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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 Long-term monogamy is obsolete and unnatural in any age, she argues, with some support from anthropologists.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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Kerry: Returning to Tsing Loh, for a sec, I want to second your point: It is odd to describe a 20-year-old relationship that produced two kids and a lot of domestic support as a "failure" just because it doesn’t last until death do us part and all that. Like you, I find it troubling that we routinely describe marriages and relationships that end with this evaluative language. “They had a failed marriage,” we say; or, “He had a failed relationship with a ballet dancer.”
But some—maybe even many—of these relationships are not “failed” at all. They are relationships that worked well for a period of time, until, say, one partner changed, or needed something new (passion, in Tsing Loh's case). You may leave such a relationship with warm memories, nostalgia, feelings of love, and, sure, regrets. Yet this rhetoric of failure, it seems to me, has the funny effect of robbing us of the experience of our own lives, because in America we tend to think of failures as something to hide, reject, put behind us.
By contrast, consider this startling (or actually, utterly predictable) statistic from a new survey by AOL Living and Women’s Day about women and marriage: 72 percent of women surveyed say they have considered leaving their husbands. Does that mean everyone who stayed with hubby in the end is in a “successful” marriage? Hardly. That’s why this rhetoric is absurd; we'd be better off thinking about love more holistically as something that evolves, changes us, teaches us about our selves, and may or may not last "forever."
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In the past few days, on my own website, my life has been reduced to vanilla pudding. I am dull, devoid of passion, pedestrian, the human equivalent of a “yawning chubby house cat,” says Meghan, summarizing Cristina Nehring’s new book Vindication of Love, the caged bird who forgot how to sing. This is because I am trapped in something that goes by the clinical name of “companionate marriage,” and worse, I like it.
Unlike Sandra Tsing Loh, I can not load my possessions into a trailer and head for the open road. I can not even easily spend an evening giggling with my girlfriends without a lot of complicated pre-arrangements. Unlike Nehring, I can not swoon for the mustachioed stranger without a whole lot of baggage coming down on my head. All I can do, apparently, is bark at my husband to pack the lunches and shove him out of my bed to make room for the whimpering children. In the feminist choice between security and passion, they all say, I have picked the wrong side.
I protest. This “choice” is less something that plagues the whole of womankind than an affliction of artists, and it reappears in various forms. It strikes me as a subtle variation on the equally false choice between madness/creativity and sanity/dullness. For every great suffering artists she names (Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath), I can name you a happily married one (Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Joan Didion).
Nehring writes that in shying away from any power difference, women give up the erotic and the mysterious. There is something to that. But the fact is, for women the power difference came with too much pain: a chador, suicide, or in the case of David Pogue’s wife, a lifetime of acting as his social secretary with the small reward of being publicly declared “sainted.”
When we, the “smug marrieds,” as Bridget Jones called us, accept the term “companionate,” we have already lost the fight. It sounds like a Japanese rent-a-friend, a new brand of artificial sweetener or at best, a highly technical term. If some people choose to think of their marriage as “work” and child-rearing as a “profession” that’s their loss. There is a great amount of mystery that flows through a lifetime of love, both for your husband and your children. There is, believe it or not, also terror, and passion, and all the ecstasies Nehring describes. I too have been derailed by love and hospitalized by love, as Nehring has, but I am happy to leave that behind. She can keep her hospital room. I’ll take the lifetime of bliss.
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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.
