Kudos to Sandra Tsing Loh for recycling an old joke into an article in the New York Times for which she was no doubt highly paid. I remember my divorced mother and her divorced and nondivorced friends sitting around laughing about how they wanted wives of their own so that they could come home to dinner cooked and kids behaving. Tsing Loh's piece echoes a famous feminist satire by Judy Syfers titled "I Want A Wife" that ran in the first issue of Ms. magazine. Of course, Tsing Loh and Syfers were making different points. Syfers was using humor to expose the male selfishness that perpetuated women's oppression in the home, and Tsing Loh is taking for granted many feminist gains. And Tsing Loh is so funny that she squeezes some freshness out of that old lemon.

Being the dork that I am, I can't help but point out to those who make jokes about wanting wives that non-lesbian-identified women have, on very rare occasions, been able to live the dream. Just last night, I read about such a household set-up in the course of reading a history of comic books. Dr. William Moulton Marston, who created Wonder Woman under the pen name Charles Moulton, was married, and he and his wife Elizabeth had another wife named Olive Byrne, who played the role of housewife while Elizabeth Marston was the primary breadwinner for much of the marriage. Each woman in the marriage had two children, but Olive raised them all, and I have few doubts she also aped the role of the Manhattan-shaking, slipper-bearing, enraptured-listening housewife. So Tsing Loh and other straight women who long for this, know that it's possible to have the housewife of your dreams, if you're willing to let your man sleep with someone younger and more compliant than you. Of course, putting it that way makes mixing your own Manhattans seem like not that much work at all.

(I don't want to paint William Marston as a patriarchal monster, however. He was just a weird dude, and was devoted both to fantasies of BDSM and his strong belief in female superiority. He explicitly saw Wonder Woman as propaganda aimed at ushering in a new era when men would relinquish rule to women, whom he saw as naturally more gentle and wise. All of which casts the feminist adoption of Wonder Woman into a comical light, since very few feminists want more than mere equality with men.)

Of course, the catch to all this is that even for those of us willing to swallow our jealousies and control over our homes to collect a conjugal third to play the role of housewife, there probably are even fewer takers than you'd get in the 1930s. Nowadays, even men who are willing to settle for uninteresting, unambitious women who'll play housewife have trouble finding any takers. Good luck hitting that jackpot of someone open-minded enough to be your third but unambitious enough to give up any hope of a career.

Photograph of woman by George Marks/Retrofile RF/Getty Images.

Tags: housewives, wonder woman

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

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

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.

Tags: companionate marriage, cristina nehring, sandra tsing loh, vindication of love

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."

Tags: divorce, sandra tsing loh, the atlantic

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

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

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

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.

Tags: atlantic, divorce

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.

Tags: atlantic, divorce