures this problem perfectly when she addresses the onerous requirement of monogamy. Now, being an unmarried heathen, I tend to think of monogamy as we unmarried heathens practice it: You can't have sex with other people or even make out with them. But Weil points out that the marriage vows can be read as defining it widely:

We all shed what we told ourselves were tears of joy. Dan and I promised to forsake all others, and sexually we had. But we had not shed all attachments, naturally, and as we waded further into our project the question of allegiances became more pressing. Was our monogamy from the child’s or the mother’s perspective? Did my love for Dan — must my love for Dan — always come first?

And because of this need to "forsake all others", Weil's relationship with her mother—the closeness of it—becomes an issue. But should it have been? Why is there such an expectation that the person you share your bed and body with also be the source of all important emotional support? No wonder so many people have trouble distinguishing intimacy from codependency. And no wonder so many people cheat! The all-consuming American companionate marriage seems stifling, and the temptation to escape to where sex and intimacy don't come with a side dish of emotional vampirism looms large in our imagination.

I won't go cliché and suggest that a little mystery should be employed to keep sex hot. But honestly, being a little less than married can be a very good way to hold a relationship together. We seek out the companionship of others precisely because we become bored with ourselves; therefore, it seems like it's simply easier to have a relationship with someone who hasn't subsumed their individuality to a marriage. This "forsaking all others" business seems like the first path on the step of losing the very thing that made you enticing to your loved one in the first place, which is your own unique identity.

Tags: elizabeth weil, therapy

Amanda, I don't think you can really make generalizations about all married people or the institution of companionate marriage from Elizabeth Weil's excellent piece. As commenter ockeghem wrote in response to your post, "It said nothing about anyone's marriage but Weil's." It was a singular account of one union, but one that confirmed a long-held belief of mine about relationships: Total honesty is for the birds. I don't always want to know what my fiance is thinking at every second, and he doesn't want to know everything I'm thinking, either. Weil and her husband re-hash a bunch of long-buried issues, and seem to find mostly pain, rather than revelation. This is not to say that we should keep Don Draperish secrets from our beloveds. I just never want to hear my future husband say about an ex-girlfriend, as Weil's husband said to her about a past lover, "We had this completely psychologically sadistic thing that was incredibly disturbing to me ... ."

Tags: companionate marriage, elizabeth weil, marriage improvement