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It's been a rough couple of weeks for marriage. First, Sandra Tsing Loh came out
swinging against the
institution in the Atlantic (and we discussed it ad
nauseam), and simultaneously Mark Sanford and
John Ensign and the Gosselins paraded their broken relationships in front of the
nation. In Time, Caitlin Flanagan takes up for long-lasting unions in
an essay called "Why
Marriage Matters." Flanagan's defense of marriage can be boiled down to: The
reasons to get married are to raise children and not die alone ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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Jon and Kate Gosselin announced their separation on last night's much-hyped episode of Jon and Kate Plus 8.
This surprised no one, as tales of Jon sweatily cavorting with coeds
and Kate's utter nastiness have been littering the tabloids for months.
What did surprise me is that the Gosselins will be doing what Sandra
Tsing Loh is doing with her kids: instead of just having Jon or Kate
move out, the couple's 8 children will remain in their Pennsylvania mcmansion, while the parents switch off living there.
In her post describing Tsing Loh's set up, Liza already pointed out the major cracks in this scenario, like what happens if...(To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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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. 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!)
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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... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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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... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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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... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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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 ... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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