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