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Dahlia, you ask, "Why do we want to cast our marriages in such cartoonish extremes?" I think the gray area—where a marriage is neither deliriously euphoric for years on end, nor a bastion of bitterness, infighting, and "divorce dreams"—may not be written about partly because those extremes sell better but also partly because they're easier for the writer. It's a lot harder to be realistic about the gray area. Because that gray area lets on that, heaven forbid, your marriage might not be perfect. It's as though if you acknowledge that a gray area exists, you come off looking like you're trashing marriage—your own.
The closest analogy I can think of, I hate to say, is the various plot endings of the recent Sex and the City movie (note: major spoiler alert), which focused a lot on fairy-tale endings of deliriously happy marriages (or one in particular). As much as it pained me to see Carrie marry Big in the end—not only because he'd consistently screwed her over throughout the series, but also because, after leaving her at the altar, it didn't make any sense (why not live together happily ever after if he's that freaked out by marriage?)—I was heartened to see the ending written for Miranda and Steve. Contrary to the foolish, the-bad-guy-will-change-for-you message sent by the valentine that is Carrie's marriage, Miranda and Steve seem to really struggle and really try to work it out (at the very end) after Steve's affair. Granted, the circumstances of one party cheating are much more dire than the vanilla-esque gray area items I'm mulling over (like leaving the cap off the toothpaste), but it's not too often, especially on the big screen, that you see the struggle and mediocrity of a marriage—along with the moments that endear the betrothed to each other, by the way—getting equal airing. It was a refreshing antidote to the overblown central story line, yet it hardly got any attention.
Perhaps the reality of it is just too banal and maybe, as Dahlia again pointed out, we might need to stake out outrageously simple positions to get published. But I think there could be more to it than that. (I also add that my own marriage is a bed of roses every single day. Seriously.)
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It seems we are having two discussions here: writing about a rotten marriage, and having one. I agree with Hanna, I don’t know how you write a piece that begins, “I contemplate divorce every day” and not end up writing the sequel, “How I Chose My Divorce Lawyer.” Hanna, you quote Ellen Tien’s assertion, “Beneath the thumpingly ordinary nature of our marriage—Everymarriage—runs the silent chyron of divorce," and wonder if those of us whose running chyron is saying “I am so lucky I am married to this man” are deluded. I agree with you, Hanna, that Tien is deluded to think there are no happy marriages, and that it demonstrates a rather narrow worldview not to understand there are many couples, who even in their worst moments, have never contemplated divorce. On the other hand, how (and why) do you write about your happy marriage? It would feel like one of those gloating Christmas letters. I grew up with a terror of marriage. My parents’ was comprehensively awful. The only thing that seemed to keep them together for 20 years was that it took them that long to finish shredding each other. I didn’t get married until I was 38, and the miracle of my life is that we have been happy for the 14 years since. But maybe this is due to the fact that early on, while watching A Few Good Men, we decided we needed a motto for our marriage and took Jack Nicholson’s line: “You can’t handle the truth!”
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Forgive me for wondering whether the whole “women-who-crave-divorce-in-print” boomlet we’re contemplating here is yet another manifestation of the “mommy wars” phenomenon. That is the media-created dustup wherein approximately 18 women (all of them upper-middle-class residents of Manhattan) purport to speak for all American women, in describing a nonexistent raging conflict between stay-at-home and working mothers. It turns out they speak for precisely nine women at each end of the bell curve—the nine women who stay at home and hate working moms, and the nine women who work and hate stay-at-home moms.
But the huge bulge on the bell curve that is the mass of part-time, flex-time, volunteer, work-from-home, struggling-along, working-it-out, too-busy-to-care moms nevertheless watch in awe as the caricatures play out in fiction and in the media. We can’t get enough of those mommy-wars stories!
Even casting this current discussion as a choice between “I contemplate divorce every day" and “my husband and I never fight" highlights the problem: Why do we want to cast our marriages in such cartoonish extremes? I find myself wondering whether women need to take this sort of outrageously simple position (“I hate my kids” “I loathe my husband”) in order to get published, or if we like to read about complicated subjects rendered in cartoonish ways?
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Well, I suppose that through a certain feminist lens everything looks like progress (From Anna Karenina to Ellen Tien). There was a time when any literary heroine who attempted some escape from the confines of a dull, loveless marriage wound up dead or alone or trapped in a dull, loveless marriage anyway. Then came the silent sufferers of the John Cheever era. And now we have our raging house bitches, freed by the pen. And I suppose there's a certain justice in that. Men don't do it because it still seems petty or pathetic or somehow beneath them to trash their wives in print (i.e., Philip Weiss' condescension). With women, the act still carries an outrageous glamour. (Katie Roiphe wrote a recent essay in New York about how happy she was about her divorce. Claire Bloom's memoir about her marriage to Philip Roth, among others, is a classic, and Roth only sought revenge obliquely, through a fictional Eve.) But I guess I don't see the liberation or happiness at the end of this road. Freedom from housework, freedom from the sole responsibilities of child-rearing, freedom from semi-arranged marriages. I'm with you. But freedom from intimacy? Freedom from love? And then what?
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Ann and Meghan, when I tried to come up with male journalists and essayists who run down their wives last night, Norman Mailer kept popping into my head. Wrong era (and maybe wrong kind of misogyny). The men's companion volume to The Bitch in the House, as I recall, was mild and mewling by comparison. Do women bitch more because they're bitchier or because they have more to bitch about? I like Ann's image of Iron Women wives clubbing their plankton husbands, but I wonder if those are mostly literary poses. Another thought: Writers like Ellen Tien are practicing self-deprecation run amok and misdirected to include not only themselves but the men near and dear to them. When I wrote recently about parents who dissect their family lives in print, the writers I interviewed unfailingly told me that they themselves, and their failings, were the real subject. The Bitch writers seem to depart from this model all too readily. Maybe that's because they extend their unflinching self-analysis to their husbands and marriages. Their men's pores and warts are as coldly exposed as their own, but maybe somehow that seems OK, because the whole thing originates in self-critique, even if it ends up somewhere else entirely.
Hanna, I don't know about you, but I feel like among the married women I know, contemplating divorce is a huge fault line. For some women, it's like prodding a sore tooth—both irritating and somehow comforting. And for other women, it's just not part of their universe—not today or yesterday or 10 years from now. Tien implies there's no real understanding among women across this divide, because she can imagine only one side of it. Is that right? I hope not, but I'm not sure.
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Meghan, you ask how male writers treat their wives in print, and I can't say I've been browsing the magazine racks. But for a recent sample, I looked back at Philip Weiss' New York magazine piece on "the trouble with sex and marriage," which supplied us here at XX with a lot of grist not so long ago. I thought I'd recalled squirming at his portrait of his wife. Here's how he and his friend describe their spouses: "He and I love our wives and depend on them. In each of our cases, they make our homes, manage our social calendar, bind up our wounds and finish our thoughts, and are stitched into our extended families more intimately than we are. They seem emotionally better equipped than we are. If my marriage broke up, my wife could easily move in with a sister. I'd be as lost as plankton." It's a far cry from trashing, but it's rather narcissistic damning with condescending praise, isn't it? And I wonder if it might go some way to explaining why so many writing wives don't hesitate to eviscerate: Maybe a new power dynamic, at least in the world of dual-career couples, spurs Ellen Tien, et al., on. Do they assume that hubbies, desperate to avoid the plankton fate, will put up with a lot? How ironic, yet classic, if the dependence of empathy-challenged guys is goading women to violate those famously wound-binding ways of females.
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Are yoga-toned women of a certain class all secretly dying to get divorced, you ask us, Hanna? I find it hard to believe—whatever Ellen Tien at O might say about her own divorce daydreams. But a follow-up question might be: Are many women of a certain, er, journalistic class not-so-secretly dying to shred their husbands into tiny little pieces in the pages of a national magazine? Or in a themed anthology to be heavily promoted at the Barnes & Noble front table? Are simple bitch sessions with a best friend over iced coffee no longer enough to get the weight off our chests? For a while now, it's seemed to me that everywhere I look—in Vogue, in O, in Glamour, in books like The Bitch in the House— there's an essay by a woman about the challenges of matrimony that basically devolves into a long humiliate-the-hubby session. Usually these verbal drubbings come high up in the piece. In distress, one searches in vain for some humor, some lightness of touch. ... But as you point out, Hanna, there's no Lucy-and-Ricky good cheer there.
Now, I see the virtue of tearing down certain conventional ideas about marriage: For example, it's clear that separate apartments work well for some folks. But it does seem to me that whatever form marriage takes, it has to be a shelter. It's a little circle two people draw around themselves in order to protect each other as best they can from life's slings and arrows. And the old moralist in me feels that while you're in that circle, you don't deliver your partner a cathartically vituperative tongue-lashing before scores of strangers. (If you really feel you must, don't do it in a personal essay in O; at least aim to produce a new Tender Is the Night.) I'm curious: Does this seem like an old-fashioned idea now? In our age of disclosure, is marriage on the same plateau as everything else—friendships, sex, boyfriends? Or does it, should it, still occupy a separate realm?
Meanwhile, it seems to me that this mini-phenomenon is majority-owned by women. But do you all see lots of essays by men—in GQ, in Men's Vogue, wherever—running down their wives?
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I want to take advantage of what Maureen Dowd dubs the celebrity divorce moment (Christie Brinkley, Madonna) to talk about how this great American pastime figures for the rest of us. When David and I did the Slate V feature in which we spent a day no more than 15 feet apart, I got one overwhelming response from women: How could you do that? I could never do that! That would be torture! For a while I wondered whether people were exaggerating their horror. After all, how hard could it be to spend a mere 24 hours tethered to the man you married? Annoying, maybe, but torture? And then I came across a story in O called "Divorce Dreams." New York Times reporter Ellen Tien begins the story with a portrait of her bumbling fool of a husband, who lies, always says exactly the wrong thing, scratches his armpit at a parent-teacher conference and then "absently smells his fingers." These anecdotes are not recounted in Lucy-and-Ricky good cheer. The story's first sentence is: "I contemplate divorce every day." Three paragraphs in, I was shocked that someone would write this way under her own byline about her living husband, and not her ex. But apparently I am an idiot. The premise is that women of certain class, flush with financial independence, yoga-toned arms and infinite choices, all yearn for divorce every day. The other ones, who say things like, "My husband and I never fight," or "My husband is my best friend" are either willfully deluded or liars. "Beneath the thumpingly ordinary nature of of our marriage—Everymarriage—runs the silent chyron of divorce." So, help me out here, ladies. Is this true? Am I living in a fantasy land? Or is Ellen Tien as bitchy as she seems?
Read the rest of the XX Factor conversation about divorce and the way men and women treat one another in print.