One of America’s longest-running love triangles is about to come to an end: According to the official Archie Comics blog, Archie Andrews—hapless ginger kid and proto-Zack Morris—is getting married. (Via CNN.)

In the 65-year-old serial’s 600th issue—on sale in September—Archie and the gang have hurtled into the future. They’ve graduated from college, and Archie’s now preparing to take the marital plunge. According to Veronica’s blog—which, strangely, reads like it was written by a spammer from Singapore—it seems Archie has chosen her over sweet, loyal Betty:

I am so excited, I am getting Married to Archie. There is so much to do, so many plans to make. I wonder if Betty wants to be my Maid of Honor? I bet she is so happy for me!
(((Hugs)))
Ronnie

Betty, predictably, is sad. Jughead will be best man. And Reggie, that scamp, plans on scooping up Archie’s sloppy seconds.

Of course, you should never trust bloggers. With a little more than three months till pub date, we might see a Graduate-style switcheroo at the last minute.

I was always a Veronica girl myself—mostly because she had black hair, like me, but also because the girl knew how to Get. Things. Done. But I have a feeling she might not have nabbed him for long. Is it too much to hope for an eventual Archie-Moose pair-off?

Tags: Archie, Archie comics, Betty, marriage, Veronica

Via Fark—a 1933 "Test for Husbands" (in two parts) that offers points and demerits for various behaviors. How would your husband shape up?

Reads the newspaper at the table: 1 demerit
Reads newspaper, books, or magazines aloud to wife: 1 point
Talks of the efficiency of his stenographer or other women: 1 demerit
Gives wife real movie kisses, not dutiful "pecks" on the cheek: 1 point

Points off, too, for being too much of a bookworm, kissing your wife right after she's applied her makeup, and writing on the tablecloth. Luckily, a husband can win a whole 20 points—the most awarded in the entire quiz!—for being "ardent, considerate, and sensitive in relations" ... Does that mean what I think it means? Who knew married couples in the '30s were all about bumping connubial uglies?

Minneapolis journalist and veteran blogger James Lileks apparently found this retro gem in the offices of the Star Tribune; a test for wives and parents is promised in coming days.

Of course, the real question is: How would Obama fare on this point system?

Tags: marriage, retro, test for husbands

A new study from the University of Michigan shows that in metropolitan areas where men are scarce, they are less likely to propose marriage and tend to spend more time playing the field. This is not even remotely surprising, but ScienceDaily reports that there are other societal effects when there is a surplus of women in a reigon:

For instance, studies have shown that when women outnumber men, hemlines actually rise, overall, as women to do more to physically attract men. Also, the rates of divorce and out-of-wedlock births are higher, and interests in women's rights increases. Surpluses of men tend to be associated with more conservative social norms and restricted roles for women.

Short skirts and women's rights, or muumuus and marriage? The former somehow sounds more enticing.

Tags: dating, gender studies, marriage, university of michigan

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

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

Like Hanna and Meghan, I read Sandra Tsing Loh as arguing that companionate marriage involves trade-offs; that for all we gain in trading hierarchy for equity, something, perhaps, is lost. But I was most struck by the fact that Tsing Loh has such high expectations for the longevity of marriage; so high that her eventual disavowal of the institution is almost inevitable. It’s not like she got hitched late one night in Vegas and regretted it the next morning. She was with her husband for 20 years. They produced two seemingly happy kids, and Tsing Loh has managed to build a fantastically successful career while raising them. This is what failure looks like? Why is this split treated as a lack of will—“a gravestone sunk down on two decades of history”—rather than a natural, peaceful end to a happy and productive union?

As Tsing Loh says, Americans marry and divorce, and divorce and marry, and continue to attend endless engagement parties without deeming the institution a waste of everyone's time. Tsing Loh thinks we’re deluded, but perhaps we’ve adapted to the fact that modern unions can be both meaningful and temporary. Surely, given the reality of serial marriage, we can come up with a better metric for determining a successful partnership than “does/does not last forever”? Tsing Loh asks “why we still believe in marriage,” but I’d like to know why she still believes that the only successful partnership is one you’re in when you die.

Tags: divorce, marriage, the atlantic

It would have been so much easier for me to find the time to write this post if I had voice-recognition software, a sophisticated self-built database with all my contacts including my Double X blog posting instructions, which I keep losing, and most of all if I had an administrative-assistant-type of husband who handled all the household bills and dental appointments and child-care challenges and playdates and grocery shopping and left me free to spend more time at the keyboard.

But I don't have these things. I mean, I do have a husband, and he does what he can, but he leaves for work earlier than I do, so this morning I was the one who took the cat to the vet. Despite the resulting time crunch, I am posting anyway to say that I was fascinated by David Pogue's column in the New York Times revealing his work efficiency secrets. In addition to high-tech solutions like software that completes the typing of certain words, enabling him to get to the next word faster (what if Jack Kerouac had had that? Would it have been possible for him to write On the Road even more rapidly than he did? Is it possible to write so fast that your words spontaneously combust?) and a cellular laptop modem stick that enables him to keep working in the X-ray line at the airport, he also has another, rather more low-tech productivity secret weapon: his wife.

"I’m lucky enough that I don’t spend time on bills, taxes, travel arrangements, kid-activity scheduling, and so on; my sainted wife takes care of all that administrative overhead," he allows at the end of his column. I read that sentence and wondered what that sort of life would be like. It's so hard to imagine, being a wife myself. Like reading about a distant country, or Antarctica, or a very, very expensive restaurant, or any place that sounds exotic and sort of wonderful but that you are pretty sure you will never visit. It must be pleasant living there, though risky; though I'm sure they both have strong and extremely functional marriages it does strike me that both Pogue and Dan Baum (whose wife helps him plan and edit his reported pieces) have a lot to lose in the event of divorce, so I hope they are very nice to these wives who assist them so readily. I am sure they are. Flowers, guys, tonight! It's a good thing neither of them married Sandra Tsing Loh—they would be so up a creek, right about now.

Reading the column, I was moved, as I periodically am, to reflect on the lasting brilliance of "Why I Want a Wife," the 1971 essay by Judy Syfers that ran in Ms. almost 40 years ago. Go back and read it. Feminism never gave us that one thing Syfers put her finger on, the spouse who smoothly takes care of your personal life and enables you to maximize your professional potential, did it? The wife? I know, I know—lots of men don't have that level of assistance, either. But so many of the women I know literally run from the office to the bus stop to take up the second shift of driving to hockey practice and preparing dinner; while driving home, they conduct business discussions using hands-free cellphones. I was also interested by the fact that Pogue works at home, but unlike women I know who work at home because it enables them to more easily dash out and take the kids to doctor's appointments, etc., he works at home because that way he can work more.

But how beguiling is this foreign country? What if feminism had given us full-time domestic and logistical helpmeets? Would we react well? I sent the link to Pogue's column to a colleague who knows all too well the experience of juggling child care and work assignments. Her first comment was that she had no idea what most of the technology he was talking about even was. Just the other day she could not figure out why her Internet was not working, and discovered that her modem had been unplugged so her son could plug in something or other.

That's the way I live, too. But thinking about it she also felt a life devoid of domestic distractions had little appeal. "Chained to a home office, to all that technology ... and no breaks to schedule a vacation or think about a kid's activity? Much as I'd like to jettison some logistical responsibilities, I'd go nuts without those interruptions." Me too. The column raises that hard to answer question: If I had somebody to free me from filling out school forms and planning the kids summer activities, would I want that? If I could write more words each day, would they be better words? Are there any women who get that level of support from their husbands, and if so, can you name them?

Tags: husbands, marriage, productivity, technology, wives

Hanna, you call out the false dichotomy between the miserable married and passionate single, and in this weekend's New York Times Magazine, Ginia Bellafante discusses Jodi Picoult's novels, and the false dichotomy between good parent and bad. According to Bellafante, Picoult's incredibly successful slew of novels, including My Sister's Keeper and Nineteen Minutes, involve "terrible things happen[ing] to children of middle-class parentage: they become terminally ill, or are maimed, gunned down, killed in accidents, molested, abducted, bullied, traumatized, stirred to violence." Bellafante continues, "Picoult’s message is at once cautionary and subverting. As much as her novels underscore the hazards of parental shortcomings, at a certain level they seem to exist to make a mockery of the cherished idea that we ought not to have any."

Basically Picoult is pointing out that there's no such thing as the perfect parent, without shortcomings, just as Sandra Tsing Loh observes that there's no such thing as a the perfect marriage. But Bellafante's commentary on the underlying message in Picoult's novels—that they expose a deep ambivalence about having children—could be said of our collective feelings toward marriage as well:

Picoult’s books and the whole cultural machine devoted to maniacal worry about children often seem like a reflection of our collectively sublimated ambivalence about having children to begin with...Picoult’s novels access this disparity, the difference between what is said and what is done, the difference between parenting that assumes the shape of performed concern and parenting that takes the form of active tending. So much of the ugliness that transpires in her books could be prevented by a marginally greater degree of psychological caution.

Substitute marriage for parenting—"the difference between marriage that assumes the shape of performed concern and marriage that takes the form of active tending"—and you've hit on what we've been discussing all week with Tsing Loh's piece. Meghan quotes a statistic from an AOL poll that says 72 percent of women have considered leaving their husbands. What she didn't mention was that in that same poll, 71 percent of women said they'd be with their husbands until they die. Talking about any of these monumental life events—marriage, motherhood—in absolutes is a mistake. It shouldn't be surprising at all that most women are ambivalent about marriage and motherhood; most people are ambivalent about everything. Just because some marriages don't work out and sometimes terrible things happen to good children doesn't mean the institutions are doomed or are in need of an overthrow. As a woman who is on the brink of what Hanna describes as a "vanilla pudding" future, I think I'll take Dahlia's advice: Ignore what the books say and just live.

Photograph of mother and child by Getty Images.

Tags: ginia bellafante, jodi picoult, marriage, motherhood, new york times magazine, sandra tsing loh

The reliably wired Marc Ambinder flags National Journal's almost foolishly comprehensive, 366-person omnibus study of the folks working in every nook and cranny of the Obama administration (complete with phone numbers)! I've only carved my way through a third of it, but Marc dishes the important stats:

12 percent of top Obama officials have served in the military, down from 18 percent of top officials at the start of Bush's first term ... A top female Obama administration official is three times as likely to be single as her male counterpart. Four years ago, a top female Bush administration official was almost five times as likely to be single as her male counterpart ... The percentage of white Christians among top officials whose religious affiliation is known dropped from 71 percent during Bush's second term to 46 percent in the Obama administration... 37 percent of top Obama officials graduated from an Ivy League institution ... with Harvard being the top college for undergraduate and graduate degrees.

This is all fascinating demographic information (Noam Scheiber has made the case that Harvard "won" over Yale in the Obama-Clinton primary), especially the news that white Christians are now only half running the federal government. But the statistic that jumped out for me is that "top" females in both the Obama and Bush administrations were likely to be single, and that they were more likely to be single under W—unwavering defender of the traditional family. Of course, I suspect Bush had fewer women in his administration (Obama employs 123, to 243 men), and those who served were of the Condi Rice / Harriet Miers mold (presumably more attached to W than to their personal lives), but perhaps Obama—despite conventional Christianist demagoguery about Democrats—is slightly more pro-family.

At any rate, the same disproportionate numbers, in radically different administrations, seem to reinforce the sacrifices women make—not just to balance work and play, but to run the free world. On the Hill, for instance, as per Lisa Lerer, "dating as a congresswoman is almost impossible. It's not just the power thing, they say, but the difficulty of fitting someone new into an already tight schedule of weekends back home in the district, weeknight events and tiring days.'" The news that Jackie Norris, former schoolteacher and Michelle Obama confidante was bumped (or bumped herself) from her position as East Wing chief of staff in order to spend time with her young children is more evidence of the unique tradeoffs of being a politica. And when "The Melody Barnes," longtime D.C. heavy-hitter turned domestic policy chief, got married recently, the New York Times narrated her story thusly:

She and her friends often joked about the cast of characters who came courting, including the date who announced that his primary passion was whittling. But one of those conversations left Ms. Barnes in tears, recalled Laurie Rubiner, her good friend. “We laughed about it, but it was heartbreaking,” Ms. Rubiner said. “Here is a 45-year-old woman who is so successful, yet the one thing that really defined success for her, family and love, was something she didn’t have.”

Oy. This definition of "success" brings me back to a dueling set of articles at The Root last week on what single women can and can't learn from Michelle Obama. In echoes of that inflammatory Lori Gottlieb article on "settling," the theses are as follows: Women should stop being picky so that they can get married and be happy. Everything up to but not including girlfriend-beating should be excused ("he had ashy toes" is not a dealbreaker). Power is not as important as progeny.

But what if Barnes had shacked up with the whittler, and sat out the Obama campaign? Or all the female congresspeople had foregone important constituent visits to stroll, two by two, by the Potomac? I know this balancing act is timeless for "type A professional women"—but is the calculus different when the jobs in question are so, well, important? It seems odd that the women personally determining many key elements of American public life could shrug off that privilege—but then again, it doesn't.

Photograph of White House Social Secretary Desiree Rogers by Stephen Lovekin/Getty Images.

Tags: condoleezza rice, congress, ellen tauscher, george Bush, hariet miers, jackie norris, marriage, melody barnes, obama administration, power, single women, white house

The reliably wired Marc Ambinder flags National Journal's almost foolishly comprehensive, 366-person omnibus study of the folks working in every nook and cranny of the Obama administration (complete with phone numbers)! I've only carved my way through a third of it, but Marc dishes the important stats:

12 percent of top Obama officials have served in the military, down from 18 percent of top officials at the start of Bush's first term ... A top female Obama administration official is three times as likely to be single as her male counterpart. Four years ago, a top female Bush administration official was almost five times as likely to be single as her male counterpart ... The percentage of white Christians among top officials whose religious affiliation is known dropped from 71 percent during Bush's second term to 46 percent in the Obama administration... 37 percent of top Obama officials graduated from an Ivy League institution ... with Harvard being the top college for undergraduate and graduate degrees.

This is all fascinating demographic information (Noam Scheiber has made the case that Harvard "won" over Yale in the Obama-Clinton primary), especially the news that white Christians are now only half running the federal government. But the statistic that jumped out for me is that "top" females in both the Obama and Bush administrations were likely to be single, and that they were more likely to be single under W—unwavering defender of the traditional family. Of course, I suspect Bush had fewer women in his administration (Obama employs 123, to 243 men), and those who served were of the Condi Rice / Harriet Miers mold (presumably more attached to W than to their personal lives), but perhaps Obama—despite conventional Christianist demagoguery about Democrats—is slightly more pro-family.

At any rate, the same disproportionate numbers, in radically different administrations, seem to reinforce the sacrifices women make—not just to balance work and play, but to run the free world. On the Hill, for instance, as per Lisa Lerer, "dating as a congresswoman is almost impossible. It's not just the power thing, they say, but the difficulty of fitting someone new into an already tight schedule of weekends back home in the district, weeknight events and tiring days.'" The news that Jackie Norris, former schoolteacher and Michelle Obama confidante was bumped (or bumped herself) from her position as East Wing chief of staff in order to spend time with her young children is more evidence of the unique tradeoffs of being a politica. And when "The Melody Barnes," longtime D.C. heavy-hitter turned domestic policy chief, got married recently, the New York Times narrated her story thusly:

She and her friends often joked about the cast of characters who came courting, including the date who announced that his primary passion was whittling. But one of those conversations left Ms. Barnes in tears, recalled Laurie Rubiner, her good friend. “We laughed about it, but it was heartbreaking,” Ms. Rubiner said. “Here is a 45-year-old woman who is so successful, yet the one thing that really defined success for her, family and love, was something she didn’t have.”

Oy. This definition of "success" brings me back to a dueling set of articles at The Root last week on what single women can and can't learn from Michelle Obama. In echoes of that inflammatory Lori Gottlieb article on "settling," the theses are as follows: Women should stop being picky so that they can get married and be happy. Everything up to but not including girlfriend-beating should be excused ("he had ashy toes" is not a dealbreaker). Power is not as important as progeny.

But what if Barnes had shacked up with the whittler, and sat out the Obama campaign? Or all the female congresspeople had foregone important constituent visits to stroll, two by two, by the Potomac? I know this balancing act is timeless for "type A professional women"—but is the calculus different when the jobs in question are so, well, important? It seems odd that the women personally determining many key elements of American public life could shrug off that privilege—but then again, it doesn't.

Photograph of White House Social Secretary Desiree Rogers by Stephen Lovekin/Getty Images.

Tags: condoleezza rice, congress, ellen tauscher, george Bush, hariet miers, jackie norris, marriage, melody barnes, obama administration, power, single women, white house