The XX Factor: What women really think.

Women Don't "Forget" To Have Children

A post from DoubleX writer Amanda Marcotte:

While conceding that Huffington Post might write headlines for its celebrity bloggers, I still have to admit that I knew no good would come from an article titled "Don't Forget To Have Kids." This myth of the woman who "forgets" to have kids is so common that we don't stop to think about how sexist it really is, since the implication is that women are prone to such heights of stupidity that they could forget about the existence of marriage and babies, even in a world that has multiple cable channels (especially TLC) dedicated to marriage and babies. If you think about the myth of "forgetting" to have kids even for a moment, it falls apart, because the more common problem is forgetting to use contraception, and having kids because of it ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)

The Obamas Do Not Have a Post-Feminist Marriage

Just one small response to Hanna's excellent observations in today’s DoubleX discussion of an alternate universe in which Hillary had become President: I can't resist disagreeing with her that the Obama marriage is post-feminist. I don't think any marriage where one spouse is gone out of the house to the extent that he was, and one spouse is left to raise the small children and hold down the fort, and, oh yes, make the money necessary for the mortgage payment, can be described as post-feminist. At least not in the ideal sense. It may be a post-feminist marriage in the sense that it's what a lot of women in her generation have struggled with—albeit an extreme version—but it's not post-feminist in the sense that it's the kind of set-up one would aspire to ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)

Later Marriages Don't Necessarily Equal Unhappy Marriages

Some 20-somethings take their relationship advice from friends, some from Cosmo. Me, I like it straight from middle-aged veterans of the Bush Administration. That’s why I’m listening very closely when Michael Gerson tells me I’m living in “a relational wasteland,” a “hormone filled-gap” between adolescence and marriage ... (Read more in DoubleX.)

What Was Your Father's Bachelor Name?

Looking for Submissions: How Marriage Changes You

In our "Your Comeback" blog today, Emma Gilbey Keller writes about Allison Yarrow's decision to change her name when she got married—something Keller never thought she'd do. She's looking for more submissions from women whose relationships have inspired life changes: Did you convert as part of a committment? Did you move across the country or to another continent? Emma wants to hear from you at emma@thecomebackbook.com ... (Read more in Double X.)

Kay Hymowitz Fears for the Future of Marriage

In the Wall Street Journal, my onetime sparring partner Kay Hymowitz argues that the discussion over the meltdown of white, middle-class marriage comes at a time when white, middle class marriages are particularly likely to last; the divorce rate for college-educated women is remarkably low. And despite the fact that her piece includes a sarcastic shoutout to Double X, I think she is mostly right. For all the talk of desperately bored empty nesters, marital satisfaction generally suffers when kids come along and rises when kids leave. The median age of first divorce for women is 29, not 59; it seems that the arrival of children is more likely to challenge a marriage than their sudden disappearance.

Only Caitlin Flanagan Could Make Mark Sanford Look Good

A guest post from Linda Hirshman:

With a cover story by working mother scourge Caitlin Flanagan, next week’s Time Magazine takes the occasion of South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford’s staggeringly banal adultery to tell America that “Marriage Matters.”

Why does marriage matter? Not of course because of the harm to the deer-in-the-headlights brigade—Silda Wall Spitzer, Jenny Sanford, etc. That would put Flanagan on the side of the adult females.

Marriage matters, because single parent families are bad for children, the only people who count ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)

Hello, Young Lovers

Caitlin Flanagan's Defense of Marriage Bums Me Out

Should We Admire Sanford's Honesty?

Slate’s Will Saletan has a provocative defense of Sanford today:

I feel awful for Sanford's wife and kids. But compared with all the cheaters who have gone before him, I don't think less of him for genuinely loving the other woman or for admitting it. It beats the hell out of seducing somebody, kicking her to the curb, and pretending she was nothing to you—or really meaning it.

I suppose there is some honesty in that. But let’s remember that he was doing it at a press conference ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.) 

Boring Marriages vs. Failed Relationships

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. 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. Meanwhile, many partnerships you mention—like Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne—were hardly boring. (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)

All the Single Ladies (In the Government)

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... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)

Americans Ambivalent About Motherhood and Marriage

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. 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... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)

Let Us Now Praise Helpful Wives

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... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)

Marriage Is Fleeting; So What?

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... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)

A House Not Completely Divided

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... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)

Has Marriage Become the Sacred Cow of Feminism?

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?

A Surplus of Women Means Fewer Proposals and Shorter Skirts

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... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)

Archie Pops the Question

Waiting for Mom's Marriage Marching Orders

As Dayo points out, there is much to puzzle over in Mark Regnerus' push for earlier marriages in the Washington Post. For one, we're never actually told why late marriage is a problem, only that marriage "wisely entered into" has various social and economic benefits. (Note the hedge; bad marriages hit wellbeing hard.) We're told that the "fault" for this trend "lies less with indecisive young people than it does with us, their parents." Where is the evidence for this claim? It would seem to contradict a decade of research weighing the influence of parents versus the influence of peer groups. No responsible sociologist would privilege the influence of parents over the influence of friends in reference to say, declining birth rates; is there something special about marriage? Or is it just convenient to pretend that the desire for late marriage is imposed from above, forcing young women into a position they'd rather avoid?

Because he refuses to allow for the possibility that 21-year-olds just don't want to get married, Regnerus backs himself into a contradiction. He portrays young women as fickle children, desirous of marriage yet incapable of resisting the demands of career-focused parents. But given the thrust of the argument, he also needs to portray the same women as independent, responsible decision makers. "Most young women," he asserts, "are mature enough to handle marriage." Which is it? Surely a college kid helplessly subject to the whims of her mother is not ready for a ring.

I'm less troubled by the piece's clumsy condescension than its attempt to sell ideology as sociology. Regnerus claims that marriage is environmentally beneficial without any acknowledgment of the fact that marriages occasionally produce children, whose existence will surely wipe out the energy-saving benefits of combining households.  He simply states, without explanation, that late marriage is an "emotional problem." Objective! But remember, we're doing science here, ladies: Though it may not be "cool" to state the cold, hard facts, Regnerus sighs, "My job is to map trends, not to affirm them." Oh, the courage.