The fly in the ointment is children.  That’s where this all gets complicated.  Otherwise who could possibly give a shit how many marriages you get into and out of?  Once you bring children into it, and you have a two year old walking around asking “where’s my daddy” you’ve got problems that are going to play a role in forming this other human being.

Actually when I think of all of my women friends who are married, and this is really sad to say, not one of them would do it all over if they had the chance.  And I mean, none of it, kids included.  That’s what trapped them, and they know it.

@Caton:

Actually, coming from olde Europe, where a huge proportion of kids are born “out of wedlock” and there is a social welfare state of some kind, things look quite different.

This is the current trend, as I see it.  Kids happen sometimes. Europeans are fatalistic about this and reasonably relaxed. Relationships stay together or break up. The kids seem to navigate this reasonably well: it’s not like their biological parents disappear. And the new consensus seems to be that it’s fine for the kids to be taken care of by dad + new girlfriend or mom + new boyfriend or some combination, as long as they’re in good health and cheer. Certainly beats “staying together for the kids”.

But overall I find the European attitude to kids much more pleasant and relaxed than the American.

And to the point of the post: yes, being myself (bitchy, opinionated, not always nice) seems to attract the right kind of guy and turns off the objectionable kind. Ah, the joys of growing up and finding through experience that all that female conditioning was just a waste of time and energy.

I was just about to say something similar. Even knowing that “staying together for the kids” is harmful, and even knowing that plenty of kids get through divorce okat, parents want to give their kids a stable environment, and if they have problems in their marriage that they think they can work through, they’ll often put more effort into trying to fix those problems.

The other thing is that when a married couple has children, having “date nights” becomes harder, and it really does require more work to be able to spend more quality time with each other.

Caton and CassieC—this all holds together nicely with the “households as economic unit” approach, simply viewing healthy children as an output of households.

Well, I’m really no expert on the subject since I have no kids and no intention of changing that.  And I can’t see clearly on this subject because my brother left my sister-in-law shortly after she gave birth to their second child.  The first child, my niece, did actually walk around asking that question (where’s my daddy) and one night when we were watching a movie (the iron giant, she loved that movie) she grabbed my hand and said “cat you can’t leave me cat”.  It was fucking heartbreaking.  And he left because he thought he fell in love with someone else while my sister in law was pregnant, and decided that it was more “Moral” to leave his wife than to continue the affair behind her back.  Of course, as you might have guessed, any woman who would actually fuck a man with a pregnant wife at home, has got some problems (and yeah, he did too) and that relationship ended badly.  He got back with my sister in law, the kids seem better off for it, and I know that he does cheat now.  The truth is that even though I myself do not screw married men, they’re off limits, and I have some opinions on the whole cheating thing, because it’s my niece and nephew and I love them so much, I’d rather it this way.  What that makes me I don’t know, but I’ll tell you this, I’m not married and have no children and the one thing I have learned from so much of this shit in other people’s lives is; that’s how I’m keeping it.  I love my partner very much.  We choose to go to bed every night with each other and no one else.  We are each free to walk any time that changes.  That’s how I like it.  I can’t handle all of this other shit that people put up with in their lives, and the carrying on that they do, and the bullshit about hard work, and the both people cheating but pretending that neither know it.  That’s too empty for me.  And I don’t have the answers of what’s right and what’s wrong, or even if what my brother is doing is right.  I just know I’m glad that my niece doesn’t ask where her daddy is anymore.  And I’m really glad that I’m not in that marriage.

The fly in the ointment is children.  That’s where this all gets complicated.  Otherwise who could possibly give a shit how many marriages you get into and out of? Once you bring children into it, and you have a two year old walking around asking “where’s my daddy” you’ve got problems that are going to play a role in forming this other human being.

Even if you have kids, I STILL don’t care how many marriages or relationships you have. As long as the kids are being taken care of, who cares whether it’s 2 biological parents or some other combination? I know plenty of people who grew up fine with 1, 2, 3, 4 ,5 or more “parents”. Whether the “parents” are really the grandparents, stepparents, adoptive parents, aunts or uncles, who cares?

Also, just because someone is not married to the biological father doesn’t necessarily mean the father is out of the picture, or even that the father is not living in the same house.

I actually do agree with much of this.  (And ties into the threads here and elsewhere about why romantic comedies suck so hard.)  It annoys me immensely that there’s this assumption that any relationship that has ended is a failure.  That there’s THE ONE person out there who is the only one you should want to be with, and you’ve carte blanche do do anything necessary to be with them, no matter how unethical or unpleasant.  That being in a relationship completes a person like we’re just half a person without that.  That the only model we have for a ‘successful’ relationship is marrying one person and staying with them until one or both of you die.  It’s fucked up and it hurts people because almost no one is actually capable of living that life.

Still, it hurts a lot to be told that since I really do have to work at my relationship with my wife (we’re sort of fighting right now—all the things that are wrong with me are very bad today and I forget to do things like close doors.  The wife pointed out that the front door was not closed all the way again.  I yelled “Yes I’m fucking stupid okay?” and now she’s not talking to me) that I’m doing it wrong and I shouldn’t be doing it.  It feels like the thread on the racist garbage Buchanan said about Sotomayor where I kept arguing that people in wheelchairs should be involved in building and community design because otherwise we end up with so-called accessible spaces that aren’t because we can’t get to the fucking bathroom without calling someone who’s not a goddamn freak for help.  Yeah I’m a freak, yeah I’m crippled and I still want my relationships to be valid even if they’re hard work.

With marriage, we’re told that you should live to hold the relationship together, and put endless amounts of time and effort into it

This doesn’t ring true to me, and I’ve been married for close to 17 years, no children and no plans.  But I gather that the experience of marriage or long-term-relationships is much different if you’re (1) a woman, (2) surrounded by a lot of judgmental friends and family.  We keep to ourselves and cut out/off the busybodies, so it doesn’t feel much like anyone is telling us to do much of anything in particular.

Other stuff, though, who says you have to care?  I often find it weird when people require an explanation for why I’m out and about without my consort, for instance, and I could see how that pressure might, under different circumstances, think that doing everything together is mandatory.

Tell me about it.

This summer my wife is going on a trip to the UK with some friends of hers.  When some people find out about it they are shocked, shocked! that either (a) she’s doing it without me, or, more annoyingly (b) that I’m “allowing” her to do it.

First, I loved the other thread, but didn’t get to comment on it.  Glad Amanda was playing devil’s advocate, because it took the discussion in some great directions.

But a few things in this post really spoke to me:

“At the same time, we’re told that marriage should be all-fulfilling, that your partner should be an economic partner, a family member, a best friend, and a lover.  And when that burden becomes too much, we consider ourselves inadequate, and we’re told to work harder.  Subsume ourselves even more to make it work.”

The marriage historian, Stephanie Coontz, has written about this dynamic.  It made me realize that it is okay, and indeed a good idea, to seek out other people as best friends, and not put it all on my husband.  It so happens that I can tell him anything (and I really do mean anything) and that level of honesty has been great for us (so far) but the reactions I get from him are different than the ones I get from my sisters, my brothers, my girl and guy friends, my parents.  Experience has taught me that although I love telling him everything, there are certain subjects I prefer to beat to death with my best friend.  Sure, he’ll listen, but I have more fun talking about them with her.  I think it is really important to remember how important all relationships are, instead of crushing the marital/primary/partner/romantic relationship under the burden of “be everything to me.” 

And:

“The first I gave up on a long time ago—-if a guy doesn’t see eye to eye with me on a whole host of things that can create conflict down the road, take a check and move on.  (Which I suppose makes me lucky to find someone who does see eye-to-eye, but I think that’s easier if you know what you believe and you happily state it forcefully instead of pussy-footing around on critical values, politics, and yes, taste issues.)”

This, a thousand times over, this.  When I was younger (and I’m still pretty young now, so this isn’t some great wealth of experiential time that I speak from) I used to worry more about what people thought of me and presenting myself in a way that we could get along.  That may sound sketchy, but what I mean is finding the common ground first so that they would like/respect me, and then trickling out (or not) topics that were likely to be contentious.  It is not altogether a bad strategy—it has made the creation of friendships with people who might otherwise think I was a whack-job possible, and thus led to some interesting conversations.  But it can be so fake and so distant.  And it also permits the formation of friendships/relationships with some really judgey people.  What I’ve learned is that if you find someone with whom you can break all those rules about what it is and is not okay to talk about, and they still like you, you are damn lucky.  I never planned to do this, it was something about him/our dynamic, but on my first date with my husband (and I was not committed to the idea of marriage before him, in fact, we considered not getting married but since we are of the committed monogamist strain, and a number of other things, we did) we said all kinds of things you are “not supposed to say.”  I brought up radical feminism, he brought up Nietschze (to clarify, he finds the man’s ideas fascinating, but the worldview not so much), we discussed exes, and just talked for hours in a fairly unfiltered manner.  That was just so much better than my earlier experiences of getting to a point in the relationship where one or the other of us said something and the response (at least internally) was utter horror, or you’re nuts, or get me out of here, or the like.

I think this is probably a good place to bring up Stephanie Koontz’s Marriage, a History, because I think it has some relevance here.

I suspect that part of the “hard work” meme is our good old-fashioned Puritan guilt about doing things for fun.  As Koontz points out, the idea of marrying someone because you love them and not because you want to form an alliance with their family is very, very recent.  Like, within the past 100 years recent, if not less.  There was a huge debate in the 1920s about “companionate marriage”, which was marriage that was primarily about the couple’s relationship and not about property rights and, eventually, the companionate idea won out, at least as a societal ideal. 

Of course, now that we get married because it’s fun and not because we have to for family reasons, we’re supposed to suffer and work harder for it than our great-grandparents did.  After all, great-grandma had it easy—her parents told her who to marry, and she did.  But we have to prove that we made the right decision and be shown working really, really hard at it to justify the fact that we chose our own partner.  It’s the same way that requirements for a clean household got more and more stringent as housework became easier and less time-consuming—the more time a woman supposedly had freed up by modern machinery, the more that time was filled up by more and more requirements for what made your house “really” clean.

Caton, for a minute I thought you were talking about my family, but my brother waited until after the second child was born to leave and move in with his new girlfriend.  He did eventually marry his girlfriend but ... yeah.  That’s not gonna last.

Mnemosyne, don’t fall into the trap of rich people’s history.  Poor folks, most of our ancestors, did marry for the combination of love and babies and household that we currently do, just in different proportions.

I often find it weird when people require an explanation for why I’m out and about without my consort

That is a huge pet peeve for me. It’s nice now, because my boyfriend lives hundreds of miles away and people have stopped being surprised when I show up places without him. But when he lived here, lots of times he was just off doing his own thing. My female friends simply could not seem to wrap their minds around the fact that 1) not only did I not give a shit that he had all these other hobbies that would take up his time that I was totally disinterested in 2) I actually liked it.

One thing I’ve tried to do that I think creates a really radical relationship is to try and be cognizant of, and then destroy, all the ways that people in relationships try to exert control over one another. This means that my partner and I let each other know what we’re up to, but we never ask “is that okay?” unless we’re breaking a previous engagement we have with each other. There are no guilt trips allowed. We each are responsible for our own money and don’t comment on or criticize each other’s spending. And on and on. We have an open relationship where, in theory, we can fuck other people if we want (although, in practice, neither of us does it much). No control. As much personal autonomy as we can muster. Of course, there are still times when we request things of each other (money, attention, company, sex), but usually these things are given freely and don’t need to be demanded or gotten through exerting control.

I really think part of the appeal of relationships to many people is that they like exercising a measure of control over another person’s activities and life. I try all the time to consciously reject that.

As a follow-up, I’d also like to say that such a relationship is incredibly freeing. I get all the benefits of being in a relationship—love, fun, entertainment, sex, friendship—without the horrible feeling of having another person exert control over me. I can do basically whatever I want, without fear of guilt trips, recriminations, etc.

I must confess that I’m sort of baffled by the “relationships are work” meme. I’ll admit that fighting is work, but that’s mostly because my partner and I are both incredibly stubborn, argumentative, and aggressive. So it gets exhausting, and you wanna quit because you’re frustrated and pissed off. But you have to push through, because you know eventually you’ll get to a resolution and you’ll both feel better. But other than that, nothing else seems like ‘work’.

Pretty much everyone I know who has what I think of as good marriages or very-long-term relationships has at some point or other looked at the social “rules” about your partner being everything to you, about having to keep the marriage together no matter what, about not being supposed to be able to live without your other half and said “f*ck this shit.”

In fact, I would submit that knowing you would be OK without your spouse is pretty much a necessity for a healthy marriage/partnership. (Not OK as in “whatever”, but as in it would suck, and the logistics would be terrible, and it would hurt a lot, but it wouldn’t be the end of all fun and happiness.) The “can’t live without him/her” relationships do much more damage when they turn to shit AND people who think they’re facing an utter abyss if their marriage fails tend to do really stupid, short-sighted things that probably increase the chances of failure.

Which is another reason that conservatives in general, and christianists in particular, are so hot on this idea of “you must marry the first person you have sex with and it must be Forever.” Sets people up for failure, and people who know they have failed are much more open to authorities coming to rescue and guide them.

See, I figured I needed to read the book.
(Honestly, if my sucktastic job wasn’t sucking 10-11 hour workdays, I would have participated more in that last thread.)

I pretty much agree with all of this. The “loss is hard” thing isn’t something that should be trivialized TOO much, of course, because it does.

I think some of that whole “it is work” thing also gets folded into the whole issue of women being expected to do all of the emotional work and also expected to hide it from the men so it looks like no work is being done.

I do think the more you are a socially recognized couple/triad/what have you, the more you get pressure to stay together. I do think people are often better off leaving. My ex asked me to hand fast her, then realized that isn’t what she wanted. She went super passive-aggressive to get me to leave until that didn’t work and she cheated and then broke up with me by email.  I still don’t think she handled that well but…

1) She’s better off. She’s pregnant, with a guy who from everything I’ve heard treats her wonderfully and they are both very much in love. Would that have happened if she was still with me? Who knows. It would certainly be a different dyamic, and its clear she wanted something other than me.

2) I think one of the reasons she couldn’t break with me cleanly was exactly all this crap about “failing” the relationship. Also, she had put a ring on my finger, you aren’t supposed to just drop that. Also, her friends all told her she was doing the wrong thing. So she turtled and played games instead of saying “I want out,” resulting in me resenting her for setting all these tests to prove I really wanted the relationship when it didn’t matter what I did, she had already decided to leave.

I think without a lot of that “IT is work, and it is YOUR work, and a responsible person makes these sacrifices” the whole thing would have been handled much better on both of our sides.

All that said, I still don’t think I buy the far end of the other way, which comes out to having no responsibility for other people at all. (I don’t think this is what you are arguing, btw, but I’ve seen the argument taken to that point.)  We’re social creatures, so we ARE going to end up entangled with each other.

Poor folks, most of our ancestors, did marry for the combination of love and babies and household that we currently do, just in different proportions.

Technically, poor folks rarely married at all.  They used to do statistics by the church registries, and then historians started to realize that a whole bunch of people that they could document as living in those villages only showed up in christenings and burials.  If you weren’t an aristocrat with property to protect, there wasn’t really any way for anyone to know if you were “really” married or not if you moved to a new village, so a lot of people didn’t bother.  Now they’re starting to say that, in Europe, historically only about 50% of “married” couples were really legally married.  In the US, IIRC, out on the frontier the judge or minister would only get to towns once every year or every few years, so people would just live together and be recognized as a married couple by the town until the judge showed up so they could make it legal. 

To this day in California, you can get what’s called a “confidential marriage license,” which means that your marriage is not in the public record and only certain people can get a look at your license.  It was meant to protect people with nosy neighbors who wanted to make it legal but didn’t want said neighbors to know that they were only just getting around to it.  One of the requirements is that you HAVE TO be living under the same roof.

And, if you read the Koontz book, you’ll be surprised at how often even us poor folks married for family reasons and not for what we now call “romantic love.”  Most cultures have a story about two lovers who ran off together without their parents’ permission and came to a bad end.  We know “Romeo and Juliet” best in our culture, but it’s a theme that runs through many.

But in reality, Date Night is pushed not as a selfish pleasure you demand for yourself, but as something you must do for the good of the marriage

“Date Night” is the “Casual Friday” of marriages.

The Human Resources Culture is everywhere we look. As you note in re: Kipnis’s argument:

Marriage is valued precisely because it’s seen as a way to tame people’s passions and get them under control, which is particularly useful in a capitalist society that needs compliant workers</a>

It’s all about control for the American corporate right. You could make almost exactly the same statement about why they value our current health insurance system—“can’t quit this miserable job, or I’ll be off the company health plan.”

And then there’s Rick with his usual vial of Santorum:

<blockquote>I think he has to realize that flying to New York is…self-indulgent.

If one night in NYC is a “self-indulgent” break from the Beltway for a POTUS, I wonder how spending weeks on end down at your your Crawford, TX ranch strikes Little Ricky. Funny, I didn’t hear here making any comments on that when his hero Prince Bush was in the White House. Is it any wonder only Faux News will have him?

I had an interesting insight reading these posts and comment threads. I had always considered it axiomatic that my divorce represented a “failure.” Now, I’ve got a glimmer of an idea that I’m going to have to rethink that terminology.

This thread has also made me appreciate all the more my current relationship. My S.O. and I can spend literally days and days together (we both have home offices), and he never bugs me. Never irritates me. I never get the feeling that one of has to get out of the house or I’ll go crazy. I’ve never experienced that before. I’ve always needed a break from people, be they lovers, friends or family. They take up my energy, and I need solitude to recharge.

But somehow, I don’t need that with him. We fit together, and he doesn’t drain my energy. In fact, I think he helps keep me charged, and I genuinely miss him when he’s gone, which is kind of a novel experience for me.

I do not understand the Santorum’s resistance to Date Night.  I mean, I work traditional office hours and my husband works managing a restaurant, so he’s busy for lunch and dinner most nights.  We both have Sunday off.  Guess what we do then?  Why is Date Night work?  My sister regularly has me over to sit so that she can have one with her husband, who pretty much still works in CA, though they did manage the move to VA so that she can have family help with the kiddos.  They don’t have a set night because she’s a freelance writer and he travels a lot.  My husband and I do because we’re in the same place but on different schedules a lot.  Sure, we’re just as likely to have a picnic on the family farm as a trip out to something fun like the theater, but what’s wrong with a trip to the theater?  Why does he think theater was invented?

It’s all of this “moral” scolding about having to live *your* life as *they* please, while they get to decide for themselves (and are even able to make personal medical decisions with their doctors without my approval!) but I must somehow always do what they want.  I mean, yes, it’s probably “self-indulgent” that I want to make my own medical decisions (without even involving my pastor!) but jeebus, FSM, and disco ball, what’s wrong with liking yourself and wanting to take care of yourself?

Amanda Marcotte:

Why do we give a shit if relationships crack up and people have a number of partners over a lifetime?

Because breakups increase the number of people living alone. And speaking as someone who has practiced general medicine for over 25 years, that’s not something I like to see. People are much more likely to be cared for properly, in every sense of the word, if they have a decent, functioning, long-term relationship.

These relationships take “work” in the sense that there are days when you can’t stand the sight of the other person. Be kind. Hang in there, it’s worth it. You’ll fall back in love.

Of course men benefit far more from marriage than women and I thank Valerie’s indulgence for the longevity of our 31 year marriage. But I don’t care if it’s marriage, friends, gay marriage, or whatever, if people have a non-abusive, long-term relationship, they are going to be better cared for.

I think you may be cursed with competence, Amanda. With your passionate engagement with people, it’s a stretch to think you are going to live alone forever. So your future roommate(s) will probably take more than they give. My apologies for my sex. Not often, but occasionally, the woman takes more than the man. Would you want that to be you? Be happy.

Long-term relationships are beneficial for the overwhelming majority of men, and for most women, who, like you, are too smart and resourceful to stay in an abusive relationship.

And as for the children, the 4 Valerie and I reared to adulthood would not likely have traded a few nights awake listening to us argue loudly when our friendship hit a rough patch years ago, for a succession of disruptions. And I say this as someone coming from a happy, open-minded family with 1 sister, 2 brothers, 2 half-brothers, and 3 step-sisters.

In the US, IIRC, out on the frontier the judge or minister would only get to towns once every year or every few years.

A friend of mine from Tulsa, OK, claimed that common-law marriage (Where living together on a long-term basis was considered a legal marriage.

As for Europe, cf “Pygmalion”, where Shaw has Eliza’s father tell the truth about his relationship ‘with her that was her mother’.

Are you married to this blog, Amanda? Does it take a lot of hard work? Does it just seem to come naturally? Do you ever want to give up on it? Why do you keep coming back? What part of your relationship to this keeps you in it?

People are much more likely to be cared for properly, in every sense of the word, if they have a decent, functioning, long-term relationship.

Y’know, I’ll buy that. What I won’t buy is that a decent, functioning, long-term relationship has to be limited to monogamous state-recognised marriage, heterosexual or otherwise. It seems you don’t buy that second proposition, either, so I’m not sure where you disagree with Amanda.

Are you married to this blog, Amanda? Does it take a lot of hard work? Does it just seem to come naturally? Do you ever want to give up on it? Why do you keep coming back? What part of your relationship to this keeps you in it?

Also, Amanda, does this blog get all pissy if you don’t accede to its demands for the affirmation of your relationship? Will you have to go through a messy legal procedure (“Amanda vs. Blog”) to stop writing it?

Oh, wait, this blog isn’t a human being. Never mind.

A couple of points.

1.  I agree that the statement “marriage takes work” often means women’s work.  Read those “can this marriage be saved” columns for the dominant paradigm.  When a couple has to work on their relationship, usually it takes the form of each of the two having to do something.  It wouldn’t be fair otherwise, right?  But often it’s just one of the partners being a shit.  If the husband is seeing prostitutes, his “job” is to not see prostitutes, but then hers is to try to “liven it up” by dressing like a prostitute.  If the husband does no housework at all, his job is to do a small amount, of the kind he’s most comfortable with, and hers is to cheerfully ignore the mold growing on the dishes in the sink.  It’s like giving equal time to evolution and creationism—no judgment, hence no justice. 

2.  Date nights prescribed for marriage ills seem to be based on “fake it till you make it,” that is, act as if you care until you do.  It assumes that you and your spouse used to enjoy going out for dinner and dancing or whatever, and now you’ve slacked away from it, and you just need to remind yourself of how fun your partner is. 

This is in stark contrast to issues raised by introversion i.e. “I hate going out and would rather stay in in pretty much any situation other than a fire.”  It’s not that you used to love doing these things, you just don’t like them, ever, but will do them because it is something the other person likes and you’re willing to do something nice for them.  Presumably because there are lots of other times when you’re happy to be married to the person and they’re happy to be married to you, even if you’re doing it in separate rooms doing different things.  There’s a lot to be said for loose coupling.

3.  There are a lot of people out there who didn’t grow up in a family where they could learn what a good relationship is.  For them, any relationship, at least while they’re still young adults, requires work, of the “I can’t figure out why she’s mad at me for not telling her where I was so she stayed up all night worrying” variety.  I think it’s a bit privilege-y for people who do already know what they’re doing in relationships to say that anyone who needs to learn consideration or forgiveness or other relationship skills, or anyone even thinks of these things as skills, not something they already find easy and normal and natural to do, “needs to grow up” and shouldn’t be making other people put up with that shit.  Because where else will they learn how to have good relationships?  From other fucked-up people?  Haha, that didn’t work before.  Which doesn’t mean you perfect emotionally raised people must take on a damaged person, but don’t just advocate throwing them away.

4.  Why do people commit adultery?  Sometimes they hate their spouses, or marriage itself.  But sometimes it’s just because they want to fuck someone else.  Saying that they do it because the institution of marriage doesn’t work for them and this is their way of blowing it up so they can get out of it doesn’t always fit.  Sometimes institution of marriage doesn’t work for them and this is their way of adding to it what they want.  When both partners do it and still stay together, it isn’t always a sham or bullshit.  Sometimes they are making their own better version of marriage.

5.  What epistemology said about getting older.  When the choices are less wide and bunches of your friends are dying, sometimes a relationship isn’t a lot of fun and ease, but it can be better than nothing.  Again, for those who are clearly superior beings who wouldn’t have trouble finding the one partner who is able-bodied and sexy and fun to be with among the million damaged unpleasant droids?  How nice for you, let’s talk about other people’s reality now.  Having that imperfect relationship can be much better than having none.  The good can be the enemy of the mediocre, and if there’s only mediocre on the table, someone might choose to take it.  And if it takes work to maintain it, that emotional work might be something you can do, and in response have someone who’s dedicated enough to you to look after you, while the physical or intellectual work it takes to earn more money so that you can hire a nurse to look after you may be impossible for you to do any more.

This is incredibly timely for me, because my partner and I just decided to get engaged about a week and a half ago. It’s kind of odd, because I never considered myself the marrying type, but I love him and I do want to spend my life with him, so there we are. I’ve been looking back at Jessica Valenti’s couple of posts on her decision to get married, too, and the comments there. It seems that few things can invite an inter-feminist fight the way marriage and weddings can. I’m not especially interested in the wedding (especially because my Mom bought every bridal magazine there is, and I told her I’m not even going to wear a wedding dress, but… in one ear, etc.), but I’ve been entirely absorbed by all of this discussion of marriage. I’m going to buy the book you discuss and hopefully my partner will read it too. It sounds like it’s worth discussing! Also, a friend is officiating, and we’ve asked him not to use the words “husband” or “wife” in the ceremony. I feel like that’s getting the whole thing off to a weird start, gender-equality wise.

I don’t want to just exempt myself from how the marriage thing works. On the one hand, as far as my relationship goes, it probably won’t change anything. We’ve been living together for awhile and neither has ever questioned the commitment. But it does feel weird to enter into this system that comes from such specious origins and continues to contribute to a system I’m not entirely thrilled with. I don’t want to be doing this just because It’s What People Do. So, thank you, Amanda. It helps to have sources to help me look this institution straight in the eye and determine why I’m really doing it, and come up with some good answers for myself beyond “I love him.”

Date Night is a concept, much like the roles of Husband and Wife, that is both a framework to act in and an ideal to aspire to.  Change the name to Couple Time and the focus changes to a less-formal list of activities and roles.  After my marriage broke up, I gave up on the many roles I had and concentrated upon my ex and the boys (and also my self) as relationships with people, and the tension eased away and the constant questioning wasn’t focused on frameworks and ideals so much as on a simple “What is best for that person?” criterion.  Really, life is easier when I’m the one living it.  That stranger who was a Husband, Father, and all that other stuff?  I’m glad he moved out.

I still miss her, but I don’t miss the marriage.

“Again, for those who are clearly superior beings who wouldn’t have trouble finding the one partner who is able-bodied and sexy and fun to be with among the million damaged unpleasant droids?  How nice for you, let’s talk about other people’s reality now.  Having that imperfect relationship can be much better than having none.”

Sorry, that sounds like I think people who aren’t “able-bodied” are no fun.  Which is obviously false.

I was thinking but didn’t finish saying that people who aren’t “able-bodied” might not have the health to be a partner forever, or you may need to learn how to be in a relationship with that person physically, sexually and otherwise.  It’s a challenge you are less likely to face when you and your partner are young and could be considered “work” to learn.

I was thinking but didn’t finish saying that people who aren’t “able-bodied” might not have the health to be a partner forever, or you may need to learn how to be in a relationship with that person physically, sexually and otherwise.

This and those of us who aren’t able-bodied like sex too.  Or maybe it’s just me?  Surely I’m not that much of a freak.

kaninchen, I don’t think what I wrote indicated I didn’t think those who aren’t able bodied don’t like sex; I certainly know better than to think so.  If what I wrote said that to you I apologize, and hope you’ll tell me why you read it that way.  I’m not having one of my most verbally fluent days.

What I was saying was that a couple where both partners are able-bodied might not need to “work” on the sex part as much, especially if we follow the heterosexual PIV “men get off, women do what they can” model that much of America seems to endorse. 

Much like we learn how to have sex for the first time, or with anyone subsequent who has different ideas, interests, and abilities, having sex with someone whose body or attitudes aren’t what society calls the norm can be a challenge. 

As a fat woman (who used to be even fatter) I’m familiar with the “you’re funny and nice and pretty but it’s too bad you’re $FOO because I can’t have sex with that” routine.  And even someone who doesn’t think it bothers them might just find out it does at a rather critical moment.

Anyway.  It’s not that the actual physical disability is the whole issue, anyway.  A lot of the “work” involved has to do with the able-bodied person’s apprehensions about the whole thing, rather than any particular real difficulty in having sex with someone who’s not able-bodied.

There’s also the issue that some people with disabilities have lower energy reserves.  Just as it would be difficult for an extrovert to hook up with me based on my not wanting to go to parties all the time, someone with CFS might present a challenge to someone who likes to go hiking.  Might, but wouldn’t have to, because to what degree being in a couple means “doing everything together” is quite variable.

So, to get to the point, as you get older, it’s likely that you or someone you want to get into a relationship with will no longer be temporarily able-bodied, but instead is disabled.  When you have fewer able-bodied people from which to choose, and you find someone you vibe up with well, often they have some disability.  Or even as you get older, the partner you do have loses his or her TAB status. 

Now you are faced with some relationship “work,” which may be more challenging than you thought.  No matter what anyone says, as you get older, it can be hard to change your attitudes and your habits.

This is of course quite different from the “marriage is work and pain and strife and you gotta deal with it” attitude that prolongs truly horrible marriages.

kaninchen, it occurs to me maybe my failing is in not speaking of the person who is disabled having the challenge, too, just talking about the TAB having the challenge of dealing with the disabled person, which does sound rather ugly when I read myself. 

Though I don’t want to speak for your experience, so I’m not sure what to add.

Anyway.  That’s my myopia, I apologize.

going off on a slight threadjack due to the photo illustrating the post, ignore me if you’d like. anyway, i’m getting married in 2 months and have been doing various wedding related things, which includes figuring out the cake situation. i was looking for toppers and they’re almost all of the “ha ha marriage fucking sucks and nobody enters it uncoerced variety” as shown above and it made me crazy. not to mention the fact that all the brides have long hair and are thin. there isn’t any variety. luckily i found a great topper on etsy with cute cartoon vampires cutting a cake made of flesh. i just really hate the way marriage is depicted with so much negativity, as a chore, as yes, work, that even the fucking cake toppers are echoing that sentiment. its like i died and got stuck in a fucking judd apatow movie where eww icky gross boys n girls hate each other.

as to the substance of the post, i 100% agree marriage shouldnt be a tedious drag, which is something “work” implies to me. i watched my mother go through 2 of the shittiest marriages in history and i promised myself i would a) never stay in a relationship, including marriage, that didn’t make me happy and b) wouldn’t marry anyone who didn’t share my values and significant common interests. i lucked out because i’m a misanthropic introvert and tend to dislike almost everyone, yet found someone i absolutely adore who is just as much as a misanthropic introvert as i am.

as to the debate over re-defining “work” i think blackbloc posted a fantastic quote about work in the other thread that sums it up nicely. work isn’t something you choose to do, it’s coerced, something you do because you must. the definition definitely made a click for me in putting that thread, and now this one, into perspective.

Date Night is a concept, much like the roles of Husband and Wife, that is both a framework to act in and an ideal to aspire to.

I’ve definitely noticed that some people become much more wrapped up in notions of what a Wife or Husband “should” do than G. and I seem to.  When my father-in-law and mother-in-law divorced 20 years ago, he swore at that point that he would never get married again, because he didn’t like the person he turned into when suddenly he was a Husband.  He still has never remarried and never regretted it.

Of course, we haven’t had children, and I often hear that’s more of a problem when it comes to people falling into gender roles than just marriage.

jessietcetera,

Go to playmobil.com and check out the cake-topping couple.  I’m not sure it’s available in different skin tones, but it topped my cake 15 or so years ago.

This is the current trend, as I see it.  Kids happen sometimes. Europeans are fatalistic about this and reasonably relaxed. Relationships stay together or break up.

It’s a socio-cultural transition.  We’re finally getting away from the farm.

I live with Inuit, who until very recently maintained a nomadic hunter-gatherer (and very much primarily hunter) lifestyle with minimal outside influence on the culture, so recent that people I work with can talk about how things used to be very different because their parents or grandparents actually lived the life.  The concept of marriage was largely an abstract thing: some people stayed together for a long period, many didn’t.  Sometimes a man would have a number of women as his “wives”, sometimes a woman would be the only one among a small group of “husbands”.  If either the man or the woman (or anyone else involved in the relationship) proved to a burden on the group, either materially in what they couldn’t do, or emotionally in being a pain in every else’s ass, they were shown the door when the opportunity arose.

This flexibility which largely ended due to southern religion and eventually national laws was because the family wasn’t tied to a specific piece of land.  People were always on the move, and so accumulation of a lot of stuff by a few people was pretty pointless and basically impossible.  (Incidentally, that’s not to say that it was a paradise by any means: not having a lot of stuff isn’t the same as not having better stuff that other people want, and are willing to take from you if they get the chance.)  Marriages as peace treaty or business arrangement or whatnot did happen but weren’t as important as they are to people that are settled down and starting to accumulate things; land or material objects or power.

Also, unlike on the farm, more kids aren’t necessarily better in that nomadic, non-civilized hunter lifestyle.  Before industrialized, farmers had to have a lot of kids because you needed them to work the property.  Because you needed many kids, and given high infant mortality rates, that reduced the woman’s role to primarily that of being babymaker, and all that entails.  And the more pregnancies, the greater the risk to a woman of dying due to it.  Add to that societal pressures of civilization, where you need to keep the population up in order to compete with other civilizations, and there’s one of the reasons long-term monogamy became considered a norm: it reduced intra-cultural conflict (if a man had a wife, he couldn’t go stealing someone else’s and the conflict that would cause), it forced the woman into the role that society required her to have (pumping out babies as fast and as often as possible, often dying in the process), and, quite honestly, it would be for life because odds are one or the other would be dead of something by what we’d consider now to be a young age.

Even marriages that were for economic/political/whatever reasons were still based on the mindset of the farm.  Man+woman+babies.  Oh, for the upper classes they could be more liberal in how they interpreted it—as long as they produced the heir and a spare, that was enough, so she didn’t have to keep pumping them out and both husband and wife could attend to their own amusements—but the idea of that was how it worked was still there.

With decreased infant mortality, longer lifespans, a longer period of time in which the child is a dependent (keeping a kid around until they are 18, let alone 22?  Most people were “married” and having children long before then in the not too distant past), the children not being an economic benefit (working the farm, or later working in a mine of factory producing wages for the family), and social safety nets and personal pensions so you aren’t dependent on the kids in your dotage, children are an economic burden.  One of the better analyses I saw was that to, say, a person in France, having 10 kids in 1800 was a blessing, in 1900 a burden, and in 2000 an utter disaster.

So we don’t need as many kids, and the children that are born are likely to survive which means women aren’t forced to be primarily baby-making machines and aren’t being killed nearly as much doing so, which means she has other opportunities outside of the marriage and the home.  So a lot of the reasons why a society would need the traditional marriage (“as long as you both shall live”) are no longer relevant.  Gradually, society is beginning to change to accommodate that reality.  Marriages as a reason to produce kids simply aren’t as important to people anymore, which is why the rationale to denying to people who want it but not to produce babies (gay marriage) is a losing cause, why it isn’t a lifelong occupation, why people are willing to experiment with other types of relationships, and why it might not even be considered necessary for some.

Ah, the dreaded “marriage is work” argument.  When I was dating, I didn’t hear that a lot, but I did hear a lot of “marriage requires compromise.”  Somehow this meant I would have to make all the compromises, including moving across the country, giving up my pets, giving up my job and my house, if I wanted to get married.  I think not.  I’m pretty darn happy single.

It just occurred to me why work and compromise and all this stuff is so intrinsic to the sexist patriarchal marriage form. 

It’s because men and women are assumed to be totally different kinds of people, that they *naturally* cannot get along without working at it because their needs, wants and interests will always be at odds.  The relationship is not of equals, and each is always going to try to take advantage of the other by subverting the other’s goals.  At best it is a tense and competitive relationship.

Contrast this with friendship, which again in a sexist patriarchal society will be man-man or woman-woman, because only that kind of pairing will have enough natural fun involved for it to happen without sex.

And if you see a man and woman who are friends, they’re probably having sex with each other, because otherwise what would be the point?

“Marriage is valued precisely because it’s seen as a way to tame people’s passions and get them under control, which is particularly useful in a capitalist society that needs compliant workers.”

It’s worth saying that there’s a huge disadvantage to marriage, from a capitalist point of view—it arbitrarily ties two workers together, meaning that if one wants to leave their crap job in City A to take an awesome job in City B, they have to dislodge their spouse from the job they love. Ideal capitalist industry requires a mobile workforce.

The enforced immobility of marriage is, on the other hand, pure fucking gold from the perspective of an agricultural society. Tie those kids down! Put ‘em to work on the one parcel of land they will dwell on for the rest of their lives, yeah!

Actually, coming from olde Europe, where a huge proportion of kids are born “out of wedlock” and there is a social welfare state of some kind, things look quite different.

This is the current trend, as I see it.  Kids happen sometimes. Europeans are fatalistic about this and reasonably relaxed. Relationships stay together or break up. The kids seem to navigate this reasonably well: it’s not like their biological parents disappear. And the new consensus seems to be that it’s fine for the kids to be taken care of by dad + new girlfriend or mom + new boyfriend or some combination, as long as they’re in good health and cheer. Certainly beats “staying together for the kids”.

Hmm, speaking as an Olde European I’m not entirely sure I concur with this analysis.  Perhaps treating “Europe” as a monolithic block is part of the problem.  I think divorce/splitting up of parents affects children (quite probably negatively) however sensitively you do it.  That’s not to say that parents should stay together it they are unhappy, since all that leads to is two unhappy people and a different negative effect on the children.  But your relationship as parents WILL affect your children, which to me just reiterates the importance of being able to have children at a time and in a situation of your own choosing.

Anecdotally, my husband and I are something of an uncontrolled experiment - his parents split when he was 9, mine stayed together “for the sake of the children”.  We both have our relationship hang-ups, but neither of us are significantly more messed up than the other.

All this reminds me of the Philip Larkin poem:

This Be The Verse

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
  They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
  And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
  By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
  And half at one another’s throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
  It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
  And don’t have any kids yourself.

Too late for me, since I’ve just had my first, but I guess hope springs eternal.

Everything in America is billed as being “hard work.” It’s not just marriage, it’s employment, owning a home, going to a job—you name it, whatever it is, in America, it’s “hard work.”  I think it may stem from the Puritan beginnings. I discovered the absolute grimness of it when I went to live in Mexico at age 15 as an exchange student…the concept of “siesta” and “manana” seemed radical for a few weeks. Then, I got it. Life didn’t have to be “hard work.” That was just living in the U.S.A.

Totally. The founding philosophies (psychologies?) of this country are the Puritan work ethic, rugged individualism, and manifest destiny. We’re all about being proud of our hard work.

I’ve never really gotten the “relationships are work” thing. I mean, we all need to take our turn doing the dishes, but we’re not supposed to have to work to like each other.

Several have mentioned “compromise”, which is the precursor to this work thing. Compromise is something that can be expected of women even when they’re just dating.

My current (new) squeeze brought this up: that he thought we should be ready to “compromise” lots for this relationship. That would indicate its value to us. To me (as to Foxling), it was fairly easy to translate this into “if we move in together, you will have give up your job and move, if there is something to give up, you will do that”. Not so much, really.

So I told him that we could choose to be together or not, and if we were choosing to be together, I wanted our interactions to be 100% mutually fun. Compromise don’t mean shit for me at this point - except guaranteed resentment down the road. He’s a smart boy, maybe he’ll learn. Or not, in which case I’ll be better off without him.

Of course, there are still times when we request things of each other (money, attention, company, sex), but usually these things are given freely and don’t need to be demanded or gotten through exerting control.

That’s why I loved Kipnis’s rant against the concept of needs.  We’re not allowed desires in the U.S., I guess, so desires get reframed as needs.  But once they’re needs, then not meeting them is cruel, right?  But of course, once “needs” are met through control, the person meeting them grows resentful and increasingly will only do it under command.

But if you’re like, “I’d like” or “I want”—-and you say it upfront and take rejection in stride—-you find that what you want tends to be produced more often than not, and happily.

Because breakups increase the number of people living alone. And speaking as someone who has practiced general medicine for over 25 years, that’s not something I like to see. People are much more likely to be cared for properly, in every sense of the word, if they have a decent, functioning, long-term relationship.

If they have a decent, functioning relationship, maybe, but that’s actually rarer than not.  Though the statistics are beginning to show a shift in that.  It’s probably because people are freer to leave relationships than they used to be.

Being able to walk right out the door is not only a human right, but it makes relationships easier, especially if you can get over your fear of loss.  The people who cheat are the ones who feel trapped (or those who get off on it, another story).  But there’s also the fact that if you trap someone, you can start exerting control and aggression on them without fear that they’ll leave.

If we’re justifying our obsession with longevity through health measures, then we need to start actually acting like we care about people’s health.  National health services would go a lot further than guilting everyone into marriage.

Are you married to this blog, Amanda? Does it take a lot of hard work? Does it just seem to come naturally? Do you ever want to give up on it? Why do you keep coming back? What part of your relationship to this keeps you in it?

Irrelevant.  A blog, like any creative endeavor, belongs to me, but another person doesn’t.  If your attitude towards marriage is proprietary like this, that’s your first clue for why it’s more work than pleasure.

Compromise is something that can be expected of women even when they’re just dating.”

As a married man, I can attest that there is plenty of compromise from me as well.

Listen, marriage, like any relationship, requires some level of maintenance.  But when you marry the right person, it is worth it.  Do I wish that I could sleep with other women?  Yes.  Does my wife wish she could sleep with other men sometimes?  Probably.  But having desires does not mean that those desires must necessarily be fulfilled.  There’s the recognition that the pursuit of selfish gratification can damage, if not destroy, the relationship that forms the bedrock of one’s life.

In all aspects of our lives, we have to strike a balance between wish fulfillment and our responsibilities.  Even if you are single, if you still have rent and other bills to pay, you have to “compromise” with yourself.  You accept that you can’t afford to go on a trip somewhere or buy that luxury item because it will require taking on too much credit card debt.

Are some peoples marriages a prison?  Yes, I get that.  And people in that situation need to make their own choices of how to deal with it.  But a healthy marriage, rather than being a prison, in my view is actually a form of liberation.  Together, my wife and I are better than we could be on our own.

What I was saying was that a couple where both partners are able-bodied might not need to “work” on the sex part as much, especially if we follow the heterosexual PIV “men get off, women do what they can” model that much of America seems to endorse.

An interesting point, but I have to point out that able-bodied women actually don’t enjoy that kind of sex much, either. 

But here’s the thing: Sex is not a relationship.  It’s part of a relationship, but sex is not a relationship.  Sex belongs to each individual, and doesn’t happen because of the relationship. Sex experts have been saying this forever, but I find it works in practice—-respect that each person’s sexuality is wholly their own, and not your property or a result of your relationship, and you’ll have better sex and be happier overall.  Sex is an activity.  Sure, activities take effort, but they aren’t the relationship.  After all, you can and a lot of people do have sex with people they’re not in relationships with.  Masturbation is also sex, and it’s outside of the relationship context.

I think one reason people are so unhappy is they don’t break down and analyze all these things as separate entities, and as such, respecting people’s individuality becomes hard.  Plus, there’s all this pressure to subsume your identity to a relationship.

If you weren’t an aristocrat with property to protect, there wasn’t really any way for anyone to know if you were “really” married or not if you moved to a new village, so a lot of people didn’t bother.

This is still true, and it’s interesting, because wingnuts exploit it to kick up fears of a working class/underclass sexual menace.  There’s all these “single” women and “single” mothers who just aren’t, because they live with someone in a relationship that should be considered just as valid as marriage, but isn’t (in no small part because it’s easier to dissolve).  Like me—-in the government’s eyes and in the eyes of people exerting pressure, I’m single.  But in reality, I’m not, nor do people consider me single in my direct social circles.  Marriage for love as a norm immediately calls into question whether or not marriage at all is a good idea.  Kipnis focused on adultery as rebellion, but I say all the people who are like, no property/no marriage, are rebels in their own way, too.

Amanda at 0936am:

The question of rebellion is an interesting one, because the state in its various forms expands its control to those rebellious relationships: palimony laws, commonlaw marriage clauses triggered by a given duration of cohabitation, and so forth.  It’s rather like watching the Russians steal the steppe or Americans steal the western plains: `there be a zone of troublesome, annoying unpredictability with people Outside Our Rules, so let us merely expand where our rules go!’.

In essence (and for hets only - teh gayz are Not Considered in most states), some form of assumed marriage, with its marital fiscal obligations is run like a cable company: you have to specifically opt out lest ye be automatically opted in.

Truth be told, (and, admittedly, practicalities aside), and, again, for hets, I’ve always been troubled by palimony laws.  If want the legal obligations of marriage, get married.  If you don’t, don’t.  If you want some mix of the two, have a domestic contract. If you’ve been screwed then claim under trust doctrines.  I’ve never felt comfortable with what is, in many jurisdictions, an automatic pension merely for having cohabitated. 

The late Prof. McLeod of UWO, once the dean of Canadian family law academics, introduced a concept called “causal connection” into spousal support in the late 1980s, and that had a decent run before it was gunned down by appellate courts before it hit its teens.  The premise was this: to establish a need for spousal support one had to establish need, one had to establish ability to pay, and one had to establish a causal connection between the two.  No need or no ability to pay?  No spousal support.  A need and an ability to pay but the need is not linked to the relationship?  No support. 

We seem to have a struggle going on within the law (both legislative and judicial) and within our philosophical constructs about just how automatic and how financial a relationship is.  And it is a struggle which does not cut comfortably across left/right or feminist/antifeminist boundaries.  If we are to accept as our starting point the notion of human independence and responsibility and free agency how are we to reconcile that with economic needs?  To choose the cheesiest example, how do we reconcile a woman’s long-overdue freedom to leave an unhappy marriage with her fiscal inability to do so?  Is it the role of the state to force the ex-husband to provide economic redress to a spouse when he doesn’t play a causal role in that need?  From a feminist angle this question will become more and more important as more and more women find themselves in the position of being the support payors. 

Absent the discomfort on ‘marriage pension’ I take no position one way or the other.  I simply bring it up because your assumption that “in the government’s eyes ... I’m single” isn’t necessarily so in many, many jurisdictions, whether you want it that way or not, whether it benefits you or not.  And these questions tie in very directly to whether or not a marriage is work.  So far as the law is concerned it is.  A friendship doesn’t create a fiscal entitlement during its existence and possible compensation thereafter as an entitlement arising out of its unexpected end, but workplaces and marriages do.

@Tommykey

no doubt there is some compromise on both sides in any half-way functional relationship. What I’m talking about is not the concept of reasonable compromise, but the meaning of the word when it is brought up as my new sweetie recently did. The phrase “relationships require significant compromise to be meaningful” is code for “you’re the female, and you better get used to the idea of giving in and giving up: because that’s your role, because being in a relationship is key to your social status. And if you don’t do it, I can safely guilt-trip you by stating it over and over again: relationships require compromise”.

So not buying it. I’ve been happily single, I’m happy to return to my happy singledom.

With respect, CassieC, women, too, can and do use the notion the phrase “relationships require significant compromise to be meaningful” as code for “time for you to change to my wishes!”—and guilt-tripping by repetition.

Truth be told, I think, in that context, it is a more female trait, if we accept the definitions of male and female used and imposed by the metaculture.  Metaculturally, men are brainwashed into making their women change by assertions of authority and altering the field on which the game is played to browbeat, literally beat or impovrish women into submission; women are brainwashed into making their men change through ongoing and draining passive-aggressive negotiations to process them into acquiesence.

I think it ties back, in part, to the “work” concept which started this whole double thread.  Changing somebody is work, leaving things as they are is considerably less so.  Many a feminist friend of mine has been baffled by her more traditional-minded girlfriends lean on her to “start changing her man” once they were All In.  Enjoying him was secondary to training him, and training is hard work.

A relationship is a creative endeavor, Amanda.

Seeker6079,

I have seen just as many men as women be passive-aggressive in relationships.  All relationships do require compromise of some sort, but it’s the type of compromise that matters.  When I was dating, my boyfriend had some health problems that meant we couldn’t eat at certain types of restaurants that I liked.  I had no problem compromising there and finding restaurants we could both enjoy without the boyfriend having to be hospitalized.  But when I was asked to compromise on basic aspects of who I was, my career, my religion, my pets, which are like family to me, then I got out of the relationship, because that type of compromise is unacceptable to me and one that is asked of women too many times.

OK, Amanda, you go on acting on your belief that your friends and acquaintances in non-abusive relationships are better off broken up, and I will support their relationships.

I do happily support your desire for national healthcare, however. Public option or die.

Oh thank [the entity, divine or otherwise, of your choice]!  I thought we’d have a thread on marriage come and go without getting to hear Seeker6079 tell us about how evil and wrong alimony is.  Phew!  That bullet has been safely dodged.  And in both threads, too.  Sweet.

The phrase “relationships require significant compromise to be meaningful” is code for “you’re the female, and you better get used to the idea of giving in and giving up

See, I thought the phrase about how relationships or marriages require compromise was specifically directed at men, as a countermeasure to the idea that Men Rule, So Do What I Say, Because I Said So.

Of course, I’m sure it can become emotional blackmail too, so that wielding the language of putative “compromise” becomes another weapon a man can use to _sound_ open-minded and respectful while still dictating terms.

And beyond that, I think that relationships _do_ require work.  Checking one’s privilege(s) is a conscious choice.  It’s easy to be a self-absorbed gonad.  Deciding not to be a total gonad, and living up to it, takes “work.”  I don’t have to unload the dishwasher or fold the laundry; I can just keep taking clean items from the top, and maybe my wife will do it later.  I choose to do little things like that because it’s considerate, and fair, and I don’t like feeling like I’m being doted on and catered to.  Being considerate and fair is “work” when idleness and impunity are possible.  (Hasn’t that been a leitmotif in all the posts about the gender dynamics of house-keeping over the years?)

Is it the word “work” that’s getting under your skin?  Being in a relationship IMHO certainly takes effort,  because selfishness is so available as an alternate option (at least for men in straight relationships where privilege and social convention can get you off the hook for both household and emotional labor).  But this kind of “work” doesn’t have to be an arduous chore, and if it is, and you resent it, something’s likely Not Quite Right.

epistemology:

OK, Amanda, you go on acting on your belief that your friends and acquaintances in non-abusive relationships are better off broken up, and I will support their relationships.

Where on earth are you getting that content from?

I saw an interview with the singer James Taylor a while ago, in which he responded with umbrage to the interviewer’s question about the ‘failure’ of his first two marriages. “They each lasted ten years,” he said. “How is that a failure?”

At the time, I chuckled and thought that was Taylor’s defensive way of excusing himself for not being a very good husband. Although that might just be the case, it really doesn’t negate the validity of the larger point. Why is it that we consider any marriage that ends (other than in death) as a failure? We certainly don’t think that way of non-marriage romantic liaisons, or of friendships that have run their course. Relationships end; no shame in that. 

As a long-unmarried person, I occasionally get questioned about whether I’m “too picky.” I have as yet been unable to answer such a query without sarcasm. “Ah! Lowering my standards will lead to Lifetime Happiness? Who knew! And here I thought I was plenty happy already, with my untolerated-bullshit-free existence. Hmm.”

kanichen:

You’re an ass.  I didn’t argue against alimony.  I argued for alimony granted under a specific legal test.

And, kanichen, try to remember that more and more women are the primary breadwinners in marriages.  A legal test granting spousal support on a “just because you were married” test is no more fair to them than it would be for a man.

There is one area, though, that causal connection as a doctrine is incomplete: it holds the potential to ignore transitional support.  There’s a good argument to be made for spousal support granted on a need/ability to pay basis without causal connection if it transitions the “need” spouse into remunerative employment.

OK, Amanda, you go on acting on your belief that your friends and acquaintances in non-abusive relationships are better off broken up, and I will support their relationships.

Was there some huge passage on EVERYONEZ MUST BE TEH SINGLE that I missed? Is not Amanda *also* in a non-abusive relationship she has no immediate intentions of dissolving? Or is it perhaps more likely that when Epi says “relationships” he/she is subconsciously revealing a belief that only the bonds of matrimony can make someone give a shit about their partner in old age or strife?

You’re an ass.

Oh probably I am.  I’m not sure why you’d think I’d care if women were ordered to pay alimony to their ex-spouses if the circumstances merited it.  If one spouse helps the other become successful through their unpaid effort and passed opportunities, why shouldn’t they receive some compensation?  I grew up listening to how evil my grandfather’s first wife was ‘cos he had to pay her alimony, and your fixation sounds awful familiar.  As for your specific legal test, I’m guessing you’re a fan because it results in fewer and lesser alimony judgments?

Bitch about alimony all you like.  But understand that it’s an attempt—like affirmative action—to remediate systematic inequalities.  I’m fine getting rid of it if we get rid of the social and economic structures that make women less equal than men first.

Seeker6079:

The phrase “relationships require significant compromise to be meaningful” is code for “you’re the female, and you better get used to the idea of giving in and giving up

FlipYrWhig:

See, I thought the phrase about how relationships or marriages require compromise was specifically directed at men, as a countermeasure to the idea that Men Rule, So Do What I Say, Because I Said So.

Actually it can be both. 

To the man it’s a signal that some compromises have to be made!  You can’t have it all your way!  You are in a relationship now!  Your wife might not be as servile as your mother.  You might have to tell her you love her or dinner might not be at the temperature you want it to be.

To the woman it’s a signal that the compromises you already make in other relationships, even romantic relationships, are nothing compared to the compromises you will need to make when you get married.  Prepare to be totally subsumed.

Well, you’ve definitely established that you’re an ass, certainly, or, failing that, merely intellectually sloppy:  “If one spouse helps the other become successful through their unpaid effort and passed opportunities, why shouldn’t they receive some compensation?”  Skeezix, that fits within the causal connection test: there is a link between ability to pay and the existence of the marriage.  Furthermore, that the issue of property compensation is covered by trust doctrines but

That leaves the issue of compensation through property division.  Post-marriage community property division, or equitable division, or net family property divisions of some form are in place in most jurisdictions, including my own, Ontario.  Now I can understand your view given that I didn’t mention compensation for help addressed through property division where there is no marriage…
Except for the fact that I did mention it: trust doctrines.

To return to support: I’m for that test for these reasons: First, because it establishes an equitable construct for when support is due than isn’t arbitrarily based on marriage in and of itself but rather on the nature of the fiscal relationship between the parties as individuals; societal realities regarding women’s income levels fit neatly and appropriately into the “need” portion of the test.  Second, it treats the parties as individuals.  Third, it supports the “clean break” notion of relationships absent an ongoing compensatory obligation.  Fourth, it matches support doctrine with property division doctrine in that the basis of awarding support is the an examination of the finances of the individuals within and arising out of the marriage rather than to an arbitrary nailing of it to the mere existence of the marriage itself.

I’ve never argued against spousal support per se, so you can take your comment about bitching and put it with your other inane inaccuracies.

You might also want to consider the fact that I’m Canadian.  We have full marriage equality here, which means that my discussion of the principles on which support should be based are not limited to a male-female dynamic.  I don’t agree with people having to pay other people money “just because”, be they male or female gay or straight.  There has to be a just, consistent philosophical basis to a judicial holding, and it should, like other fiscal principles, be based on a compensatory starting point.

One final note on another point that you’ve completely missed in your eagerness to kvetch:  My first post rooted itself in Amanda’s comment about being in or out of the marital system.  My response was that people who stay out of the system often have the system stretched out to fit over them whether they choose to or not.  Such judicial/legislative action is going to produce equities in some cases or inequities in others.  It is thus most definitely appropriate to discuss when we do and don’t impose fiscal obligations on cohabitations and the reasons that we have for doing or avoiding this.

old feminist.  This:

The phrase “relationships require significant compromise to be meaningful” is code for “you’re the female, and you better get used to the idea of giving in and giving up….

....
is actually CassieC’s; I merely quoted it.

It’s worth saying that there’s a huge disadvantage to marriage, from a capitalist point of view—it arbitrarily ties two workers together, meaning that if one wants to leave their crap job in City A to take an awesome job in City B, they have to dislodge their spouse from the job they love.

Only if you assume both spouses work.  That’s a big part of the problem with the way our work lives are set up right now:  the basic assumption is that one spouse works and one spouse stays home to deal with all of the non-work stuff.  People who worked for IBM in the 1950s through the 1970s had a nickname for the company, “I Been Moved,” because the company would transfer its employees every five years or so.  (Relatively) easy to do if only one spouse is working, but extremely difficult if both work.

Marriage worked great for capitalists from the Industrial Revolution until the women’s movement of the 1970s.  After that, not quite so much.

Palimony arises (at least in the US) from an implied contract that one party will take care of the other.  Failing to recognize the contract, which is usually spoken, i.e., work less, baby, stay home with me, I’ll take care of you, we don’t need a piece of paper, would be treating two people in a romantic/companionate/what have you relationship than other people.

That would suck.  Particularly because of the opportunity costs to the financially weaker party.

This post does not have the words “child” or “money” in it. 

People who don’t have a whole lot of surplus wealth get married because of love and sex; but after that falls apart, they might stay married so their children will not grow up in poverty, or they might not.  If you don’t have that surplus money, you won’t get any good choices.

Ismone:
That’s why the concept was embodied in legislation in many jurisdictions.  In Ontario the trigger time for a common-law marriage is three years.

Good luck with all that over-romanticizing love, Garuda.  That certainly won’t put overly high expectations on your relationships that will lead to endless disappointment.

Having read your post, Ms. Marcotte, and the subsequent comments I felt compelled to register in order to ask some pertinent questions. What do we mean by happiness? What do we mean by love? What is the meaning and purpose of marriage?

It troubles me whenever there seems to be a conflation of the concept happiness with the production of some inner pleasanr psychological state, because that leads to some dangerous conclusions. After all, I have little doubt that the murderer of Dr. Tiller, all serial killers and Adolf Hitler experienced some sense of euphoria from the evil they did. I’m more inclined to agree with ancient philosophers who asserted that happiness means not just getting what you want, but also only wanting what you ought to want. I believe there’s a moral component to true happiness that often gets short shrift, i.e. it would make me happier if there were a single-payer health care system in this country so that all get taken care of (and not just me).

Being that I am married, have performed over 100 marriages and have seen a wide variety of marriages in members of my congregations, I appreciate the description of the components of adult relationships by the late Harry Stack Sullivan. He observed that they include 1). the lust dynamism; 2). intimacy/friendship needs and 3). security operations. We often yammer about the first two forgetting how powerful and important the third one is. Basically, we fall in love with someone who makes us feel psychically safe. But that’s swampy ground. It includes affirmations of self-identity (e.g the man who says he only dates models is saying a lot about the fragility of his ego), the voices of family members (“he’s not good enough for you”), familial patterns (which explains why many children of alcoholics are drawn to each other), the whole your story is my story thing, the notorious lists of who does/does not qualify as a suitable partner and so on. Many become coupled on the basis of some huge mutual neediness. Given that 1/6 of all men and women have some clinical psychological problem and likely twice that many have some serious neurosis, you have an awful lot of folks entering into some sort of relationship with the opposite or same sex with some serious emotional handicaps.

Which brings me to my third question. Judaism and Christianity share a peculiar vision of marriage that it is grounded in the goodness of Creation and that it is somehow linked, on an earthly level, with the thing we call salvation. There’s some wisdom in that (though it’s fraught with danger, too). The wisdom is that a lot of people enter into relationships/marriage with the implicit belief that it will somehow fix/heal them (the salve of salvation). What they don’t bargain for is that the fixing and healing may involve some radical heart/self surgery. There’s the rub.

How many times have we heard guys say about their newly beloved something like, “I love her giggle,” and then 20 years down the road, it becomes “If I hear that damn giggle once more, my head will explode.” The very things that attracted become the most troublesome.

The true good work of marriage is not the dirty dishes or date nights or rehashing who takes care of the dirty diapers, but that a good partner will drive us insane (or more truthfully) force us to confront our own insanity. We love to live with the delusion that the world revolves around us. But if we are to grow as human beings, don’t we need to give up that delusion? And who willingly and easily does so?

One last thing—I get tired of hearing the verbal tic about the “Puritan work ethic” which screams to me that those who throw it around know squat about history or the Puritans. Here’s something that predates it by several millennia: “Remember the sabbath day and keep it holy… Remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the Lord your God brought you out from there… therefore keep the sabbath day.” Deut 6:12f (Translation: rest because now you can. The taskmasters never allowed you to rest and if you tried you’d feel fear and guilt). The thing is, after the taskmasters drowned in the Red Sea, we gave them mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and then let them take up residence in our heads. Our problem is the inner taskmaster work ethic that scolds us, “You aren’t good enough, pretty enough, smart enough, decent encough, caring enough, so get to work, you lazy slug.” You can’t blame that on either the Puritans nor the institution of marriage.

epistemology:

“Be kind. Hang in there, it’s worth it. You’ll fall back in love.”

NO! I think that idea is another way people are shamed into staying in unhappy relationships. Plus it’s tiresome to lecture a woman on how she needs to always be kind to her partner. But we just can’t have a woman expressing her anger or disappointment can we?

“I think you may be cursed with competence, Amanda.”

WTF? How can something like competence be a curse to her. This sounds like one of the many blame-women-for-a-man’s-insecurity ideas. It drives me insane when positive traits are flipped into negative ones when they apply to a woman. As a child I constantly received the “you’re too smart for your own good” comment. Sometimes it was meant in jest but often it was not. Oddly, I never heard anyone say this to a boy.

“...occasionally, the woman takes more than the man. Would you want that to be you? Be happy.”

So she should just take one for the team (that team being the man in the relationship) when she finds herself on the losing end?  If it’s good for you to take more from than you give from your wife why would it be bad for Amanda to be in your position? Because she’s a woman?  Either it’s good to be on the receiving end of a lopsided relationship or it’s not. You seem to be making the incredibly misogynistic point that a woman should shut the fuck up and fake happiness for the sake of her unequal relationship but feel bad if she’s not the one getting shorted. After all she’ll “fall back in love” with her S.O. benefiting from this inequality, right?

“...and for most women, who, like you, are too smart and resourceful to stay in an abusive relationship.”

Staying in an abusive relationship has nothing to do with intelligence. It’s about self-esteem which is under attack in the relationship. Saying a woman is too stupid to understand that she’s in an abusive relationship and needs to leave validates what the abuser is often telling her…that she’s so dumb she can’t leave him because she wouldn’t be able to manage without him.

I think your original point might be worth considering but it loses all credibility with these statements.

Also, I need to learn html.

The point about abusive relationships is key—it really is all about self-esteem, not intellect.

I can say from experience that I would have been much better off if my parents had divorced sooner rather than later.  Children don’t need one dad and one mom to turn fine.  They need one or more consistent, loving adults in their life, the more the better.  There are all types of families throughout the world, and the kids usually turn out ok.  In some societies, children are raised by mothers and uncles.  In some places, it’s just a mother and father.  In some places much of the extended family is involved.  People should divorce or stay married based on their own relationship.  Divorced parents can still love their kids.  Children know when something is wrong in their parents’ relationship; you’re not fooling them anyway.

Marriage should be like any other relationship.  If it’s over, then let it go.  It’s a waste of time to have a one-sided relationship, and that it terrible if there are kids involved.  It sets the bad example for your kids that marriage is supposed to suck, that it’s a trap, that they should tolerate a bunch of crap for the sake of their future marriage, or even that it’s fine for them to treat their future spouse like crap, because that person has to stick around anyway.