Marriage isn’t the problem - the Mystique of Marriage isn’t even the problem.  People like this who have ridiculous expectations and then blame marriage for their personal inability to think through their problems before involving other people in damaging and hurtful ways is the problem.

Not getting married because you think about it and it isn’t for you?  Fine.  Cheating on somebody and ending a marriage and then whining about marriage?  Grow up.

Not getting married because you think about it and it isn’t for you?  Fine.  Cheating on somebody and ending a marriage and then whining about marriage?  Grow up.

So much this.  When my marriage ended, it wasn’t because the institute of marriage is a sham that women buy into because of the patriarchy, it was because we let both our own personal issues and outside influences drive us apart.  If we had both been a little more mature and able to stand up for ourselves, both with each other and with said influences, things might have been different.  That’s not the fault of marriage itself.

Haven’t read the the essay, just scanned, but I want to make one addition to the Gilbert anecdote.

When you seperate out marriages with wanted and planned for kids and marriages with unwanted and unexpected kids, studies have shown that the changes of happyness is nearly all attributed to the couples that feel “saddled” by their children.

I would like to suggest that people like Tsing Loh—who apparently “had it all” and decided it wasn’t what she wanted—are probably not cut out for marriage as an institution. That’s fine. But it’s probably hard for a lot of people to swallow her account due to the fact that most of us DON’T have it all—we have out-of-work spouses, physical and mental illness, dead end jobs, and other trappings of the world outside of her ivory tower, yet we still feel committed to our marriages and kids—boredom and all. Perhaps some stay in the institution because of those very reasons, but I’ve personally seen marriages unravel due to economic hardship, illness, family problems and other such reasons. It’s a lot harder to embrace a concept like marriage if you’re living with that kind of stress. It’s hard to listen to her blaming the idea of marriage for her lack of appreciation for all of the good things in her life while some of us soldier on, thanking our spouses for putting up with and and returning the favor. I could care less if people embrace marriage or not. But I can’t help but feel it’s a bit disingenuous to enter into it with all the advantages in the world, then blame it for your discontent.

Loh does read as someone who had been fronting it for a long time (and had the cash to do it), and just got tired of it.  There is a lot of pressure on a certain sort of upper class people that they need to “fit in” with the general ethos of their social class.  You can’t rise in corporate areas without the complementary wife, and it would look so strange if you didn’t have kids, and don’t forget!  Your wheels gotta be tres chic!  With the cutest car kid seat accessories!

You see the worst of it with utter grifters like Sarah Palin, where everyone and everything is an accessory to her glorious self.

Antigone, yes, one method humans use to be happy is to be thouroughly hypocritical.  Not quite delusional, but a very nasty kind of fake-it-until-you-make-it.  The kind that makes them insist that other people are happy as well, even in really bad circumstances.  If said women/minorities/whatever insist otherwise, the hypocrits take that really, really personally and react progressively more agressively to defend their illusions.

Movie-makers and other creaters of media generally caters at least a little bit to these people in part because they are among the most agressive squeakers.

There are plenty of prescriptions on how to be happy.  They do count on you being truthful to yourself, though.  The hypocrit path is rather utterly dependent on how much social power you have, since otherwise you get being beat up for the asshole you are…

As someone who’s married, I am all for the dismantling of the obnoxious marriage-industrial complex, mainly because, wow what a great large-scale experiment. If oppression/conditioning is all that is keeping a marriage together, then it should dissolve. If most of those marriages did dissolve, then how many married couples would there still be? It would be fascinating to find out.

Of course, I also wonder how many otherwise strong marriages would not have cracked if they had access to childcare support and more leisure time.  The “ideal” nuclear family system was set up predicated on female enslavement, and it never worked perfectly, and now works hardly at all because women work and can’t also be fulltime house servants. And most no longer have close family support or servants of their own.

Does this mean it’s ceremonial long-term pair bonding + child-raising that’s inherently at fault, or the way we organize our society so as to isolate small family groups from support, feedback, and stress relief?

emjaybee, YES, exactly!

I want to add the thing that has ticked me off for years now, which is the idea that success in marriage is defined as identically equal to dropping dead while married.

A marriage of 5 or 10 years, in which both people grew, blossomed, were happy, supported, and emotionally healthy, but which ends, even without drama, because the people no longer prefer to be married, even if they stay friends, have or continue to raise wonderful children, stay in each other’s lives and so on, is a failure.

A marriage of whatever duration in which both people are miserable, manipulative, unhealthy, and bitter, with whatever effects that has on the people around them, or on crippling their own souls and chances for success and happiness, that lasts until one or the other drops dead, is a success.

Bah.

And that problem isn’t a problem with marriage either, but with it’s inappropriate use by people who aren’t suited to it (or each other).

Maybe I’m poignancy-challenged, but don’t weddings seem like a sure way to crush a good party under family stress and undue expense?  Plus I can never get past feeling vaguely disturbed by the bits of medieval pageantry.  In my experience, marriage is basically a way to make break-ups more costly.

The urge to slam adulterers is something most people should have a little more humility about, since it’s so common—-I don’t cheat, but I don’t think someone should be strung up for it.  I know that my knee-jerk urge to viciously condemn them, as if they did something so out there, comes from my own fear of it intruding on my life.

yet we still feel committed to our marriages and kids

The implication that Tsing Loh wasn’t committed strikes me as completely false.  She was married 20 years.  If you watch the video, she speaks of her husband in the highest terms available.  Again, it’s so very tempting to say that someone else failed because they didn’t work hard enough—-it helps us believe that we can’t fail, because we’ll just work harder because we care more.  But I do like her point—-at the end of the day, why work so hard?  A lot of people do it so they can simply say they didn’t fail.

I think part of the problem is that the discussion is conflating two groups—examined people and unexamined people.  Examined people make reasonably good decisions and know why they did so.  Social structures are less useful to them, because they’re grounded enough in themselves to have some idea of what they should be doing.  Unexamined people just kind of do things.  Social structures are extremely useful to them as checks on random and self-destructive behavior.

Anyways.

I think marriage works for some people, and not for others, and for different reasons.

And because of that, people shouldn’t be under pressure to get married. That seems to result in people marrying for very stupid reasons, and then finding out it’s not making them happy and spreading the unhappiness.
Otoh, one person’s “boredom” is another person’s “comfort”. One person’s “lack of variety” is another person’s “knowing another person completely is an amazing journey that takes a life time, especially as they change over time”. One person’s prison is another person’s sanctuary. One person’s “work” is another person’s “best time”.

Of course, when you look at it that way, it is kind of weird to privilege people who like stability, intimacy of thought, depth, trust, commitment and safety over people who like risk, adventure, emotional independence, and a quick exit. But then, the risk takers flourish in capitalism.

She’s just telling the aftermath and leaving out why she decided to have whatever she had (a fling, an affair, an intimate relationship) with another person. Her husband found out; they went to counseling, he or she said “Screw it.”

Personally I feel that a marriage should be able to withstand a minor fling—“cheating” is an offense against intimacy, not an infringement of your partner’s property rights in your private parts. Just say, “Man, s/he was hot, and s/he wanted to jump my bones. Let’s go out for ice cream.”

But if there’s nothing left and you’re merely sick of each other, just leave.

I dunno, I don’t think I would’ve gotten through my depression if my spouse wasn’t devoted to me.  Not that she needed marriage, but it would be $6K (that’s like working full time at minimum wage in CA for twenty weeks) in her pocket if we could.

I think the business relationship is more apt, mix in too high of expectations and too low estimates of the reality of having children.  We should make it easier on people to find help to care for their children, no barriers on gender to marry, and less hurdles to divorce amicably and share responsibilities - even if only one member is amicable.

Without children or economic dependence, the reasons for marriage drift away

Eh. I’m tempted to disagree, using things like “Stumbling on Happiness” as a justification: marriages are perfectly happy and seem like perfectly great ideas under many circumstances when there are no kids involved. It would seem the opposite is the case using the data you cite: people are happy with marriage when there are no children and are less likely to divorce when both partners are economically independent.

it is kind of weird to privilege people who like stability, intimacy of thought, depth, trust, commitment and safety over people who like risk, adventure, emotional independence, and a quick exit. But then, the risk takers flourish in capitalism.

There’s a certain strain of social conservatism that is skeptical of capitalism for this very reason. I’d venture to say that it was the dominant strain of social conservatism until the Republican party co-opted the social conservatives as an extension of their party in the USA.

“Without children or economic dependence, the reasons for marriage drift away.”

I didn’t have any particular desire to get married, but then I found someone who, for five years, has made me happier than I ever thought possible and with whom I always want to spend more time.  Didn’t think it could happen, but there you go. 

And I thought that was enough.

But…then there are all the legal/societal benefits of marriage.  I want to know that, if I am in the hospital, the person I love most is allowed to be at my side.  I needed decent health insurance.  I discovered that my profession doesn’t give a rat’s ass about allowing you to care for a partner, commute because your partner can’t find a job in the same city, or provide any assistance in finding such a job if that partner is not your spouse.  Unfortunate, but a fact of life, and my staying single wouldn’t change that fact.  It would only make my life more difficult and unpleasant. 

In short, there are many other reasons for marriage.  Gay couples wouldn’t be fighting for the right to participate in a pointless institution.

Dead on Samantha. People are different and want and need different things. This is one of the issues that I really disagree with Amanda on, probably because I am married. I do think marriage might be a little over-mythologized. People form long term parterships. It just happens. Marriage provides a legal framework that acknowledges this. One of the forgotten benefits of marriage is divorce. With divorce there is An orderly way to dissolve these parterships. Especially when common property and children are involved.

Honestly Amanda I think that by saying what you do about marriage you buy into the cultural framework built around the so-called institution of marriage. How is being married different than living with your long term so? Aside from the law giving more legal protection it’s not very different. Marriage is given too much power. Loh’s marriage broke up. People break up for a lot of reasons, that’s why no fault divorce exists.

I think that she (and by extension most of the commentators) are trying to rationalize something that probably had a lot more to do with the people involved than it did the institution. It us interesting how people bring their own stuff to this, like the feeling that I’d she just worked harder it would have worked out. Marriages end, relationships end. And because every marriage is as unique as the people involved it’s very hard to draw conclusions about marriage from anecdotes. Just like you really cAn’t apply statistics on marriage to an individual situation. I guess I wish we could just let go of the huge mystique around marriage, as if it’s a magical thing that will suck out your happiness and force you into a life of miserable boredom or give your life meaning and purpose. Marriage is just a contract. Relationships are about people.

I don’t know- having been on the receiving end of a cheating spouse, it’s one thing I’m pretty freaking judgmental about.

A lot of people stay in bad marriages “for the kids” so the idea that having kids destroys marriages is bogus from the start.

It is indeed a big change in the relationship and I think can give a lot of stress to 2 people. But in my case at least, it wasn’t the kids, it was life…  Did the kids increase the conflict ? Absolutely, there were a lot more chores to divide and in turn to resent each other for not settling into each others’ idea of a spouse. But I think ultimately it was the gradual distancing of this ideals that broke our marriage.  We did prolong the agony for some 3-4 years “for the kids”...

Hector, a minor fling might be just a symptom. My ex cheated on me for over a year, lying all along. I didn’t leave him for the cheating. The problem was deeper than that. He resented me for not being a 50’s wife, cheating was his way to punish me for it. I resented him too, so I went out of my way to NOT be the 50’s wife.

In the end all this passive aggressive stuff was a sign of the deep dissatisfaction with the marriage. And was worse for the kids I think. So I divorced him. My family’s official excuse is his affair but it was never as simple as that. Affairs break a marriage when there’s no more love, not before that.

Don’t know if there’s truth on the “marriage is impossible” idea. I do know that we didn’t start that way, we were both young professionals who thought a modern couple had to divide tasks equally, the woman could earn more than the guy, etc…  People change. We changed drifting apart from each other, maybe others change coming closer.. I still keep hope alive that love can last more than 3-5 years.

“The implication that Tsing Loh wasn’t committed strikes me as completely false. “
I don’t know about that, cheating on someone really isn’t being committed to them…

Sorry- I had no plan to end there, my son pressed the button before I was ready. What I wanted to say is that I agree with a lot of what was said here, but it really doesn’t matter how common cheating is, it is still horrible to do to someone. Having ended up with pelvic inflammatory disease because I was being exposed to things I didn’t know I was being exposed to has probably made me bitter, but I really don’t understand what is so hard about just saying “I want a divorce”. That being said I do think affairs would be a lot less common if we didn’t put marriage up on this huge pedestal and people were more comfortable admitting when they had grown apart and could just move on without a lot of fan fare. And yeah, I can see where children would have a negative effect on marriage quality. It’s a lot harder to have fun with your spouse when you’re exhausted and broke, both of which are more common when you have children. (Or at least for me) Or when your vacations are suddenly spent seeing the wiggles in concert instead of having fun with your spouse.

I get why people who are happily (or even unhappily) married want to defend marriage; I was like that myself, even though I didn’t even want to get married and was more or less coerced into it!

But come on, people. Wake up and smell the coffee. It’s sounding progressively more desperate to say that marriage isn’t “for everyone” or that it “sometimes” fails because of “the personalities involved”. The reality is that outside the prosperous middle classes, marriage is more or less a bust already. And even inside that halcion sphere, something like a third of all marriages end in divorce. Marriage isn’t “not for everyone”. It’s “for almost no-one”, at least in its conception as a life long unbreakable commitment.

I’d love to have the sort of iron cald moral certainty to say that people who cheat or do other passive aggressive things to get out of marriages should just “grow up”, and that despite the manifest fact that the majority of individuals are voting on marriage with their metaphorical feet, it’s not the institution but the people who are broken. But I don’t, because I like to see people for what they are and not for what they ought to be.

I agree Hector- I actually think that a lot of affairs are able to be worked through as long as everyone is honest about what happened, why and what needs to be done to go forward. It’s been 2 years since the husband cheated- we almost divorced, both realized we didn’t really want to, renegotiated the relationship and went from there. I didn’t get that hung up on the sex though- to me it was more the being unsafe and exposing me to shit without my consent, kwim?

I think that marriage as an institution is definitely broken, TheLady. I don’t see it as something to be defended. I still thinking that lying and being an asshole is not an acceptable way to treat someone else, though. Like I said though, my experience tends to make me bitter about the whole concept.

The urge to slam adulterers is something most people should have a little more humility about, since it’s so common

So’s sexism, racism, poverty, stupidity, petty rudeness, heart disease, locking yourself out of your apartment, and getting caught in the rain with your good shoes on. But all those common things are still, you know, bad, and I don’t know why we should be humble about making that determination.

The thing about adultery that’s different from many things in that list above is that it isn’t an ‘act of god’ or a nebulous, diffused effect of society’s shortcomings. It’s something one person does, by choice, that hurts someone who trusts them, and they do it knowingly. (Exceptions, yes—if I beat my spouse and controlled his finances so that he lived in fear of violence and poverty if he left me, nobody could judge him for keeping any secrets he chose. But that is very clearly a special circumstance. And some people wouldn’t be particularly hurt if their partner slept around, or would view it as a very minor offense. But then it’s hardly cheating.) Like you, I don’t cheat, and I have also never been cheated on. The latter part isn’t a virtue of mine any more than never having been beaten by a boyfriend is a virtue. But it’s something I expect, not something I’m grateful for.

I have noticed that a lot of people who’ve been cheated on, especially women and especially if it’s happened to them more than once, sometimes develop a self-protective fatalism about it: all men “slip up” sometimes, they’ll say—people don’t say this about women so much—or they’ll smugly proclaim that only naive people expect perfection. This kind of attitude-striking is totally understandable, and if it makes them feel better, fine.  But treating your lover with respect isn’t perfection or a particularly high bar, it’s just the basic minimum. In an established monogamous relationship, if you want to sleep with someone else, you tell them first, and they decide if they mind enough to leave over it. I am not humble about my expectation that my partners won’t be dicks to me, and it’s hard to think of a more ill-advised course of action for a person, especially a young woman, to take. Women and girls are already told they’re too picky, too demanding, too high-maintenance, too unrealistic, and this just for daring to want partners they like and are attracted to. Must we add to this litany that they need to be more humble, too? It’s not a new thought; turning a blind eye to your husband’s little adventures is an age-old virtue of the understanding good wife, the one who’s sensible enough to know when to keep her mouth shut to preserve peace. I don’t think it was a good idea the first time around, and I don’t think it gets any better when it’s extended to husbands as well.

(I realize your statement was directed at both genders; I’m more interested in its application to women, but I don’t think monogamous men need to be more humble about their expectations of marital fidelity either. Less entitled to go into a killing rage or exact any kind of physical vengeance, yes; more inclined to treat their wives well and pay attention to their happiness levels, yes; more humble about their expectations of honesty and trust, no.)

He resented me for not being a 50’s wife, cheating was his way to punish me for it. I resented him too, so I went out of my way to NOT be the 50’s wife. .

This is the root cause analysis Tsing Loh denies us, even while seemingly baring her life to us.

If people knew that their love would turn to hate and thoughts of revenge, hopefully they would never get married.

I don’t know about that, cheating on someone really isn’t being committed to them…

By that standard, there are almost no commitments, because everyone eventually does something to compromise intimacy or trust. Sexual infidelity is far from the only qualifier and, for many people (although YMMV), not even near the top, in the sense of Hector B.‘s “look, they were hot, and they wanted sex.” The importance of monogamy varies between marriages - and to make it clear, I’m talking about even nominally monogamous ones, not just people with “arrangements” - and to claim that cheating automatically takes precedence over, say, financial irresponsibility with shared funds, or even emotional infidelity, is inappropriately universalizing one’s personal priorities.

I also knew that tipping over the sacred cow of marriage would result in defensive reactions, above all

Wow. If this had been an article written by a man justifying why he dumped his wife of 20+ years for a new honey, would you be so eager to rush to praise it? Or to try to get anyone who disagrees with your praise to STFU by pre-emptively accusing them of being ‘defensive’?

All Loh is really saying is that she’s goddamn angry at her husband (for being absent and leaving an unfair share of the burden on her shoulders), that her lover is more alluring than her husband (you’d expect so; why have an affair with somebody you like less than your spouse?), and she wants the marriage to be over. This is all rather pedestrian and isn’t an exciting, fresh view of the Futility Of The Institution.

There are many valid critiques of marriage, traditional marriage and variations thereof. This isn’t it. But it’s got Loh’s name on it and it’s in an Official Publication of the Chattering Classes, so we all have to play Emperor’s Clothing and pretend it’s all profound and shit? Not interested.

Julie, what a rotten thing to do!!!! I was livid when I found out my ex was cheating and didn’t ever wear a condom with me. His protestations that he always wore condoms “outside” were not reassuring at all!

I stayed with him for 2 years after that, but it was misery. We were just putting on a show “for the kids”, a show that no one was enjoying, not even the kids… Hope you have better luck!

mythago,

The way I read it, Tsing Loh’s article spends (relatively) very little time focusing on her own marriage, using it as a jumping-off point for a much more wide-ranging view of the institution. To each their own reading, I suppose.

you’d expect so; why have an affair with somebody you like less than your spouse?

Plenty of reasons. Not that they’re good reasons, necessarily.

A man who has an affair after 20 years of marriage?  Probably would depend on if his partner was someone his age or a lot younger/subordinate.  In the latter case, yep, I get upset.  In the former—-well, mythago, you totally misread me.  Hate to disappoint, but I feel sorry for both genders when they’re stuck in sexless marriages that they can’t terminate because that would make them “shallow”, and so they give in, because at a certain point, life is for the living.

All Loh is really saying is that she’s goddamn angry at her husband (for being absent and leaving an unfair share of the burden on her shoulders), that her lover is more alluring than her husband (you’d expect so; why have an affair with somebody you like less than your spouse?), and she wants the marriage to be over.

I’d like to borrow mythago’s useful summary of Loh’s presentation without taking a point of view on the article’s significance.

First, my impression is that the husband’s touring is more excuse, rationalization for the divorce than the primary cause, as if the counselor told them to list the advantages and disadvantages of their marriage and life post-divorce.

Second, a lover is always going to be more exciting then one’s mate. You know nothing about this person, so they are interesting to you. You both are working to charm and impress the other Generally when two people meet, you are both clean, sweet-smelling, well-dressed, likely relaxed. Thoughts of your daily rounds (the bath tub faucet is leaking again am I going to have enough underwear to make it through the week, the kid’s soccer game is on Saturday, did I pay the property taxes yet, is that another pimple) are knocked right out of your head, displaced by thoughts of “I wonder what s/he looks like naked”.

Finally, I think the husband decided the marriage was over because he packed all of her things into boxes and set them on the driveway.

Part of me tends to think it’s easier to avoid being a cheat if you’re not invested in marriage.  It’s so much easier to get out if you’re bored.  I’m not saying that everyone has the will to just end it out of the blue, but if you’re going to start doing fucked up stuff to force the end, you don’t have to take it to the level of cheating.  Griping a lot can be the end of a relationship when you have no financial stake, legal binding, or need to keep up appearances.

The importance of monogamy varies between marriages - and to make it clear, I’m talking about even nominally monogamous ones, not just people with “arrangements” - and to claim that cheating automatically takes precedence over, say, financial irresponsibility with shared funds, or even emotional infidelity, is inappropriately universalizing one’s personal priorities.

I don’t see how it makes cheating any less serious to note, accurately, that there are a lot of other awful things people can do to each other. As far as marriages varying—I think the very concept of “emotional infidelity” is complete and total BS, start-to-finish, but if I were involved with someone who I knew felt differently, I’d have to be a jerk to do something I knew he’d understand as cheating on him even if I wouldn’t mind it myself. I do think that even in marriages where people never have a big explicit boundaries discussion, most people have a sense of if and how certain things would hurt their spouses. If you genuinely, truly don’t know how they’d take it, you just don’t do it till you find out.

Anyway, the issue of whether or not physical monogamy is an objective big deal or not is a total red herring, because objectivity’s got nothing to do with it. If I have a phobia of ants and my husband throws a box of ants at me, he gets a divorce and I get the sympathy of all our friends and relations. To say that ants aren’t objectively evil, or that my phobias are my personal psychological issues that my husband isn’t responsible for, or that fear of ants is an antiquated relic of the 50s, is to spectacularly miss the point. The reason marriage discussions tend to center around infidelity is because an aversion to it is something huge numbers of people share. Nobody is required to mind it very much, but the fact is that most people do, many people are terribly and deeply hurt by it.

why have an affair with somebody you like less than your spouse?
When a man (or woman) pays $200 to a sex worker he isn’t looking for love. When Bill dallied with Monica he didn’t like her more than Hillary.

There are hundreds of reasons people cheat. Some don’t even make sense at all. But one thing is to always be a cheat (like Bill) and another is to start cheating 20 years into the marriage. What changed ? Women’sex drive does go up at 40, but it usually isn’t them who cheat, is the man, whose sex drive is going down not up! I mean WTF ??

I guess my point is that cheating doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Some deep dissatisfaction with the other spouse triggered it. And that is what kills marriages, not the cheating itself.

How is being married different than living with your long term so?

Harder to get out.  I don’t know anyone with a long-term S.O., for instance, who complains about going months or years without sex.  My experience is that living in sin types cheat less, too.  These don’t strike me as unrelated.  Yes, they break up more, and that doesn’t strike me as unrelated, either.  When they do, it’s not as miserable as divorce. 

Signing the paper does, in fact, change things, in that it makes it harder to leave, and so you don’t have to either try as hard or evaluate the viability of the relationship as often, which means that you’re that much more likely to fester for years in bad relationships.

I don’t know about that, cheating on someone really isn’t being committed to them…

Overly high standard.  Most cheaters are trying to save the main relationship, at least consciously.  (Subconsciously, not so much.)  If they weren’t committed, they’d just break it off and sleep with who they want.

sophonisba,

Did you see the statement I was replying to? It claimed that cheating automatically invalidated any claims to commitment; I don’t see how your comment refutes that. There is, statistically, no such thing as commitment, because there is, statistically, no such thing as a relationship in which someone hasn’t performed a betraying action of some degree or another. If my wife threw a box of ants at me, that’d be a betrayal of me, despite my lack of phobia, because of its aggressive nature. Doesn’t mean we don’t still have a commitment, valid despite the aggressive action.

So’s sexism, racism, poverty, stupidity, petty rudeness, heart disease, locking yourself out of your apartment, and getting caught in the rain with your good shoes on.

I’m not going to slam someone for having heart disease, locking themselves out of the apartment, or getting caught in the rain.  In fact, I find the quickness that people judge what are very ordinary, sympathetic human impulses or lapses in judgment (like eating the wrong thing or not checking the weather before putting your good shoes on) kind of disturbing, and I’m more disturbed when I do it.  Sexism, racism are different.  I can’t believe you’d put poverty, which is hardly an individual weakness but more a chronic social problem, into the same category.

I get that there’s different kinds of cheaters.  Some people totally cheat out of sadism.  Some people get married TO cheat, because adultery turns them on.  But then there’s marriages that go on for years, putter out, and someone cheats just to force the issue.  It’s the wrong thing to do, but it wouldn’t happen so much if we didn’t push the “relationships take work” mentality underlying American marriages.

Right on Amanda!

Not only all the legal and financial things that are complicated but society and family play a big role on it too. My family was shocked I wanted divorce. My mom: “Just because you are bored you are going to make 4 people’s lives miserable ?” (3 kids and cheating ex). My aunt told me to do like her: have lovers too. My own sister told me by leaving my ex I would be “telling everyone you were cheated on” and if I held on “no one will know”. Not one of them seemed to understand the pain of living a life with someone you don’t love and doesn’t love you, just for appearances. I was supposed to keep the farce going on and cry on my pillow every night (or in a hot young thing’s shoulder like my aunt).

Am I happy now ? Not really but I am not unhappy and devoid of any hope of it ever getting better, like I was before. And both me and my ex are much more warm and caring with the kids now that the burden of pretending is off our shoulders.

<i.Women’sex drive does go up at 40, but it usually isn’t them who cheat, is the man, whose sex drive is going down not up! </i>

This is untrue, as Tsing Loh’s story shows.  Women cheat nearly as much as men, and I think it’s well-understood that the small gap between the sexes is only due to the fact that women have fewer opportunities.  If you eliminate men who, drunk on male privilege, sleep with subordinates or prostitutes and compare the percentages of men and women who commit take-a-lover adultery—-a real lover, someone that you could actually fall for—-then I’d bet it’s about the same.

sophonisba, I have to disagree with you that infidelity is something nobody is required to mind. It is such a pivotal factor in almost every portrayal of a failed relationship in the arts and media, such an obvious and often used outrage flag in sit coms (“we ere on a BREAK!!”), that if you’re cheated on and don’t react with outrage, you’re liable to wonder what the fuck is wrong with you, frankly. So people just assume they are/will be outraged, wounded, betrayed, their life over, trust destroyed, insert-cliche-here, without really stopping to find out what they really feel about it. It’s ot uncommon for the underlying feeling to actually be relief - that the other person, after years of inflicting nameless misery on you (or so you think), has finally given you something concrete to beat them over the head with it.

The real issue here is that the preoccupation with sexual fidelity often edges out more mundane, less sharply defined things that can’t be easily defined by into a single, deciding deed that fits easily into a socially accepted narrative for relationship breakdown. Nobody is going to judge you for saying “I left him because he slept with my best friend”. But explaining to your mother or a nosy co-worker that you dissolved a 10 year mariage because the other person was consistently disrespectful in small but degrading ways, was financially feckles or emotionally distant, abusive etc. open you up to exactly the sort of “well you could have worked harder” criticisms that Amanda has been rebelling against.

“A lot of people stay in bad marriages “for the kids” so the idea that having kids destroys marriages is bogus from the start.”

Only if you conflate “destroyed marriage” with “divorce.” I mean, really, if you have a happy marriage that goes to hell under the constant stress of raising children, but they opt to delay filing for divorce until after the kids are packed off to college, would you call that marriage intact?

The real issue here is that the preoccupation with sexual fidelity often edges out more mundane, less sharply defined things that can’t be easily defined by into a single, deciding deed that fits easily into a socially accepted narrative for relationship breakdown. Nobody is going to judge you for saying “I left him because he slept with my best friend”. But explaining to your mother or a nosy co-worker that you dissolved a 10 year mariage because the other person was consistently disrespectful in small but degrading ways, was financially feckles or emotionally distant, abusive etc. open you up to exactly the sort of “well you could have worked harder” criticisms that Amanda has been rebelling against.

I’m getting this printed on a business card, and handing it out to people I meet randomly on the street.

Of course, this doesn’t negate your argument that it shows dissatisfaction.  It often does.

But I’d argue that adulterers are often the people most invested in marriage.  If they weren’t, they’d leave.  But Tsing Loh, like Senator Ensign, appears to have been completely invested in the idea of being part of a Married Couple.  And really, in both cases, weren’t they trying to project the image of the super-happy married people that love marriage?  Granted, they were working for different views of marriage—-Tsing Loh was working the hipster-yuppie thing, and Ensign the traditional patriarchal marriage—-but both are cheaters in no small part because they were so invested in the idea of marriage that they couldn’t let go.  I’m not really a fan of the idea that anyone should be required to stifle desire indefinitely, which is a big reason I’m a proponent of comprehensive sex education over abstinence-only.  When someone is really invested in the idea of marriage, and the passion is gone, it seems cheating is inevitable.

Could be.. My puzzlement is why this cheating starts late into marriage, it seems to me it is not sexual. It is more a passive aggressive thing, or a way to feel young again. Psychological things that make you look outside for what you are not finding in your house. Like that husband that has no sex with his wife but has porn sites bookmarked.

Amanda, are you trolling your own blog again?

Fine, yes, marriage has a dicey and oppressive history, and it gets romanticized and caught up in untenable fantasies.  So does private property ownership.  So does government.  So does meat-eating.  So does, by some people’s reckonings, heterosexuality.

Don’t like those things?  Opt out.  Do like those things?  Opt in with some ethics and hash them out so that they feel right for you (and your partner/s).  I don’t know why it has to be considered such a brazen act of courage and defiance.  There’s a difference between not liking eggplant and rising up against Aubergine Hegemony.

Heh, Renmiri kind of undermines my argument with some poignant personal experience there; hat off to the perversenes of some people in trying to keep marriages together for the sake of it. Still, I think adultery does occupy a privileged position in the “legitimate reasons for divorce” list.

It’s also neatly disproven by social science, which finds that women are less likely to divorce when they get more education and more power.

I believe they’re also less likely to get married, and to marry later., which might in themselves explain your observation.

The real issue here is that the preoccupation with sexual fidelity often edges out more mundane, less sharply defined things that can’t be easily defined by into a single, deciding deed that fits easily into a socially accepted narrative for relationship breakdown.

Thank you.  And seriously, I’ve seen so many people do this.  To the point where you can go to some weddings and see that as the end, because already they’re stifling their doubts because they sent the invitations out already.

My experience is that living in sin types cheat less, too.

Don’t tell me you’ve never seen the Maury Povich show.  (Yes, obviously they select for maximum judgmental effect; I know that’s not exactly a representative sample of humankind.)

Flip, I bring it up because it’s interesting, and because a lot of people are quietly thinking these things, but they don’t bring it up because it’s a sacred cow.  And that would probably be okay if we the unmarried weren’t sniffed at like we’re either immature or traitors.

Amanda,

I think your observation about cheating and breaking up is too simplistic.

I was married to someone who cheated, swore he wasn’t— apparently lied about the second part, and dragged us and our daughter through a miserable time while I tried to figure out what the hell was going on. But when it came time to go to therapy, he wasn’t interested, nor in the end did he care about saving the marriage. It was more complicated than just breaking it off or trying to “save the main relationship”. I decided that it was somewhat like Tsing Loh’s situation—he was bored and wanted something new, but didn’t have the guts to just make a clean break. Our marriage died with a whimper instead of a bang (no pun intended).

Of course, I have to add the caveat that not everyone does that.  A lot of my friends are married and they don’t think we’re fucked up, nor do they bother us about it.  But still, many a single woman has to navigate many a family occasion, particularly weddings, with questions about why she doesn’t stifle the questions inside and just get married.

Lol The LAdy, exactly!

When I meet someone I barely know and they asks me about the divorce I always go for the “he cheated” answer. Saves me 3 hours of moralizing discourse from someone who know nothing about the situation.

I felt numb when I found out initially, then relieved. Then shocked at myself for not feeling more, not crying and covering my head with ashes. After some introspection I realized that I wanted out too. I was just venting my frustration in different ways.

I wasn’t trying to be simplistic, Chryslin.  I suspect I’ve been cheated on by a similar lazy bastard.  But I don’t recall that I said all cheating was like that.  On the contrary, I said that different cheaters have different reasons.  But the sexual desire vs. the need to keep the relationship together dichotomy explains a lot of cheaters.  There are also others trying to provoke the divorce.  Sometimes these are the same people—-they are consciously invested in marriage, subconsciously want out, and they cheat to make their real desires happen.  Tsing Loh doesn’t exactly hide that this is her likely story.

A man who has an affair after 20 years of marriage?  Probably would depend on if his partner was someone his age or a lot younger/subordinate.  In the latter case, yep, I get upset.

Heh.  Now explain *why* precisely.  See if you can articulate why it is worse for a 45 year old married man to be running around cheating with a 25 year old paramour rather than a 35 or 45 year old one.

Amanda, spot on about the weddings. I’ve been to quite a number of weddings recently of young people who had been happily cohabiting until the big day, and with no immediate plans to have kids, and thought: “why?”. After watching the couples closely and keeping that question in mind for a year or so, my conclusion is that they are gettin married because their relationship is actually over. It injects a period of fake excitement - planning the wedding, the honeymoon, the dress - into their lives that fools them into believing they’re as much in love as ever. And afterwards, when it’s all a big blank, well they (and everyone else) just tell themselves that it’s just a bit of anticlimax and the weight of adulthood setting in, nothing to worry about, let’s plan the christening.

And so, in their late twenties, people unconciously slip into relationships that will last years, produce children and debt and obligations and hassle, when the truth is that they should have broken up the day the guy bought the ring.

If you’re not married and don’t have that adrenalin rush of social approval and the fake injection of solemnity, you’re much much more likely to just quietly walk away when the love is gone, and so much the better for everyone if you ask me.

Then shocked at myself for not feeling more, not crying and covering my head with ashes.

Heh, I just found out that my vague suspicions about an ex were probably true from a mutual friend. (Thank god I got that just in case STD test!)  I always wondered if I’d care.  I didn’t.  If it had happened at the time, sure, because I was still feeling low, though my self-esteem was on the upswing at the time.  (Which I think provoked it, and said mutual friend agreed—-that he couldn’t stand to see me with my shit together.)  But no, I didn’t care.  Watching him aggressively cheat on another woman after me—-flaunting it around town, no less—-I saw how much it was about sadism for him.  Which had nothing to do with me at all. So why should I care?

I think people’s reactions are a lot more varied in real life than we’re led to believe.

Meh, relationships do take work.
All relationships - with friends, coworkers and family as well as romantic ones.

That said, there comes a point where the work outweighs the good things - that’s when you want to consider ending it.

Sure, it’s interesting, but I’m not sure why you prefer to come at it from the angle of institutional critique (Marriage Is Bad And Can’t Be Fixed) rather than an expression of preference (I Don’t Want To Get Married).  It varies.  Some people like it, some people don’t, some people start out on one side, drift to the other, and then maybe back again.

I’ve said before that I live my life in such a way as to have very little in the way of meddlesome “community” (including “family”) around me, so I almost never feel like I’m being judged.  I think you feel like you’re being rated and evaluated by people, like, all the time, just to defend who you are and what you’re like.  I just don’t feel the same constant scrutiny.  I guess I’m lucky—privileged?—that way.

Thanks for the clarification Amanda. I understand your point much better now. I’m sure that MY denial and his laziness combined to make it much more ugly and drawn out than it should have been. In the end, I’m sure that in his mind, the cheating was the effect of the bad marriage, but in reality, it was the cause of the break up.

Because, Flip, you can’t separate the institutional critique from the personal.  I don’t want to get married not because I’m eccentric.  I have my reasons, and it’s interesting to trot them out.  I think that it’s good to have these discussions, and the only way to save people from making themselves miserable by being married is to open up the discussion.

This is because kids can be counted on to say and do romance-deflating stuff.

6 months: *urrp* [kid spits up on Mommy’s nice dress]
3 years: “Hey Dad! Look! Mommy’s on the toilet! Mommy’s pooping!”
7 years: [cell phone call to Mom and Dad at expensive restaurant] “Mom? Dad? Come home right now? The baby sitter’s MEAN! She won’t let me stay up to watch TV!”
12 years: “That dress is, like, so grody” [or whatever the current expression is]
17 years: [cell phone call to Mom and Dad at expensive restaurant] “Mom? Dad? Can you like pick me up? I’m. like, stranded at Ashley’s friend’s friend’s beer party.”

If your ego is fragile and you depend on externals (you spin stories of The Perfect Life), you find it hard to just laugh off incidents like these (and worse). Most sensible parents toughen up and laugh it off.

Amanda, there are reasons people can disagree with you other than their failure to understand your point.

Isn’t one of the valid criticisms of marriage that it is rooted in different expectations for men and women? I’d therefore be very surprised if you reacted exactly the same way to the fictional Sander Loh, who dumped his wife after 20 years because (in his opinion) she was away from home too often, left him too much of the housework and bacon-earning, and anyway he fell in love with somebody else.

I guess my point is that cheating doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Some deep dissatisfaction with the other spouse triggered it.

Christ on a cracker. “You forced me into somebody else’s pants” is about the tiredest excuse ever. Nothing in a relationship happens in a vacuum, but really, you can be married to a porn star with an IQ of 250 who is a gourmet cook and still want to fuck around. Because your cinq-au-sept isn’t your spouse. Really, is anyone going to argue that Monica Lewinsky was hotter than Hillary?

I’m not, btw, wagging a finger at Loh - just noting that of course she can’t see a lover replacing her husband. The whole point of having a lover is that they’re not your spouse; they’ve got the heavy-breathing novelty value, you haven’t had endless fights with them about who does the laundry, you’re with them in Dating Mode, not Everyday Life Mode. (This is not a startling insight on my part. Cynthia Heimel and Marjane Satrapi have said it much better than I ever could.)

As for the stupidness of marriage, setting aside the hilarity of people who are in pseudomarriages (sorry - “monogamous and living together”) looking down their bohemian noses at it, it reeks of hetero privilege. Go ahead and show up at a Marriage Equality meeting and correct everyone’s thinking on how it’s stupid of them to want to get married, look at what Sandra Loh said!

Right, they’re your reasons, and they’re excellent ones for you, but it seems like it inevitably leads to an impasse—someone will say, Hey, I’m married, and I like it, and my partner tells me he or she likes it, and we do how we do with it. 

The critique of capital-M Marriage seems like it denies or negates the possibility that some non-zero number of small-m marriages are cool, because they’re all poisoned marriage-fruit from the poisoned Marriage-tree.  That’s why the conversation around these posts has become testy in the past.

As I see it, at the meta level you’re saying “Because Marriage is [this], I don’t want to get married.”  So the response is pre-programmed to be, “but Marriage doesn’t have to be [this].”  That’s going to set off a discussion that bogs down in arguing with people about how _they_ really feel or how _you_ really feel or how Anecdotal Stranger told me she really feels… but then we’re back to the personal anyway.

Sandra Tsing Loh is doing the same thing:  her personal circumstances have led her to conclude not just that her marriage was bad, but that Marriage-the-Category Is Bad.  There’s probably a name for that kind of logic.

But, yes, by all means, let a thousand discussions bloom.  I’m not trying to foreclose them, and wouldn’t want to.

you haven’t had endless fights with them about who does the laundry

Which, as I recall, Amanda has in the past said is a fight worth having.  (And I agree.)

The tedium of domestic bliss, Tsing Loh compelling argues, kills passion

Well, yeah, passion is great, but sometimes there’s tedium.  I don’t really want to mow the lawn or clean the catbox or pay the gas bill, and it sure ain’t foreplay, but that’s life, and if you have a partner, it’s part of your shared life.  You can’t spend the whole day fucking.  Existence is full of boring shit.

Damn. I had written a post but mythago and Flip are much more eloquent than I am so screw it.

I hope it was the catbox/fuck/shit post that earned my reputation for eloquence! 

Sandra seems to have struck a nerve with one commentator at the LAT:

I suspect I will not be the only Loh fan dismayed by a piece of work that simultaneously goes too far—letting the “flaming jet fuselage” of her own wrecked relationship cloud all marriage—and not far enough—failing to address any of the specific details that sent her partnership into a tailspin.

The result is a piece that’s thoroughly provocative and strangely bloodless, the anti-marriage burden of proof foisted on a few didactic authors and the anonymous tales of a pair of Loh’s unhappy, sex-starved friends.

Loh doubtless experienced the “regret, suffering and bent over double weeping” she described in an accompanying video. I’m sure she spared us many of the details in an attempt to cushion the blow for her family, particularly her husband. But you can’t help but wonder if she does as much damage letting the general speak for the specific.

The essay and Loh’s take on marriage will no doubt provoke much discussion, particularly in Los Angeles, the setting for most of her long run of books (most recently “Mother on Fire”), solo shows and regular radio bon mots, currently featured on KPCC-FM (89.3) in “The Loh Down on Science” and “The Loh Life.”

In an interview Tuesday, the 47-year-old Loh said her breakup has already triggered both empathy and disdain. Supporters include women who “do a lot of secret self-examination, but are afraid to utter aloud” their misgivings about marriage.

See if you can articulate why it is worse for a 45 year old married man to be running around cheating with a 25 year old paramour rather than a 35 or 45 year old one.

It could either be worse because of the power/money/experience disparity between the man and the woman (Exploitation is bad), or because of the younger/hotter/firmer disparity between the wife and the paramour (Significant others are not replacement items).

Because any sensible person is always more suspicious of a privileged party’s actions than an unprivileged party’s actions under any circumstances.  That’s called “paying attention.”

That said, one of the things I’d like to see come out of this conversation is the full circle, the discussion of what it is precisely men get out of these relationships once the kids are gone or whatevs.  But then, that’s been one of the great contributions of this blog for me, the understanding that Patriarchy Hurts Men Too.  If my life as a man is defined in terms of adherence to convention and power games, and any deviation from this life path is defined as immaturity—and if a lot of such deviation really is immaturity—then it gets really hard to figure out where my self and desire to be a good person end and my society’s unwillingness to allow me to be my own sort of good person begins.

But relationships /do/ take work.

It takes a certain amount of effort of honestly and transparency to have a healthy relationship.  Maybe that’s ‘work’ to you and ‘play’ or ‘common sense’ to someone else.

I don’t consider divorce to be ‘bad’ per se, and we should avoid calling it so.  It’s a legal calling that’s important when people involved have changed over time and the relationship needs to be recognized as dissolved.

If Loh didn’t think her relationship was work the effort, why didn’t she ‘divorce’ before she ‘cheated’?

Because it would have been work.

I guess my point is that cheating doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Some deep dissatisfaction with the other spouse triggered it.

Christ on a cracker. “You forced me into somebody else’s pants” is about the tiredest excuse ever.
Hey I was the one cheated on, so I’d be the last one to take on the “You forced me..” BS. He didn’t even try that one.

But you know what ? I did see that our marriage was over. Am I pissed that he cheated ? Yes, but just that would not be the end. Like Hector and Julie mention above, a lot of couples work through that.

I never said marriage can’t work. Mine didn’t and a lot don’t work. I am glad some work, as I hope my kids find love and the existence of good marriages out there show me it is possible. But after going through 20 years on one I know a lot of the difficulty of making it work. It’s not for everyone.

“I discovered that my profession doesn’t give a rat’s ass about allowing you to care for a partner…”

Yeah that is a huge one.  If you have to work corporate, the fact is whether we like it or not, if your husband has a heart attack no one expects you in for a week.  If your boyfriend has a heart attack, that’s a whole other story.  It doesn’t matter what anyone thinks should happen, or what you think the person in this situation should tell their boss, this is what is.  And it doesn’t matter if you love your partner and the two of you have the best relationship bringing nothing but joy to each other, and the married person is miserable and so is their spouse, and fantasize about murdering each other.  Does not matter.

This is exactly why we as a society have no right to deny marriage to gays.

Familarity breeds sexual boredom, it’s just a fact of life.  Everyone wants to deny it, some will even tell you that after 25 years they’re still fucking 4 times a week and doing it sideways and can’t keep their hands off of each other.  That’s hysterical.  But it’s never true.

“[S]ome will even tell you that after 25 years they’re still fucking 4 times a week and doing it sideways and can’t keep their hands off of each other.  That’s hysterical.  But it’s never true.”

Ok, first… sideways? I…don’t get it…
Anyway. Saying “it’s never true” rings false to me. How do *you* know? Do you follow all these people home and watch through the window, or something? Just sayin’.

It could either be worse because of the power/money/experience disparity between the man and the woman (Exploitation is bad),

That’s making some whopping assumptions right there.  If the younger woman *consents* to it and has meaningful alternatives, as I assume she would, how exactly is any disparity “exploitation”?

or because of the younger/hotter/firmer disparity between the wife and the paramour (Significant others are not replacement items).

Now that’s closer to my fumbling on the subject.  But in this case, isn’t the “wrongness” a feeling of unfairness on the part of the wife rather than any objective statement? Why is it worse for a husband to be cheating with a 25 year old than a 45 year old - is it just because the wife is particularly threatened by being unable to compete?

Interesting that we’re considering this about husbands cheating.  Perhaps we lazily consider a wife cheating with a much younger boy is simply playing around unseriously.

Meh, relationships do take work.
All relationships - with friends, coworkers and family as well as romantic ones.

I think it would probably be less irritating if we used the word ‘effort’ instead of ‘work’—the former a) doesn’t make eventual success an assumption, and b) isn’t quite as depressingly fatalistic.  But yes, all relationships take some effort, and if the effort is too much, I’d say that it’s not worth it.  That said, I’m not really cut out for marriage myself, because I analyze too much on the fly (family, friends, & SOs don’t seem to like that trait much) and simply don’t have the energy (never mind a like-minded partner) for reinventing the wheel.  Still, getting along with parents and siblings and lifelong friends and coworkers and extended family members you think are nuts but who have still been kind to you, etc., requires effort at different times and for different reasons, and we don’t usually ditch important relationships over bad spells.

“Familarity breeds sexual boredom, it’s just a fact of life.  Everyone wants to deny it, some will even tell you that after 25 years they’re still fucking 4 times a week and doing it sideways and can’t keep their hands off of each other.  That’s hysterical.  But it’s never true.”

It seems a bit arrogant to issue a universal declaration on a part of human life that shows so much variability, especially over a long period of time.  I won’t disagree that it’s uncommon, and an ideal that most people aren’t going to live up to and that should be okay, but it’s just as easy to say that familiarity breeds boredom, full stop.  Everyone wants to tell you that they still have deep and meaningful conversations with their spouse, sometimes 4 times a week, about wild things that they’d never even heard about 25 years ago, and they’ll talk until sunrise.  But, you know, it’s bullshit because nobody can possibly still be interested in somebody else after 25 years.

Amanda:

I don’t know anyone with a long-term S.O., for instance, who complains about going months or years without sex.

I know some and have been in one myself.  And then again, you say “complain about” which isn’t the same as “experiences” or even “suffers.” 

My experience is that living in sin types cheat less, too.  These don’t strike me as unrelated.

I think the characteristics you mention may not depend on each other but are instead dependent on another variable—length of term of relationship. 

Couples who aren’t married now, even if they’ve been together for some time, even if they have children “without benefit of marriage,” sometimes do eventually marry, so a graph of “length of time together” and “married” will show an increase even after 10 or more years.

And the longer you’re together, married or no, probably the more likely you are to cheat, up to a point when sex in general is just not that interesting any more.

“Now explain *why* precisely.  See if you can articulate why it is worse for a 45 year old married man to be running around cheating with a 25 year old paramour rather than a 35 or 45 year old one.”

There is no difference that I can tell. Anyone older than 18 has full agency to have consensual relations with whoever they wish to. Amanda has this odd thing about differently-aged partners—a bit of moralizing and a bit of weirdness.

Also seems like pure hypocrisy on Amanda’s part to me, taking away the agency of younger women like that.

sophonisba said:
“Like you, I don’t cheat, and I have also never been cheated on.”

As far as you know. There is no way for you to know with absolute certainty that you haven’t been cheated on. Now I’m sure you might faith in your partner, faith that they wouldn’t betray you, faith that they wouldn’t lie to you but that’s all it is..faith. You could be basing this faith on past behavior (you’ve never caught your S.O. cheating/lying) or you could just be the type of person that wants to have faith in others, so you do. Either is nice for you, but to use this faith as a weapon against others is
self-righteous and judgmental. Most people don’t think they’ll cheat and/or get cheated on until it happens to them. Which leads to Amanda’s comment about humility.

“The urge to slam adulterers is something most people should have a little more humility about, since it’s so common—-I don’t cheat, but I don’t think someone should be strung up for it.”

You responded:

“Women and girls are already told they’re too picky, too demanding, too high-maintenance, too unrealistic, and this just for daring to want partners they like and are attracted to. Must we add to this litany that they need to be more humble, too?”

The first sentence is all too true in our culture. But I don’t think that Amanda’s point was that women need to just STFU and take it if/when a S.O. cheats on them. More that we as a society need to contemplate our own human flaws and frailties before we start condemning those who have cheated.

...marriage is still popular with Americans precisely because we’re fed these fantasies,

Yeah- there’s shows based around how much of a crazy woman one can be in the days leading up to the wedding and STILL have some sap marry you. That and all the consumerism surrounding the whole day of… the dress you’ll spend so much money on and only wear once, making your friends dress up any way you want them to, getting lots of gifts that you want out of a registry you pre-select.
Meh.

I don’t have much sympathy for the women in the video because certainly what happened should have been discussed BEFORE it happened (yeah I listen to a lot of Dan Savage) and things could have been worked out but whatever. Not my relationship. She has a right to vent. I’m all for that.

I love my marriage.  I love my wife. 

I think the key to marriage is having a clear idea of what path you’re life is on, and finding someone who wants to share that path with you.  I don’t think enough people consider this.  People don’t think enough, in advance, about whether their partner is on the same page in terms of what they’re going to want to be doing when they’re 40, 50, 60…  Whatever they think their partner brings to the table, “is this someone who will want to be doing what I want to do as I move along my path through life” isn’t what most people think about.

I think the key to keeping it working is to keep liking each other.  That’s what I see most in marriages that stop working.  People stop liking each other.  It even happened in my marriage.  We stopped liking each other.  In fact, most of our first five years were pretty rocky.  But we did counseling, and after about six weeks we got re-connected with the idea that we really liked each other, and it’s been mostly awesome since.

But, then again, it’s like the tide.  It goes out and it comes back.  It was great for most of last year.  It was rocky through the fall.  And it’s been great again since about January.  We’re in the midst of a peak, but I’m sure there will be troughs.  And peaks.  And troughs.  And peaks.

It’s weird.  Whatever.  I don’t have any point.

Right, they’re your reasons, and they’re excellent ones for you, but it seems like it inevitably leads to an impasse—someone will say, Hey, I’m married, and I like it, and my partner tells me he or she likes it, and we do how we do with it.

It’s still valuable for them to ask why their narrative dominates the discourse, and they’re so much more popular than people who see the problems with it, who are inevitably seen as failing because we haven’t found a way to conform to the institution.

See, Wallace’s comment is a perfect example.  Everyone wants to talk about the key to marriage, instead of asking why we have to have a key, why we put so much into this institution.  Which isn’t to pick on Wallace, who was just the most recent commenter.  We all fall into the trap of thinking, “How can we preserve this institution?” instead of, “Why do we have this institution?”

More that we as a society need to contemplate our own human flaws and frailties before we start condemning those who have cheated.

As my homie, Nietzsche put it:

Thus do I counsel you, my friends: distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful!

It’s still valuable for them to ask why their narrative dominates the discourse

Yes, there’s a big cultural presumption that marriage is the default state, and that it’s what everyone is looking for.  I get that.

people who see the problems with it, who are inevitably seen as failing

Do you think that people who know you aren’t married and don’t want to be married see that as a _failure_, truly, rather than a difference?  Who’s out there trying to make you feel this way?  I mean, literally, who does it?  This is the point about scrutiny I was trying to make before.  You personally seem to feel a lot of scrutiny.  I would hate that feeling.  I struggle to understand where it comes from.

(OK, I got carried away here, so I’m editing in this warning, tortuous disquisition ahead.)

I dunno, to me it seems like there’s a big difference between saying that you personally have a lot of issues with marriage, and it’s not for you, and you’re not just saying it, you mean it; and saying that marriage the institution is broken for everyone—and maybe even that no one should do it.  But you have a pickup truck (IIRC) even though Car Culture is a cornerstone of American fantasy, does damage to the environment, and outright kills people.  I’m sure you use your truck in a sensible and ethical way, so that if you have to have it, at least it does the most good and least harm.  That’s what some of us try to do with marriage. 

I certainly don’t think the world _needs_ marriage.  I basically believe that the French civil-union option should apply to any number of people who organize themselves into some kind of household, including married and unmarried couples, un-coupled roommates, those anarchist collectives, whatever ya got, make it legal and record it with some kind of nonjudgmental authority so that everyone’s protected if it burns down or someone splits without paying the gas bill.  If we were starting from scratch, that’s what I’d create, and let people do whatever rituals they like or don’t like beyond that as they see fit.

But that’s like the Esperanto of marriage.  Marriage as it exists now is something else, to wit _many_ something-elses, and that’s why people are bound to get hung up on how you rhetorically jump the synapse between “marriage will not be for me” and, often, it sounds like, “marriage ought not be for anyone.”

We all fall into the trap of thinking, “How can we preserve this institution?” instead of, “Why do we have this institution?”

Actually, I feel like we talk a lot about why we have it, especially lately, because of the whole issue of same-sex marriage.  Because the specious arguments for why same-sex marriage is not or ought not be Real Marriage, meritless as they are, open up a whole set of questions about what Marriage even is, legally, religiously (if it must), culturally, etc.

“Yeah- there’s shows based around how much of a crazy woman one can be in the days leading up to the wedding and STILL have some sap marry you. That and all the consumerism surrounding the whole day of… the dress you’ll spend so much money on and only wear once, making your friends dress up any way you want them to, getting lots of gifts that you want out of a registry you pre-select.”

Danica, I feel sorry for those women labeled “Bridezillas”. OK I don’t feel sorry for the self-entitled, over privileged brats. But I saw my cousin, who wanted a small family wedding, get pressured into having a larger one with all the bullshit that entails. Her future in-laws guilt tripped her, her parents and married friends warned her that she needed to appease his family to stay on their good side, her single friends went on and on about how lucky she was to have a big wedding and the groom was never asked and never offered to make a decision or lift a finger to help. So after months of having to make tedious meaningless decisions she became crazed. Then her soon to be sister-in-law insisted the wedding ceremony be changed the day before so she could read a bible passage. When my cousin hesitated this woman had the nerve to call her a “bridezilla” That’s when I lost it.  These wedding/marriage mongers pummel women with the contradictory its-your-special-day AND this-wedding-isn’t-just-about-you statements. Now I would have told them all to STFU. But my cousin is one of those genuinely nice people that actually worries about other people’s feelings. So it saddened and angered me to see her crushed under all the “perfect day/best day of your life” pressure.

I guess my point is I think most Bridezillas are made not born.

We’re talking around in circles.  Marriage is one of those things that is created out of a feedback cycle between people and their society.  I hate using the term dialectical because I think it’s a primitive concept, but something like or related to that is central to this dialogue.

Because really, um…
You can’t really autopsy any concept like marriages or any other dynamical relationships with multiple parties.  Trying to do this by anecdote is *really* chasing your tail!  Marriage as an institution is primarily about recognition in the light of society.  Society is everchanging because people and their needs change all the time and they objectify relationships like their marriages in terms of what the general society views as a marriage.  There isn’t really a point in rejecting the term “marriage” or not engaging in it.  It’s society that determines the nature of your relationship, just as it does the nature of your sex or your race.  No matter that Amanda never marries her long time boyfriend, society will still percieve that relationship as it wishes, whether that be a marriage or living in sin.  Also, Amanda isn’t actually saving money or drama (other than some fancy ceremony), she’s merely paying in a way that she prefers.

So since Amanda can’t change the institution of marriage by her participation, she’ll just change the institution by challenging the social image of marriage, I suppose.

But isn’t the point of having these kinds of discussions about marriage, same-sex marriage, racism, sexism and gender identity to fight the patriarchal society’s ability to dictate and determine “the nature of your relationship, just as it does the nature of your sex or your race”?

My cousin is one of those genuinely nice people that actually worries about other people’s feelings.

From long personal experience as just such a nice person, I would give your cousin this advice:  it is explicitly her responsibility to worry about her own feelings and make absolutely certain that her self is expressed.  Because she is just as worthy of expression as anyone else, and no one else will take on that role.

Repeating that to myself has gotten me through a lot of stupid and self-defeating behavior, especially after making errors that hurt other people.

Oh, yeah, that is the point.

The lost point is that we shouldn’t too wrapped up in ourselves or talk about in adversarial x vs y terms.  In a sense, that does mean that we shouldn’t fight the patriarchy.  That merely validates it.  It’s more like the native american parable about which wolf you feed.  It’s about understanding the fractal relationships well enough to setup new dynamics that people will want to feed into.

I don’t really understand why we can’t accept that different people have different feelings about relationships. What people want from relationships is different. What makes people happy is different. Some people are genuinely happy in their marriages, c’est bien. Some people genuinely don’t want to be married, c’est bien aussi. Why is this oppositional?

Think of the person you were 20 years ago.  Did that person want the exact same things that you want today?  How have your goals, opinions, tastes, and ideas changed since then?

People change and grow over time.  Sometimes you marry the person who is right for you at that time, but you both grow and change, and suddenly you’re not the right person for each other any more.  That’s not a lack of success, that’s just life.  It’s too bad that people do such emotional violence to themselves over the fact that they’ve grown in different directions.  It doesn’t help that, as a commenter said above, that our society brands them as “failures” if this happens.

Of course, then there are people who grow together, and remain right for each other throughout the years.  I think this involves quite a bit of luck in some cases, but I also think that it’s a lot more likely to happen if you marry later on in life.  I think you’re more “set” in your ideas, tastes, opinions, etc. when you’re older.  You’re much likelier to know yourself at a later age, so you’re better at choosing someone who will suit you for the long term.

All of this being said, I think that it’s true that our society puts way too much emphasis on marriage as the end-all and be-all of happiness for everyone.  I mean, every single fairy tale ends with the protagonists getting married, and then all you hear after that is that they lived “happily ever after.”  That’s BS, but it seems to be what some people expect from marriage. (And honestly, it’s a situation that’s understandable—if you hear a lie enough times, it starts to sound like truth.) 

However, I also do think that there’s a reason people want to be married, aside from all of the legal benefits and cash&prizes;getting married confers—and also aside from all the fairy tale stuff.  There’s a reason people are fighting for the right to get married, and it’s not just because they saw “Cinderella” a few too many times.

We all fall into the trap of thinking, “How can we preserve this institution?” instead of, “Why do we have this institution?”

People have all kinds of bad reasons for getting married. mostly related to some kind of societal pressure. Patriarchal legacy? Sure, lotta that in the mix. I agree that from that perspective, the marriage industry is a bunch of crazy hokum.

But the reason the institution persists lies in its legal nature. Marriage has evolved into an institution that exists to protect the rights of women. Marriage makes it much more difficult for a man to take the best earning years of a woman’s life and then leave her with no assets. Marriage makes it much more difficult for a man to repeatedly impregnate a woman and then leave the family wallowing in poverty. That stuff still happens, I know, but today’s legal marriage is largely designed to prevent, or at least alleviate the problem. Then there’s the stuff about inheritance, decisions when one partner becomes incapacitated, etc. Marriage is a legal arrangement. It formalizes ones rights and obligations.

In theory, I don’t see that marriage has anything to do with raising emotionally healthy kids. Two (original) parent family, yes, very important. Legal framework, not so much.

Regarding this thread, I agree with those, most recently Mandolin, who make the live and let live argument. Whether you want to get married or not is nobody’s business but your own. I also agree with whoever said all these personal anecdotes are ultimately meaningless. I, for example, have no idea what it means to say that marriage takes a lot of work. But obviously a lot of people have a very real sense of what that means. Of course there will be all manner of individual outcomes. I don’t mean to belittle anyone’s personal experience, but it is the large trends that matter to us as a society. As long as long term relationships and child rearing entail any kind of financial or professional sacrifice, marriage will be a necessary legal institution.

Sandra Tsing-Loh has spent years making the case that women are slaves to their foibles.  It looks like she’s willing to go the ultimate extra mile to prove her point.

Regarding this thread, I agree with those, most recently Mandolin, who make the live and let live argument. Whether you want to get married or not is nobody’s business but your own. I also agree with whoever said all these personal anecdotes are ultimately meaningless…

I don’t mean to belittle anyone’s personal experience, but it is the large trends that matter to us as a society…

As long as long term relationships and child rearing entail any kind of financial or professional sacrifice, marriage will be a necessary legal institution.

I agree 100%.

But the reason the institution persists lies in its legal nature. Marriage has evolved into an institution that exists to protect the rights of women. Marriage makes it much more difficult for a man to take the best earning years of a woman’s life and then leave her with no assets. Marriage makes it much more difficult for a man to repeatedly impregnate a woman and then leave the family wallowing in poverty. That stuff still happens, I know, but today’s legal marriage is largely designed to prevent, or at least alleviate the problem. Then there’s the stuff about inheritance, decisions when one partner becomes incapacitated, etc. Marriage is a legal arrangement. It formalizes ones rights and obligations.

Well said.

Marriage exists to provide legal protections and to formalize obligations. There’s no guarantee of personal happiness stated nor implied. You’ll have to work that part out on your own.

To the young & / or foolish here - make no mistake: NOT formalizing things is not a good or safe place to be - which is part of the reason why gays are fighting for the right to marry. If someone is interested in being your partner for life, they’ll want things formalized.

For the heterosexual females up in here: If a man tells you he loves you too much to marry you RUN.

See, Wallace’s comment is a perfect example.  Everyone wants to talk about the key to marriage, instead of asking why we have to have a key, why we put so much into this institution.  Which isn’t to pick on Wallace, who was just the most recent commenter.  We all fall into the trap of thinking, “How can we preserve this institution?” instead of, “Why do we have this institution?”

I agree with this.  I have thought, a lot of times, that if I ever found myself not-married, there’s no way I’d ever get married again.  Part of it is that I think if I can’t make it work with my wife, there’s no way marriage will ever work for me.  We’re the best fit for each other that I think either of us are ever going to find, and if it doesn’t work out under these circumstances than I don’t ever see it working out for me. 

But a big part is also “why would anyone ever want to do this?”  I loved being single, and having my own place.  My wife and I joke about this.  We’ve stumbled into conversations a couple times about who else we could see ourselves married to, and it’s always turned into “Yeah, right.  Married again.  No way, ha ha ha.”

In defense of marriage, I do like the idea that life is an adventure we are on together.  And I do think, despite having to sometimes give in to someone else’s home decorating sensibilities and having to sometimes sit through TV shows I’d rather not watch, in the long run my life will be a richer experience because I’ll have had this partner.

I’d hate to see what Loh would do if she decided that she didn’t want to be a mother any more.  I somehow doubt she would be so direct and honest as to give her husband full custody.  There is more ironic style, and possibly another well-paid article, in endangering your children such that they are taken away and then blaming the pressures of being a mother in modern society.

Not that those pressures aren’t there, not that those pressures or the downside of marriage in society should not be discussed, but that such discussions conveniently enable manipulative douchebaggery among dishonest intellectuals.

My niece and her husband met during a period in their lives when they were smashing the state.  They planned to never marry, despite growing their family.  Then the second child was born with some serious congenital health issues and my niece had to drop her hours to the point where she was no longer covered under health insurance plans. 

So they went to city hall and made it legal.  By that time, after a couple of kids, elders were relieved rather than feeling cheated by the lack of some meaningless ritual.  All the same, there was no substitute for that legal package of benefits so easily obtained when it came to securing their family.

The problem is, if we remove legal marriage, people couldn’t afford to resolve their corporate partnership issues like this without resort to the courts, and those that could would not only be leveraging wealth privileges but clogging up the courts.  The only sane answer is to extend it universally, and let people and churches make up the rest themselves.

The implication that Tsing Loh wasn’t committed strikes me as completely false.  She was married 20 years.  If you watch the video, she speaks of her husband in the highest terms available.  Again, it’s so very tempting to say that someone else failed because they didn’t work hard enough—-it helps us believe that we can’t fail, because we’ll just work harder because we care more.  But I do like her point—-at the end of the day, why work so hard?  A lot of people do it so they can simply say they didn’t fail.

Amanda Marcotte on 06/20 at 03:50 PM

So?  She talks nice.  Big fucking deal.  Any shit-stain used car salesman trying to fleece you will talk nice.  It’s part of the job of being childish, selfish and self-absorbed.  Proof is in the pudding: she didn’t act nice. 

As for “commitment,” I think you missed the boat.  She seems to be committed to the “look” not the reality of marriage.  I see this all the time.  People get married and/or having children because “that’s what you do” and the spouse, or child, is nothing more than a “life accessory,” something like a pair of shoes or a nice tie…  And that’s what she strikes me with her self-absorbed video, she may as well said:  “My husband was a great car, like a Volvo, but I wanted to run around in my new Ferrari, so I did, and now the bank took the Volvo because I couldn’t make the payments on it…  boo hoo”

Bottom line is:  If you’re done, you’re done.  But be an adult (and not a self-absorbed ass) and be done with it, do not lie, cheat and otherwise treat your spouse and marriage with a lack of class and respect, all of which she did and are exceedingly immature. 

For example, when my mother got done, she got done with her first marriage, she divorced my dad.  No drama.  No fucking around.  No hate.  No bile.  No attacking.  Nothing.  She just had issues that she needed to work through on her own and needed to be independent so she served him with divorce papers.  Hell, it was so drama-free that it surprised everyone in the family, including my father, whom us kids lived with for four years while she got her head back together.

To this day she has nothing but positive things to say about my father, too.  And he reciprocates even though I know it hurt him tremendously at the time.  But she didn’t cheat on him, treat him like crap or anything like that.  She just got married too young to someone who was not the person for her and hadn’t worked through the issues she had coming from a highly abusive family.  When she got done with the heaviest part of the load, she started dating and got remarried when I was 19…  This husband worked for her, she’s been married 29 years now.  They’ve, at times, had their issues.  But it works for them.

Anyway, there are classy ways to be done.  And classless ways to be done.  This was about as classless as it gets.

For example, when my mother got done, she got done with her first marriage, she divorced my dad.  No drama.  No fucking around.  No hate.  No bile.  No attacking.  Nothing.  She just had issues that she needed to work through on her own and needed to be independent so she served him with divorce papers.

But then she would have had to have packed her own boxes.

Yeah, but not all marriages fit in to the sexless mold. When my husband cheated, we were having more sex than we had had in awhile because I was no longer the cranky sleep deprived mom of a newborn and he was home more often. I mean, I couldn’t claim we had a perfect marriage, but it certainly wasn’t sexless or horrible- in fact I have a much higher sex drive than my husband in general. His one and only reasoning was “I don’t know, it just kinda happened.”

Had to skip to the bottom, but ...

My puzzlement is why this cheating starts late into marriage, it seems to me it is not sexual. It is more a passive aggressive thing, or a way to feel young again. Psychological things that make you look outside for what you are not finding in your house. Like that husband that has no sex with his wife but has porn sites bookmarked.

I heard this story and my immediate thought was “Mid-life crisis.”  Six months from now, Loh will be writing a story about how badly her relationship with her lover ended and how much she wishes she could be back with her ex-spouse, because she’s really just trying to deny that she’s getting old and will someday die.  It happens to both men and women, and it happens in a very similar way for both.

It’s also the case that cheating on your spouse (or being cheated on) is considered a valid reason to leave.  Feeling like most of the burden is falling on you, or that you’re not being respected?  You need to get over it.  But have a one-night stand and you can blow the whole thing up without having to admit your spouse has been playing passive-aggressive games for 10 years and you’re sick of it.

I’ve been following the discussions here (and at Hugo’s) on marriage and Sandra Tsing-Loh with some fascination—-kinda “window on a world”....I don’t have a dog in this fight. Been married (eloped at nineteen—-no wedding industrial complex for me!), divorced (at 25), co-habited (early thirties) and had a child out of wedlock (*gasp!* disgraciada! *snicker*).

Flip, I bring it up because it’s interesting, and because a lot of people are quietly thinking these things, but they don’t bring it up because it’s a sacred cow.  And that would probably be okay if we the unmarried weren’t sniffed at like we’re either immature or traitors.

Amanda, I’m really interested in this comment—-simply because that wasn’t my experience. I never had anyone pester me about marriage when I was your age and cohabiting. That might be a regional difference—-I did have people pester me about having children when I was married in my late teens/early twenties, but that stopped—-in Illinois, everyone pretty much assumes that if you haven’t had a child by the time you’re 27 at the latest, you’re never going to (for women—men are given more time). By the time you’re in your thirties, everyone either assumes you’re either going to live together for a few years as a “test drive” before getting married, or that you have no plans to marry at all. Marriage is considered to be a collection of legal/financial benefits that people can either afford to go without or not. Considering that you don’t run in conservative fundamentalist circles, are you really experiencing people telling you that you’re immature for not getting married?

Also, to play the game of What If: if all couples, whether het or same sex, were given the option of “marriage” or “civil union”—-exactly the same legal and financial benefits, just different names—-would you then consider it? I ask because I’m getting the impression that you think too much baggage is attached to the name “marriage”, but that you aren’t necessarily opposed to the legal/financial aspects of it. I also think a whole helluva lot of heterosexual couples would opt for the name “civil union”.

Don’t like those things?  Opt out.  Do like those things?  Opt in with some ethics and hash them out so that they feel right for you (and your partner/s).  I don’t know why it has to be considered such a brazen act of courage and defiance.  There’s a difference between not liking eggplant and rising up against Aubergine Hegemony.

and

As for the stupidness of marriage, setting aside the hilarity of people who are in pseudomarriages (sorry - “monogamous and living together”) looking down their bohemian noses at it, it reeks of hetero privilege. Go ahead and show up at a Marriage Equality meeting and correct everyone’s thinking on how it’s stupid of them to want to get married, look at what Sandra Loh said!

I’m leaning toward FlipYrWhig and mythago here. Having been married and cohabited, I’d say the nature of the relationships and dynamics are EXACTLY the same—-it’s just that marriage offers legal/financial benefits that living together does not (and—-that living together cannot, even if you go to the courts. you can protect inheritance rights through the courts sans marriage, but you can’t gain ERISA health insurance benefits, or Social Security, or Unemployment benefits for a partner, or FMLA benefits, or…need I go on?).

Folks don’t seem to be foregoing pair-bonding. It seems that the arguments are framed around whether or not the m-word is attached to that relationship—-with some folks thinking that “marriage” should or does by definition carry with it patriarchal baggage, and by having a relationship that resembles marriage in every way yet without the “piece of paper” makes that patriarchal baggage disappear; others (like me) think that the word “marriage” has zero influence on the level of patriarchal baggage, and that the institution is in just as much a state of flux as every other institution (like “work” or “the family” or “religion” or….pick your poison)—-that it is what you make it, consciously or unconsciously. ‘Nother words, between the folks who think the institution itself can be changed, and those who think it’s irreparable. Myself, I think the institution isn’t going to disappear no matter the name until people collectively decide that pair-bonding is undesirable——and I don’t see that happening. In fact, experimental communities in the sixties/seventies that discouraged pair-bonding sure the shit did not discourage gender-based roles (with the lion’s share of the work burden placed on women, and the relaxation/recreation reserved for men). Not what I’d call feminist.

Thoughts?

This confirms to certainty something that I’ve always been near-certain of since the Kinsella-Lau mess:
NEVER EVER EVER EVER EVER DATE OR MARRY A WRITER!!! ELEVENTY-ONE-LEVEL ERROR!  FLEE!

That only-partly-joking view aside, one thing becomes clear from listening to Sandra Tsing Lo’s words: she has obviously listened to and absorbed Churchill’s maxim that “if you are going to kill a man then it costs nothing to be polite”.

When people talk about the “institution” of marriage, I think there’s two different senses in which people are using it. There’s long-term, monogamous pair-bonding operating under the assumption that staying together is better than splitting up and afforded certain legal protections by the state, and there’s this social construct of the thing that will fulfill you above all other things and without which you are nothing. Clearly, the latter is bullshit, but I feel like the majority of the people “defending” marriage on this thread are defending the former and being accused of defending the latter and being in total denial.

I also feel like Amanda’s framing buys into the latter sense, even as she claims to be attacking it, by casting divorce as evidence that marriage is flawed. People who co-habitate break up and people who get married get divorced. Which “institution” is flawed? Or perhaps people sometimes reach a point where their relationship just doesn’t work any more.

The thing I find a bit obnoxious is the assumption that anyone here who is married is just a total tool who has been hoodwinked into following social convention. I’m actually quite aware of the trade-offs I’ve accepted, thank you very much, but ... THEY’RE NOT ALL BAD. shah8 is right that you can’t really get out of the system, you just decide which set of trade-offs is preferable to you.

NEVER EVER EVER EVER EVER DATE OR MARRY A WRITER!!! ELEVENTY-ONE-LEVEL ERROR!  FLEE!

And this. More than once, I have been just appalled at a piece that appears in the NYT Modern Love column. How can people publicly humiliate the people they claim to care about like this? At least have the decency to change the names and put it a transparently fictionalized “novel” so that only people who actually know you in real life realize what you’ve done.

Amanda:

Women cheat nearly as much as men, and I think it’s well-understood that the small gap between the sexes is only due to the fact that women have fewer opportunities.  If you eliminate men who, drunk on male privilege, sleep with subordinates or prostitutes and compare the percentages of men and women who commit take-a-lover adultery—-a real lover, someone that you could actually fall for—-then I’d bet it’s about the same.

True, and overdue. There are, however, age and gender differences as to the whys.  The bit about a man’s sex drive going down in his 40s, for example, is only partly true.  I saw quite a few divorces cross my desk where the husband’s sex drive hadn’t gone significantly down but rather he had merely, by 40ish, given up on seeking sex from his wife,; when he knew that the answer would be `no’ he stopped asking and that was interpreted as a loss of interest.  By that same token I found a greater number over-40 adulterous males (whether their sex drives did or didn’t drop) turned to adultery out of narcissism: the adultery was about validation of themselves as attractive, wonderful, blah blah bah, even though their sex lives and home lives were just fine; it wasn’t enough that they be loved by one, they needed to be desired by at least one more.

chingona gets it

Hector B at 6:28:
Shades of Chris Rock, no?  He said that when go out on a date with someone you aren’t going out with them, you’re going out with their representative.

but they don’t bring it up because it’s a sacred cow.

The worst part about sacred cows is that they often aren’t cows at all, but very angry bulls with very sharp horns in very small spaces ... with you.

chingona gets it

You expected anything less?

What Mnemosyne said about the inevitable followup article in a while.  We’ll get it whether she’s happy or unhappy, still with the squeeze or split, seeking husbandly reconciliation or not.  She’s a writer who uses her personal life as grist for her mill, and has already used the most intimate, painful thing in her—and her husband’s life—to sell an Atlantic article.

Never date a writer unless you are prepared for a million people to know things about you that you didn’t want known.  Whether you want these things known or not will count for exactly jack dancing shit to the person hunched in front of their laptop.  You’re no longer a person you’re a subject.

Is there a gender difference in this sort of intimacy whoring?  Loh and Lau spring to mind, but I’m not well versed on other such articles.

(bows in apology to chingona)

Holy shit.  I think the saddest part of that article was this little aside from the friend—“my hear doesn’t rise when she walks into the room.  It sinks.”  If that’s ever true of either me or my spouse, I hope we both have the sense to call it quits.

I’m going to be perfectly honest:  I am happily married, and if I had known at twenty the things I know now, I don’t think I’d be married now, or at least, not to my current partner.  (It’s this sort of contradiction, IMO, that makes people defensive and prickly about these marriage posts).  It’s not so much that I don’t enjoy being married, or that I don’t love my spouse.  It’s more that I bought hook, line, and sinker into the idea that 1) any long-term relationship should have marriage as its end goal and 2) the end of a long-term relationship means that I failed. 

Hence, when I graduated from college, rather than striking out on my own and moving across the country and breaking up with my then-boyfriend, I stayed here.  I was terrified of being thrown into the adult world; I didn’t know what I wanted, and “Love” gave me a convenient reason to not figure things out on my own, to not face my fears.

I feel the urge to close this with a panegyric on my spouse’s virtues and our marriage.  I think I will resist.  I will say instead, that I wonder how many people blame their relationships for feelings of stagnation and entrapment, when the reality is it is their financial choices (especially choices to conform, e.g. buying a new car or a house, or lack of income equal to expenses) that really is the source of their dissatisfaction.

Of course, lacking income isn’t a financial choice for most people.  Please substitute “situation” for “choice” in my last paragraph.  I should learn to preview.

La Lubu, you’re right, it’s a real cultural difference.  You have no idea how patriarchal Southern/Texan culture can be until you’ve lived it and been exposed to it.

When Professor Avenger took a sabbatical in a town where one of his Avenger uncles lived, his Aunt Bess got to know Mother Avenger and confided to her, “An Avenger is happy when his wife is stirring something on the stove, even if it’s a pot of shit!”.

FlipYrWhig:

Marriage as it exists now is something else, to wit _many_ something-elses, and that’s why people are bound to get hung up on how you rhetorically jump the synapse between “marriage will not be for me” and, often, it sounds like, “marriage ought not be for anyone.”

The problem is that marriage isn’t presented as a choice some people make and some don’t.  It’s presented as something that most people should do, even if it’s hard for them, and if it’s hard you should work, and only if you tried really really really hard and still didn’t succeed should you think that it’s not for you.  And even then, “that special someone” may be out there waiting for you, you never know, don’t give up!

It kind of reminds me of people who say I’d believe in God if I just gave God a chance, or who want to know who hurt me so that I’d turn away from God.  That I have to be ignorant or broken in some way not to believe.

It’s presented as default, and you have to prove you really don’t want it, and are unsuitable for it by trying it and failing, because supposedly, most of the time, people don’t know it’s what they want until they’re in it.

Unfortunately when you’re in it, especially with kids, it’s deuced hard to get out of it gracefully. 

Remember the situation that Julie commented above, who said that she told people the reason she got divorced was because of her husband’s cheating rather than the suckitude of the marriage itself, because you only get to get out of a marriage if your spouse cheats on you?  Because if she just said it was the marriage sucking, she’d get all kinds of moralistic “you should have worked harder on it” advice?  That’s how the marriage assumption fucks things up.

“Unfortunately when you’re in it, especially with kids, it’s deuced hard to get out of it gracefully. “

To clarify—if you work really hard at it for a long time, rather than just quickly coming to the conclusion that marriage is not for you.  By the time you stop believing the “work harder” bullshit, you can be well and truly jammed.

far too many expectations are placed on the marriage bond, and by extension the nuclear family, which is now not only supposed to be the font of endless sexual bliss and warm companionship for the parents, but is supposed to be the principal religious, entertainment, and—now with homeschooling movements, both post-hippy and Nationalist-Christian—educational center for all members

feh. marriage is a *social obligation*, whether that obligation is framed in religious or civic terms. It exists for the sake of social order. It is only about your happiness or pleasure so far as you take pleasure in the fulfillment of your social duty. Even if we could manage to create real gender equity in the institution, and finally cleanly separate civic marriage from all religion (both of which are desirable goals) we would still be left with something that is most often a burden and chore.

Kind of like the rest of adult life.

the problem isn’t really marriage, or it’s not *only* marriage—it’s the decline of other kinds of association, i.e., neighborhood, community, public schooling, even just simple friendship—where people can derive some fulfillment and meaning in life outside of the suffocating confines of the nuclear family. (I.e., it takes a village in all things, not just child-rearing.)

Remember the situation that Julie commented above, who said that she told people the reason she got divorced was because of her husband’s cheating rather than the suckitude of the marriage itself, because you only get to get out of a marriage if your spouse cheats on you?  Because if she just said it was the marriage sucking, she’d get all kinds of moralistic “you should have worked harder on it” advice?  That’s how the marriage assumption fucks things up.

Aaaahhh, but was it marriage that sucked, or her spouse that sucked? As for the “working harder” on it…well, my perception is that anything enjoyable is not work, full stop. It’s effortless, even if you’re putting effort into it, if that makes any sense. I mean, a long mountain bike ride, playing guitar, reading a novel, painting a picture, eating a really delicious meal—-those things require effort, but I don’t ever hear anyone describe such things as “work”; most of the time even the folks who do that sort of thing for a living don’t describe it in the same terms that people slogging it out on a construction site, or in a cubicle, or in front of a cash register describe their work. (that whole thread over at Hugo’s about marriage-as-work was a disconnect for me——where I come from, “work” is the term used to describe something that inherently sucks, even when necessary; on the thread, it seemed most folks preferred using the term “work” to describe anything worth doing. must be a cultural difference. or an Apolloian vs. Dionysian thing. I dunno.)

My thought on marriage-as-work is: when it gets to the point where you have to describe it as “hard work”, you’re on the downhill slide. When a relationship is good, it isn’t “work”. The “work” part comes in when you have to lie to yourself about the prospects of keeping the relationship together—-lying to yourself is hard work. Denying reality is hard work. Or at least that’s how I experienced it. Telling myself (about my spouse’s alcoholism), “it’s only the booze talking” or “but he can change” or “but of course he still wants to be married—-that’s what he says!”—-that, was work. Trying to find the correlation between what-is-said and what-is-done, OMFG, that’s heavy lifting.

Here’s where I’m finding a disconnect between marriage as being an inherently oppressive, patriarchal institution incapable of being altered to fit a new reality——patriarchal men expect live-in girlfriends to be just as “wifely” as wives, albeit more disposable (and without that whole pesky “cheating” trope, because hey…if you’re not married, you’re not “really” cheating, no?). Bah. Want to avoid a patriarchal relationship, avoid the patriarchs—-whether you marry ‘em or not.

oldfeminist:  The problem is that marriage isn’t presented as a choice some people make and some don’t.  It’s presented as something that most people should do, even if it’s hard for them, and if it’s hard you should work, and only if you tried really really really hard and still didn’t succeed should you think that it’s not for you.

I don’t doubt that there are people who dedicate themselves to presenting marriage in such a way.  But that has not been my personal experience.  That’s why I keep prodding to find out what actually-existing people run this game on happily unmarried people they know, to the degree that it becomes the smoking gun for why marriage is intolerable.

chingona:  The thing I find a bit obnoxious is the assumption that anyone here who is married is just a total tool who has been hoodwinked into following social convention.

True.  And the thing I find a bit lofty is the assumption that by not being married you become a brave revolutionary who refuses to be hoodwinked into following social convention.  To me that feels like the reasoning of the people who make their blog color-scheme green to support the protests in Iran.  You get the frisson of Great Struggle without having to do anything especially risky.  Every day we do and use a lot of things that have repugnant histories behind them.  Yes, it makes a statement of some kind to eschew those things, be it meat, gasoline, cotton, tobacco, or church.  But it’s not really all that activist/rebellious.

La Lubu:  When a relationship is good, it isn’t “work”.

No, I disagree with that—via wapsie’s frame in the comment above yours, anything that involves obligations IMHO involves “work.”  That’s why I keep coming back to the cleaning-the-catbox example.  It’s not a big deal, but it demands some modicum of time and effort.  If you refuse to shoulder some part of your obligations to the other parties to your associative group (family, partnered relationship, coworkers, neighborhood, government, etc.), you’re a free rider on other civic-minded people’s work.  In fact, if we want to play the false-consciousness game, I would say that believing that good relationships don’t involve “work” is under-appreciating how much “work” is actually being done just below the surface, everything from remembering to change the toilet paper to remembering to give your partner a kiss.  To me those count as “work” because they’re more effort than self-absorption.  They’re not drudgery, but they’re still work.

That said, I do think that a lot of people get it all switched around, and they think that because they’re investing “work” in their relationship, it must be good, because good relationships involve work.  Bad relationships involve work too!

No, I disagree with that—via wapsie’s frame in the comment above yours, anything that involves obligations IMHO involves “work.” That’s why I keep coming back to the cleaning-the-catbox example….

Well, I guess I don’t experience it that way because all the little things being done below the surface are things people do anyway when they live alone, right? So, if both partners just continue to, y’know, be considerate of the other person and still keep doing that unrecognized work, neither will be burdened or put upon. Then again, I’m a woman—-I wasn’t raised to believe that once in a monogamous relationship, it’s time to cease household chores and child-raising ‘cuz that’s what a wife is for. (absolutely not calling you out, FlipYrWhig! just sayin’ that I’ve encountered plenty of men who give lip service to the idea of egalitarian relationships in terms of feeling equal or believing in equality as an abstract ideal, but not performing egalitarian relationships in terms of daily action, as in, the dishes don’t do themselves. and that’s regardless of marital status.)

I do find the catbox/dishes/toilet paper roll, etc. to be curious examples, in that a person living alone necessarily does those things for him or herself—-why would that change upon partnership?

I don’t doubt that there are people who dedicate themselves to presenting marriage in such a way.  But that has not been my personal experience.  That’s why I keep prodding to find out what actually-existing people run this game on happily unmarried people they know…

FlipYrWhig-

The families of my best friend (BF) and her now-husband (BFH).  They co-habitated for about three years, and had dated for about two years before that, and the pressure from their families (particularly the mothers) as to why he hadn’t proposed yet was intense.  BF would tell me about comments from the families, and I still can’t believe how rude and intrusive they were.  Even mutual friends got on the “just kidding” why aren’t you two married yet joke train.  I’m convinced that BFH actually didn’t pop the question sooner as a passive-aggressive reaction to the palpable pressure. 

Now, of course, that they’ve bought a house, the cycle will begin again as to why they don’t have kids yet.  Ugh.

I do find the catbox/dishes/toilet paper roll, etc. to be curious examples, in that a person living alone necessarily does those things for him or herself—-why would that change upon partnership?

Men and women are allowed to have different standards of housekeeping. Further, if women violate the standards they grew up with, they feel intensely guilty about it while guys typically do not. I know this, because all of my best friends are messy. I’m going to say messiness is hereditary, because a certain Mrs. Messy has a messy mom, and a tidy dad, but only one messy sister—the other siblings take after the dad I believe. When we visited their house for a special occasion, Mrs. Messy put me and my wife to work tidying up—she knew we could handle the clutter without flinching.

I would say that guys use their s.o.‘s more developed sense of guilt and higher (goal) standards of housekeeping to shift the burden of housework to them.

@ La Lubu:  It may well be the case that the “work” frame is more resonant to me as a man, because, it’s true, there’s always the possibility of being a self-absorbed jackass and getting away with it (for a while, at least).  _Not_ scooping cat poop or changing the TP are always possible.  And that also applies to “emotional labor.”  Women get conditioned to and praised for picking up the slack in all these things.

(Amanda has written persuasively about this in the past, about the gendered nature of household responsibilities and how being a slob is not a political act in protest of bourgeois standards of hygienic domesticity.  If someone can’t tell your revolution from your indolence, ur doin it rong.) 

Checking my privilege takes vigilance, and that’s “work”; even when it becomes second nature, it’s still a pattern of choices that serve to counterbalance the temptation of inconsiderate laziness.  Your point about performing egalitarianism in daily action is exactly what I mean to get at:  that’s work.  Feminists were the ones who raised awareness of how much tangible and intangible work takes place in the domestic sphere.  Regulating oneself to avoid selfishness requires labor, as does regulating oneself to avoid picking up the slack of a selfish partner, or calling out that partner’s slacking.  So I don’t think good relationships run smoothly by themselves, although they can be made to appear so when partners choose to fulfill their obligations to themselves and to each other, and I still think the rhetoric of “work” is apt for describing that process.

Now, of course, that they’ve bought a house, the cycle will begin again as to why they don’t have kids yet.  Ugh.

Yeah, my wife and I—approaching 20 years married—get the child questions a bit.  But I find the best solution is to move to a faraway state where you have no family, and not to talk to them very much.  Pressure relieved!  Ah, misanthropy, what can’t you solve?  Seriously, one of the things that becomes evident to me reading Pandagon is how much wider a social circle people like Amanda occupy than I do.  Narrower social circle, much less social pressure.  That’s my solution.

Never date a writer unless you are prepared for a million people to know things about you that you didn’t want known.

Really, really REALLY avoid Candice Bushnell.

Candace, goddammit!

Marriage is still relevant today if you see marriage first and foremost as a commitment. It’s an alliance, a promise to stick together and support each other through thick and thin—unless and until one or both parties moves to dissolve the union.

If you see the relationship as something you do because it’s fun and fulfilling, and something you intend to stop doing when it’s not fulfilling anymore, then there’s little point in getting married—except of course for the benefits and legal rights that go with a formal recognition. You can just date or live together.

There is something to be said for the idea of trying hard to make a troubled marriage work because the other person still wants to be married. Tsing Loh makes it sound like she believed that she could save her marriage if she was willing to put the work in, but that she just couldn’t be bothered to take on yet another project.

The essay doesn’t say much about how her husband felt, but I got the sense that the decision to end the marriage was unilateral instead of mutual. If her husband wanted to stay married to her, I would argue that she would have had some moral obligation to at least attempt to make her marriage work.

Maybe she’d already been trying for 20 years and finally decided at some level that further effort was hopeless, in which case good for her for getting out, better late than never. Someone who walks away from a marriage they believe to be salvageable and a partner who still wants to be married is being a bit of a jerk.

Most people don’t actually attain the level of commitment in marriage that they’re nominally supposed to have, which suggests that marriage as the default mode of adult life is problematic. A lot of people would be better off not getting married because they aren’t interested in entering into that kind of commitment. It would be much better if marriage were considered a niche option for people with unusual tastes, as opposed to a default way of life.

It would be much better if marriage were considered a niche option for people with unusual tastes, as opposed to a default way of life.

I like this formulation.  (How would that be achieved, do you think?)  But I would say that fighting against marriage-as-default doesn’t have to take the same shape as fighting against marriage, and in Amanda’s rhetoric, the two often seem one and the same.

Your point about performing egalitarianism in daily action is exactly what I mean to get at:  that’s work.  Feminists were the ones who raised awareness of how much tangible and intangible work takes place in the domestic sphere.  Regulating oneself to avoid selfishness requires labor, as does regulating oneself to avoid picking up the slack of a selfish partner, or calling out that partner’s slacking.  So I don’t think good relationships run smoothly by themselves, although they can be made to appear so when partners choose to fulfill their obligations to themselves and to each other, and I still think the rhetoric of “work” is apt for describing that process.

Wow! You just really clarified something for me—-why I don’t perceive the daily action as “work” (because I always took for granted I would have to do it anyway, same as breathing) and why past partners did perceive that daily labor as work (because they had to give up a privilege).

To paraphrase Florynce Kennedy,(who once visited the county seat here 30+ years ago) “If men could get pregnant, housekeeping would be a sacrament.”

The critique of capital-M Marriage seems like it denies or negates the possibility that some non-zero number of small-m marriages are cool, because they’re all poisoned marriage-fruit from the poisoned Marriage-tree.  That’s why the conversation around these posts has become testy in the past.

Yep.  It often comes across as, “Well, you know what those people are like.  What?  Why are you getting all offended?  I wasn’t talking about you, just those other people who have the same characteristic you do.”

I think society will drift towards “marriage as niche option” as the stigma against living in sin dissipates and women’s liberation advances.

A lot of girls are taught from birth that their primary mission in life is to find a suitable husband. At least we’ve come far enough that even the most ardent proponents of this view rarely articulate it so bluntly. But the bride idolizing culture hasn’t gone away.

What are these ‘things’ we call marriage and family? Are they imposed upon us by aliens (or their near equivalent, men), enforced by some threatening entity we call the state (black helicopters, anyone)?

Seriously, is there any such thing as a bad marriage or a good one or a failing one? To speak of it that way is to give marriage some sort of existence independent of the people living it out.

What if we were to talk about houses the same way? Oh, my house is bad, because the faucet’s leaking, the windows are drafty, there’s a crack in the foundation, and it takes too damn much gas to heat it.

Sounds silly, right?

Yet, we think nothing of it to speak of marriage that way.

Perhaps, it might be helpful to look at marriage in terms of analogy—to say, a house, or even the rules of grammar. We don’t buy a house just for the sake of houseness, nor do we learn the rules of grammar just we can show of at some literature academy. No, the house serves as shelter and the rules of grammar serve the task of communication.

So what larger purpose does marriage serve?

Happiness? Okay, but what do we mean by happiness? If it’s merely the creation of some pleasant inner psychological state, then beer might be far more effective. But if happiness is connected to us becoming more human, then the path is not quite so obvious or free of grief and anguish.

I have seen estimates that one sixth of men and women have some clinically diagnosable mental illness. And since there is no bright line between them and the rest of us, I would venture to guess that at least twice that many have some serious neurosis afflicting them. So, half the population is laboring with a serious emotional handicap from the get-go.

Do we say to them, you can’t get married, because you’re too damaged to make a marriage work?

But aren’t they entitled to reach for happiness, even if it’s only a sad and limping sort? And given the fact, as any family systems therapist would tell you, we marry our own level of dysfunction, the result is two people who have serious ‘issues’ pairing off, seeking from the other the healing they need. How well will that work?

I’ll close with another metaphor for marriage, one that John Calvin (whose 500th birthday is next month used to describe our relationship to God)—it’s a mirror. It reflects our love, our pain, our neediness, our fear, our aspirations, our brokenness, our joy and our sorrow. You can’t blame the mirror for what it reflects.

I’ve gotta go with wapsie here:

the problem isn’t really marriage, or it’s not *only* marriage—it’s the decline of other kinds of association, i.e., neighborhood, community, public schooling, even just simple friendship—where people can derive some fulfillment and meaning in life outside of the suffocating confines of the nuclear family. (I.e., it takes a village in all things, not just child-rearing.)

It’s easy to single out “marriage” as the source of all problems, and plenty of people getting divorced do that.  But it’s much more of a symptom of our increasing social isolation than a problem with “marriage” itself.  Fifty years ago, your spouse wasn’t supposed to be your sole source of friendship and happiness, but that’s where we stand now.

Also, if someone can point out to me a human society that has no pair bonding whatsoever, I’d be interested to read about it.  Even polygamous and polygynous societies depend on having two people raising children together, even if more people are added to that relationship.  Like it or not, we’re wired to pair bond for several years at a time (usually long enough to get a kid to about age 7 or 8) and everyone who’s tried to create groups that do otherwise have failed miserably.  Even polyamorists usually have a primary partner.

But the bride idolizing culture hasn’t gone away.

Perhaps the hyperkinetic nature of the recent upsurge in Bridal Porn is really its death throes.  It just seems to me that it’s a thing people do or don’t do.  Whatever.  Get married, don’t get married; go to law school, don’t go to law school.  They feel cognitively equivalent.  Both are things that people do and sometimes enjoy, sometimes regret.

But, like I said, obviously men don’t get the same social pressures and conditioning that women have gotten and still get, and I’m sure there are regional, ethnic-cultural, class, and religious variations, and more.

Oh, my house is bad, because the faucet’s leaking, the windows are drafty, there’s a crack in the foundation, and it takes too damn much gas to heat it.

Sounds silly, right?

No, that doesn’t sound silly at all: it sounds like you have a bad house that needs major repairs. Or maybe you should have bought a different house. Or why, after an inspection that reveals these issues, you say, “there’s no way I’m getting involved in this house until the major issues are taken care of” before I sign the paperwork.

So, half the population is laboring with a serious emotional handicap from the get-go. Do we say to them, you can’t get married, because you’re too damaged to make a marriage work?

Well, keep in mind that in an earlier era, many forms of an unmarried life were considered acceptable vocations, and it was much more common to avail oneself of them than it is now. Granted, economic circumstances were such that it wasn’t conceivable to be able to put together a marriage and a household for many people, but the truth is that throughout history we have had many people who were encouraged not to marry. There is a religious case for claiming that some people are not well-suited to marriage, but you seem to be denying this simple reality.

Perhaps the hyperkinetic nature of the recent upsurge in Bridal Porn is really its death throes.

I agree. It’s not just the lessening and/or lack of stigma against living together, the later age of marriage (longer education/lack of jobs—-not many folks are willing to weather marriage on the minimum wage)—-it’s also “the economy, stupid!” ‘cuz folks now have to choose “do I put on a wedding, or do I have a honeymoon?” Or for that matter a downpayment on a house/condo? Back in the day when folks got married straight out of high school, it was common for the bride’s parents to pay for the wedding. Now, people pay for the weddings themselves. That tends to tighten up the budget and the guest list, and make a quickie ceremony at the courthouse look more attractive.

Heh.  Trawling the more rabid and loonier parts of the InterWeb, I’ve just found this guy agreeing with those who believe marriage is broken.  I suspect his argument may not be the same as that here, though - click through at your own peril.

@ La Lubu:

Wow! You just really clarified something for me—-why I don’t perceive the daily action as “work” (because I always took for granted I would have to do it anyway, same as breathing) and why past partners did perceive that daily labor as work (because they had to give up a privilege).

IMHO when you start thinking of such moments as work, you start to realize how much (or little) you’re really doing.  But I really have come to understand that one of the perks of privilege is the ability to fob off such work onto other people; which means, by the same token, that counteracting privilege means thinking about all of these things as work, and striving to do your fair share of that work, lest it fall to your partner (or, in the non-intimate domain, your associate/s).

I only got to yesterday @ about 6pm so apologies if this has been covered since:

- It seems that Amanda, Auguste and TheLady are shoehorning a narrative that Loh isn’t writing:  That dissatisfaction pushed her into an affair (Amanda even assumes Loh’s affair was “with someone [she’d] really fall for”, but I don’t see Loh say anything like that at all).  From what Loh writes about her marriage and the marriages of her friends, it seems more basic:  One party isn’t interested in sex with the other.  Loh flippantly writes off The Open Marriage at the beginning of the piece as “[fizzling] out with the lava lamp”, and name checks The Ice Storm, but based on her story, and the Modest Proposals at the end, it seems like sex is a big deal.  Hector B. had it right early in the thread in terms of what could defuse the situation, though it’s not really a world that we seem to be currently living in.  However, along with questions about why so much work should be put into keeping a marriage, we also ought to be asking questions about why sexual fidelity is assumed to be an immutable requirement.*

- The other thing that all the relationships have in common is that the men still call the tune.  For example, it’s Ian’s perfection that’s held as the standard that his wife must live up to.  I agree with an early comment that if Loh’s piece were written by a man that his actions wouldn’t get as much leniency as Loh’s recieved by Amanda*, but it seems clear that Loh does consider it an act of rebellion against the “rules” that seem only to require further demands of her.  I think I read it a little differently from Amanda, though:  Requiring her to check her sexuality at the door was the last straw, not a form of “acting out” to force some other issue.

- Big points off for Loh’s referencing of Evo Psych woo.  Hormonal dosages in the womb override societal environment?  Really?

* It gets touched on here in these discussions, but not at a place with higher visibility like The Atlantic.

** Further, Loh’s reliability as a narrator has be questioned, or at least not taken solely at face value.  For example, saying how her ex is a wonderful man who neatly packed away everything she owns and left it outside the house could be an extremely polite way of saying that he was a micromanager who wanted control over every last detail of their house.

Loh deliberately elides to create interest.  Make of that what you will.

There’s long-term, monogamous pair-bonding operating under the assumption that staying together is better than splitting up and afforded certain legal protections by the state, and there’s this social construct of the thing that will fulfill you above all other things and without which you are nothing. Clearly, the latter is bullshit, but I feel like the majority of the people “defending” marriage on this thread are defending the former and being accused of defending the latter and being in total denial.

Should we really be defending the former?  Why is it appropriate for people to feel the need to enter into a social arrangement with detrimental legal claptrap so they can be safe and secure?

I support gay marriage rights because I know that’s more likely to happen than what really should happen; that “marriage” should be off the legal papers all together.  All of the legal benefits and protections offered by marriage could easily be remedied by actually treating people like people instead of blood sucking tics.

Why is it appropriate for people to feel the need to enter into a social arrangement with detrimental legal claptrap so they can be safe and secure?

Uh ... cause the legal claptrap isn’t detrimental?

FlipYrWhig at 05:38 PM:

Whatever. Get married, don’t get married; go to law school, don’t go to law school.

This actually made me laugh out loud. I had a feeling, based on all that “you can just” stuff - you can just ignore people’s comments, you can just move thousands away from you family to avoid being pressured by them, you can just make your own damn decisions about your life - that you had something of a privileged view of the kind of life choices that people mean when they talk about the decisions that lead to entering and exiting marriages.

Frankly, if you can “just” go to law school - with all the financial and educational benefits that that entails having - then we’re not on the same page as to what we mean by “most people”. Because most people don’t get to make a decision like that with just a shrug. I’m not trying to pile on you like you’re some kind of over privileged oppressor, but the example you chose is extremely indicative of the fact that you’re thinking about this in very different terms that me.

The reason that myself and others want to undermine marriage as an institution is that its existence serves as an excuse to not remove a lot of the obstacles to a decent life for people (mostly women and children). You don’t have to find affordable day care, you can just get married and let your partner support you. You don’t have to have access to medical care, you can just get married and get on your partner’s insurance. You don’t have to have access to decent affordable housing, you can just get married and buy a 2-income home. You don’t have to be able to use public transport to get to work, when you’re married and have children you’ll just get an SUV anyway.*

Or, to put it ever so much more elegantly:

All of the legal benefits and protections offered by marriage could easily be remedied by actually treating people like people instead of blood sucking tics.

*Marriage rates drop off dramatically in places like Sweden, France and Holland where these benefits are taken for granted and paid for with concomitantly high taxation. Marriage is just a hidden tax in that sense, but an immoral one, because it is paid in a much more controversial currency than mere cash - human life and human suffering - and delivers it benefits extremely unevenly.

@ TheLady—Maybe the “law school” bit was a bad example, then, because I wasn’t using it as an analogue for the availability or ease of marriage (and I don’t remember making claims about “most people,” but I may have).  Instead of law school, I could have said, “Play soccer, don’t play soccer.”  I was on a tangent where I was concurring with Lindsay Beyerstein that marriage might be considered a “niche option for people with unusual tastes, as opposed to a default way of life.”  Law school, too, is something that many fine people detest and reject. 

(FWIW, I’m not a lawyer, but I’ll confess to being over-educated and privileged in many other ways.  My “you can just” arguments stem from genuine bafflement at who the people are who look askance at and apply pressure to unmarried life.  I can easily imagine that millions of such people exist.  I just truly, anthropologically, want to know who they are and why their opinions sting so much.)

And, yes, marriage as it currently exists confers privileges and it damn sure isn’t open to everyone.  I love the idea of changing those.  In my family we’ve had nothing but varyingly un-traditional weddings, for one small example, so we’ve tried to buck the idea of Big Ceremony.  That’s pretty insufficient as a means of ushering in social change, but it’s a small tweak.  Getting married or being married doesn’t mean being a traditionalist across the board.

This is a standing debate about political and cultural change:  working within the system or working to bring the system down.  I have grave doubts that “undermining marriage” is ever going to happen.  That’s why my earlier examples of how to contest marriage likened it to things like meat-eating and driving:  many people are opposed to them and for very good reasons, but making meat or cars go away for everyone is quixotic.  Challenging people who choose to marry, eat meat, or drive—and in fine American tradition, probably all at the same instant—to do them responsibly is something I’m all for, and faster, please.

“I do find the catbox/dishes/toilet paper roll, etc. to be curious examples, in that a person living alone necessarily does those things for him or herself—-why would that change upon partnership?”

There’s an added dimension to them, though.  It’s the difference between living alone and doing things when and how you damn well please and having a roommate whose needs re: things getting done also require some consideration.  There is more mental effort required from two people trying to live together amicably and equitably than is required from two people living by and only responsible for themselves.  That’s part of what I’m finding kind of problematic about the objection to marriage/relationships taking some “work”—any real-world resource-sharing relationship takes some “work” to keep the wheels running smoothly on a consistent basis.  It’s not like informing someone that you finished off the milk is the height of drudgery, but it’s also not the sort of thing you need to do if you aren’t sharing living space.

Do you think that people who know you aren’t married and don’t want to be married see that as a _failure_, truly, rather than a difference?  Who’s out there trying to make you feel this way?  I mean, literally, who does it?

I can’t speak for Amanda, but I also don’t want to get married or have kids. My mother thinks of it as a failure, as a failure of HERS really, and actually is just hoping I’ll change my mind (like she did.). In fact, family members on both my and my boyfriends side are constantly asking us when we’ll get married, “you can’t hold it off for ever you know” (why not?), when the kids are coming, etc.

I think what FlipYourWig and others are talking about, though, has to do with regional differences.  I adore Amanda, I really do.  But so much of her polemic is shaped (naturally) by growing up in Texas, and the social norms that women “have to” adhere to down there.  In—dare I say it?—more normal parts of the country, my experience is far more like FlipYourWig’s.  Get married or don’t, no one particularly cares.  If anyone cares, it’s at the individual level (your mother wants grandchildren, by gosh) as opposed to society.  Look, if there were that much pressure for marriage, you wouldn’t have the high rates of childbearing outside marriage.  (Not passing judgment on such childbearing, just commenting.)

Amanda tends to set up a straw man that women elsewhere are subject to the unique pressures of living in Texas, and then rants against them.  And her rants are righteous rants indeed.  But they’re just overkiill for those of us who live in typical blue-state urban areas, for which there really is little societal pressure to marry for marriage’s sake, and people who remain unmarried and / or childless are simply—well, unmarried and childless, whatever, everyone moves on.  I don’t think she realizes how truly out of the norm Texas is.

All of the legal benefits and protections offered by marriage could easily be remedied by actually treating people like people instead of blood sucking tics.

You really think so? How do you establish spousal privilege, for instance, without a legal definition of “spouse”? It’s not unreasonable to imagine a boss contractually creating civil-marriages-that-we-don’t-call-marriages (or whatever your putative system has) between him and each one of his employees, to prevent internal whistleblowing on his lawbreaking.

An extreme example, but it’s one currently held at bay by marriage’s legal definition as a union between exactly two people in romantic cahoots. If we divorce marriage’s legal benefits from romantic couples, as you seem to want to do, I’m not sure what provisions are in place to prevent misuse of the immunity from testimony traditionally enjoyed between married couples.

Or do you think that’s simply not something worth keeping?

@ Susanne: 

If anyone cares, it’s at the individual level (your mother wants grandchildren, by gosh) as opposed to society

I don’t know if I’m ready to throw down the gauntlet of what’s “normal.”  But what I’m trying to get at is precisely this difference between generalized pressure that is brought to bear upon women by Society and the immediate pressure applied by particular individuals.  I have no doubt that Society expects, nay, demands that marriage is the default state for women (and for men, who are supposed to be reluctant; women are supposed to want it, and for it to be as sparkly as possible).  Society prescribes that having children is better than not having them, etc.  But a lot happens in that gap between Society and the people in your life.  And I think it’s a lot easier to tell the people in your life to fuck off, and build your own microcosm with a semi-permeable barrier against Society, than it is to set about undermining marriage everywhere.  If you’ve already built that microcosm—which takes “work”!  Woohoo, full circle!—you’re winning.  Kick against the pricks.  Hard.

@ Chet:  Ooh, interesting.  IANAL but I don’t think I would mind seeing spousal privilege go away.  My utopian outlook is that “marriage” or “civil union” would become the name for a mutually obligated household arrangement, nothing necessarily to do with sexual intimacy.  So Felix and Oscar or Kate and Allie or Bert and Ernie would be civil-union-ed by virtue of having set up house together:  the union would be just the name for the household pact.  But I haven’t thought much about whatever ripple effects that would have on other aspects of the law.

(Also, I’d hope there’d be a single-payer health care system in place, so that adjudicating the equivalent of spousal benefits would be a non-issue.)

But so much of her polemic is shaped (naturally) by growing up in Texas, and the social norms that women “have to” adhere to down there. 

My husband’s family is evangelical Christian. My family is pretty secular Jewish. My parents thought it was great that we were living together, never once asked me if we were getting married or having kids, and when I told them we were getting married, my father’s reaction was “Well, if you feel you want to do that ...” His parents were seriously freaked by us living together and tremendously relieved when we got hitched, but he bore the brunt of that and didn’t let it spill over onto me.

So ... not necessarily regional, but there are big cultural variations.

And one reason I’m glad we lived together first is it got the adjustment of sharing space, making decisions together, and being alone together (if you follow that) out of the way without the baggage of marriage. The first six months were kind of rocky, and then we figured out how to be in each other’s space and how to get out of each other’s space while still being in the same dwelling. I think if we had to do that after we got married, I would have had a serious “My God, what have I done?” moment.

My friends who dated long distance their entire relationship (and also come from different cultural backgrounds) and then hiked the Appalachian Trial together for their honeymoon had many, many “What have I done??!!!” moments after their wedding.

Susanne, I’ll have to repost my earlier observation, since you didn’t seem to take it in before you posted your conversation:

You have no idea how patriarchal Southern/Texan culture can be until you’ve lived it and been exposed to it.

When Professor Avenger took a sabbatical in a town where one of his Avenger uncles lived, his Aunt Bess got to know Mother Avenger and confided to her, “An Avenger is happy when his wife is stirring something on the stove, even if it’s a pot of shit!”.

I should mention that Professor Avenger and those of his generation except for a younger brother were born in Texas, and I spend 6 months of my last year of junior high in dynamic Denton, TX, so I have a limited expertise on the subject.

Also, it wouldn’t be exaggerating that here in rural inland CA(where perhaps denelian was born and bred)  there is some difference in the attitude Amanda experiences vs. those here, but I would opine that the folks that go to the Protestant Churches here, especially Baptist, or the Nazarene(where the social climbers attend, they even have services in Espanol for who are Hispanophonic) wouldn’t be much different, given that the pink people attending them either came from or have familiar roots from TX, OK, AR, etc.

denelian, where in CA did you come from?  I was born in the CA town that was the site of the westernmost conflict of the Civil War.

IANAL but I don’t think I would mind seeing spousal privilege go away.

Well, that’s pretty easy for you to say, but it’s my rights you’re talking about. Can you give me a good reason why I should let you take my right away? What am I supposed to be getting in return, here?

But I haven’t thought much about whatever ripple effects that would have on other aspects of the law.

Well, no offense, but maybe that’s a good argument against a sweeping destruction of a worldwide, long-lived legal institution. You know?

Well, that’s pretty easy for you to say, but it’s my rights you’re talking about. Can you give me a good reason why I should let you take my right away?

Why should you have more rights than me? How about instead of taking them away, we give them to all? Why do you deserve special treatment that I don’t??

@ Chet:  I’m just blue-skying, not proposing policy.  And you might notice that I’ve actually been one of the “marriage defenders” here, although I have no investment in “traditional” marriage.  (I like Lindsay Beyerstein’s “niche option” language, articulated above.)  And for that matter, marriage has varied so much over time and place that I’d be loath to flatten it all out into a single “worldwide, long-lived legal institution.”  It’s two, three, many institutions.

Anyway, back on topic.  My thought was more that “spousal” privilege would be replaced by, um, “civil-union-pact” privilege, so that the same protections currently adhering to married couples would apply more largely to members of the same household, whether or not they’re having sex.  So no one would have fewer rights.  More people would have the same rights.  Who knows whether that would work?  Not my department, and if I’m failing to think things through, anyone can correct me, and I’m quite sanguine about that.  But this is in the spirit of the late-night bull session, not a white paper.

Dark Avenger, I did indeed see your comment.  And that’s precisely my point.  Texan culture is a unique culture that is of importance or relevance only to those people who live there, and the norms and mores thereof are not generally experienced in nor relevant to the people who live in the more normal areas of the country.  Texas is a variation / aberration that just isn’t important to the rest of the country, Texas Pride and all notwithstanding.  And Amanda’s experiences that everyone is pushing Teh Marriage and Teh Kids on her is certainly her valid experience, but it’s by no means such a universal construct that we all need to acknowledge it as Universal Pressure on Women.

“I’m not sure what provisions are in place to prevent misuse of the immunity from testimony traditionally enjoyed between married couples.”

I’m reasonably sure you don’t have immunity from testimony willingly provided by a spouse.  What you have is the privilege of the state not being able to compel your spouse to testify against you.  Kind of like the 5th amendment also prevents you from being compelled to testify against yourself, but would not prevent you from confessing to whatever you damn well please if you felt inclined to do so.

Kat, who would you like to not testify against in court?

Look, I would be perfectly fine with a lot of rights that come with marriage being decoupled from marriage. I would be thrilled if we had universal health care, and people didn’t need to get married to make sure the person they care about can get insurance coverage. But some things actually can’t be extended to “everyone.” Not “everyone” can be considered the automatic inheritor of my estate. Not “everyone” can be the default person to make a medical decision for me if I am not competent.

Personally (not speaking for Chet), I would be fine with switching to a system in which you designate someone to be that person, and it could be your spouse or it could be your brother or it could be your friend.

But we set it up this way not just to “privilege” marriage but because we assume that when you marry, you are choosing a person to be your family and that you trust and share values with this person and they are a more reliable person to know your will than your parents and your siblings, who you did not choose. Does it always work out that way? No. But it’s not exactly arbitrary either.

So anecdata time, but I’m in one of those couples who’s cohabiting happily and has been cohabiting happily for a long time, with no immediate plans for kids, but we’ve decided to make it official and get married.  I proposed.  We’ve been together for 8.5 years and cohabiting for 4.5 at this point.

Frankly I’m insulted at the idea that we’re doing it just to inject some new excitement into a dying relationship.  Because really, no.  It’s actually not all that exciting. 

Here’s why I decided to propose:  I wanted to publicly state, before our friends and family, that I love him and I intend to stay with him—because I’ve reached the point where I feel that’s true already.  We’re already in a committed monogamous relationship; we already do make choices in our lives with an eye towards staying together.  We already do find the rewards in continuing to be with each other worth the minor effort it takes to not piss each other off too much.  We like each other enough that it’s worth it to put up with each other’s minor bullshit, in order to keep doing the things together that we like.  I’d like to say that out loud rather than pretending there is no commitment.  If I’m going to do this, I’m going to do it honestly and out front.  Why equivocate?

Why do it legally instead of just having some kind of hippie ceremony?  Because we’re reaching the point in our lives where we’ve actually got assets—I bought a house, we both have IRAs—and we’d like to name each other as beneficiaries.  Living together, our finances are entangled, even though right now we maintain totally separate accounts and split bills down the middle.  As time goes on and we continue to cohabit, finances and possessions will just get more entangled, and we’ll need to advocate for each other in health situations.  Legal marriage is a way of getting legal recognition for a situation that basically already exists.

I’m not saying that the cultural expectations of marriage won’t affect us; of course they will, there’s no way for them not to.  There is a certain amount of increased bullshit expectations that get put on you with marriage, and not everyone wants to cope with that.  But the baseline in our relationship has always been this:  we’re together because we’re happy together and want to be together.  If we were no longer happy together, there’s no force that binds us.  We’d be okay apart too.  Marriage doesn’t change that: if we become miserable in the relationship, if the bullshit gets too much, we still feel ourselves free to part ways.  Yes, the legal recognition means there’s more of a legal process for dissolving the partnership if we want to do that.  It’s a tradeoff in terms of risks and benefits.  We think the benefits of legal marriage outweigh the risk of increased PITA-ness of a divorce if we split up.

Texan culture is a unique culture that is of importance or relevance only to those people who live there, and the norms and mores thereof are not generally experienced in nor relevant to the people who live in the more normal areas of the country.

Texas is a variation / aberration that just isn’t important to the rest of the country, Texas Pride and all notwithstanding.

You noticed I used the term Texas/Southern culture.  I should also mention that I spent 3 years in AL, so I have some knowledge about that.  Texas is less cowboy hats and more desert, but there are lot of places in the American South, especially in the rural areas, where attitudes she has experienced hold sway more often than not.

And Amanda’s experiences that everyone is pushing Teh Marriage and Teh Kids on her is certainly her valid experience, but it’s by no means such a universal construct that we all need to acknowledge it as Universal Pressure on Women.

I don’t think she’s done that here or elsewhere. I’ve a feeling that you perhaps are a bit too defensive of the concept of marriage to make such unsupported claims, unless you can find and demonstrate that she generalizes too much from her TX experience with direct quotes of her doing so.

My thought was more that “spousal” privilege would be replaced by, um, “civil-union-pact” privilege, so that the same protections currently adhering to married couples would apply more largely to members of the same household, whether or not they’re having sex.

I don’t understand “whether or not they’re having sex”. If they’re not romantically entangled, what’s the point? Moreover, what’s the compelling public interest in ennobling their relationship with special rights?

I mean couldn’t we at least extend the rights of marriage to gay couples before we extend those rights to basically any two people at all?

Personally (not speaking for Chet), I would be fine with switching to a system in which you designate someone to be that person, and it could be your spouse or it could be your brother or it could be your friend.

Personally, I don’t see how we already don’t have that system, only instead of a “rights-buddy” we call that person a “spouse”. Now, currently, there’s some unfair restrictions on who that person can be, I think we should get rid of the requirement that says it has to be a non-relative of the opposite sex. But the idea that it still has to be someone you think highly enough of to be a sexually intimate partner, that still seems like a good idea. I interpret chingona as mostly agreeing (not to speak for her of course.) What are we missing? Do we need official state recognition for Jay and Silent Bob? (They’re hetero life-partners, you see.)

I think I’m going to start calling my husband my “rights-buddy.”

I think I was mostly agreeing with you, Chet. Where we might differ is I don’t have any philosophical objection to extending them to non-sexual life partners (Jay and Silent Bob). And really, it’s not like the state has any way of knowing if you have sex or not, so if we have gay marriage, then both same-sex and opposite-sex best friends could marry and gain those rights and privileges. It’s just ... no skin off my back.

Ah, the north end of the Central Valley.

I grew up and live about an hours’ drive north of Bakersfield on the east side of the Valley, south of the Sequoias.

i hate southern California - that is required.

We have a lot of folks who moved up from LA to get away from the gangs down there, the only problem is that we have our own homegrown gangstas, we had a drive-by a few years ago on the street off the street I live on, although the worse thing these days are the macho fools who blare their car stereos at night.

Dark, the similiarities between “central conservative California” and OK or TX are SCAREY.

From the Wiki:

The Depression-era migrants to the San Joaquin Valley from the South and Midwest are one of the more well-known groups in the Central Valley, in large part due to the popularity of John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath and the Henry Fonda movie made from it. By 1910, agriculture in the southern Great Plains had become nearly unviable due to soil erosion and poor rainfall. Much of the rural population of states such as Kansas, Texas, Oklahoma, and Arkansas left at this time, selling their land and moving to Chicago, Kansas City, Detroit, and fast-growing Los Angeles. Those who remained experienced continuing deterioration of conditions, which reached their nadir during the drought that began in the late 1920s and created the infamous Dust Bowl. (Small cotton farmers in states such as Mississippi and Alabama suffered similar problems from the first major infestation of the boll weevil.) When the onset of the Great Depression created a national banking crisis, family farmers—usually heavily in debt—often had their mortgages foreclosed by banks desperate to shore up their balance sheets. In response, many farmers loaded their families and portable possessions into their automobiles and drove west.

Taking Route 66 to Barstow or Los Angeles and crossing the Tehachapi or Tejon passes, they began new lives as fruit and vegetable pickers on truck farms in the San Joaquin Valley. Having gone from the relative independence of homesteading to a condition that was essentially peasantry, many of them lived in squalid agricultural camps and were deeply unhappy with their economic plight; domestic disputes, crime, and suicide were rampant, and occasional riots broke out. New Deal measures alleviated some of these problems, albeit belatedly: by the time that The Grapes of Wrath drew public attention to the Okies’ plight, many of them had already left the valley. Those that didn’t were assimilated into California culture and society where they and future generations became noted tradesmen, educators, legislators and professional business people.

Many of the Okies and Arkies left the San Joaquin Valley during World War II, most of them going to Los Angeles, San Francisco and San Diego to work in war industries. Many of those who stayed ended up in Bakersfield and Oildale, which became an increasingly important center of oil production after major Southern California oil fields such as Signal Hill began to dry up. Their influence remains strong: Bakersfield resembles a West Texas town such as Midland or Lubbock far more than it does anywhere else in California. Country music legends Buck Owens and Merle Haggard came out of Bakersfield’s honky-tonk scene and created a hard-driving sound that is still deeply associated with the city.

Buck Owens used to come up here and give a concert here when he was starting out, using hay bales as a platform when doing so at the outside back of a building.

(cont)

(Part 2)

It should be pointed out that for a long time, “Okie” was used to brand the ‘newcomers’ from people who were born and brought up here, an older fellow at a library sale told me that when someone would use it as an epithet at him in bars when he was younger, his shame led him to fights over such taunts.

The local paper used to have three catagories in sorting folks out in the obituaries:

“Native and life-long resident”  Had loser parents and/or grandparents who came out here(we have people born in the 18th Century buried in a cemetery a three minute walk where I live) and they never left the place.

“Native of blank, state, and a long-time resident”—came out here in the 30s or before with their family when they were young.

and the lowest status, “Native of blank, state, and a resident”.  They once used this for an obituary of a woman who lived 30 out of her 35 years here because she had the bad grace to die by her own hand.

Of course, I should mention that Orange County and San Diego tend to be conservative, the latter from all the Navy retired folks and having major military installation besides.

My grandfather hitchhiked from TX to Grass Valley, CA during the Depression, PA grew up later in Napa, CA, getting married in San Jose, and moving here(where I wasn’t born) to work as a teacher until 15 years ago, when he moved to the coast, and lives off of River Road west of Salinas now.

Top 10 Ways You Know You Lived In CA

1. You make over $300,000 a year, and still can’t afford to buy a house

2. Gas costs $1.00 per gallon more than anywhere else in the U.S.

3. Your child’s 3rd grad teacher has purple hair, a nose right, and is named Flower

4. Your coworker has 8 body piercing’s, and 12 tattoos… and non are visible

5. Your car insurance costs as much as your house payment

6. It’s barely sprinkling rain and there’s a report on every news station: “STORM WATCH”

7. You can’t remember, is pot legal?

8. The Terminator is your governor

9. The guy at Starbucks wearing a baseball cap and sunglasses who looks like George Clooney really IS George Clooney

10. Both you AND your dog have therapists, and myspace accounts

I hope you folks are taking notes, except for denelian there’ll be a test next week. 

Well, if 50% of marriages end in divorce, then what is happening to her is not exceptional.  I feel very sorry for both her and her husband but predict he will come out of the whole thing better than she does. Life is ruthless to women of her age these days, like nothing I have ever seen before. Mark my words: she’ll lose her Atlantic gig. Her whole shtick was that she was this cute married mom, and now she’s another middle aged woman dumped out on the street with her stuff. Who wants to hear about that?
The Hell of marriage is that the big payoffs may be years down the line: the kids graduate from college, grandkids come along, your home is your own: and people get impatient. Of course people who can’t enjoy each other and their kids in the moment are bound to be unhappy and blame said kids and spouses for their misery.
Even not knowing the whole story, I think this is a huge mistake.

I mean couldn’t we at least extend the rights of marriage to gay couples before we extend those rights to basically any two people at all?

Um, yes?  Did you think I would object to that?  First I was the pragmatic one defending marriage as the worst of all options except all the others, and then since the terrain of the discussion shifted to undermining vs. rebooting marriage, I started talking about how it might be reconceived.  Not what I demand must happen tomorrow.

Where we might differ is I don’t have any philosophical objection to extending them to non-sexual life partners (Jay and Silent Bob). And really, it’s not like the state has any way of knowing if you have sex or not, so if we have gay marriage, then both same-sex and opposite-sex best friends could marry and gain those rights and privileges. It’s just ... no skin off my back.

Right, that’s just what I was talking about.  That’s why I used the Felix and Oscar, Kate and Allie, Bert and Ernie examples.  It’s not hard to imagine a person whose most important, most intimate relationship in life is a best friend or roommate, and it’s not at all romantic or sexual.  So if Oscar ends up in the hospital, why not have Felix be able to take leave to care for him without worrying that it will cost him his job?  What if Kate wants Allie to take care of her kids if something terrible befalls her?  What if Ernie wants Bert to get his 401(k)?  (Man, I’m in a maudlin mood.)

That kind of reciprocal care tends to track with romantic feeling, but I don’t think it has to.  That’s the kind of thing I’m talking about:  extending the rights and protections conferred now by marriage to other life-partnerships.  Is that really so ridiculous?  (I guess I’m a sappy sort, because I do find the “rights-buddy” label kinda sweet.)

After reading Loh’s article and this post, it seems that Loh’s saga could easily be summed up by one interpretation of Kurt Cobain’s Smells Like Teen Spirit song even though she was born a few years too early to be a member of Gen X.

After reading Loh’s article and this post, it seems that Loh’s saga could easily be summed up by one interpretation of Kurt Cobain’s Smells Like Teen Spirit song even though she was born a few years too early to be a member of Gen X.

Dude, she’s a hapa and an ABC and a CalTech grad. She’s probably spent her whole life trying to figure out where she fits.

and not a one of them farms at all, anymore. they mostly became truckers,

That’s what Grandfather Avenger did after WWII and the defense plants closed where he lived in Napa.  He was raised on the farm in TX(his father migrated from TN after a family tragedy), but never wanted more than his backyard space and “having a good time was very important” as one of my cousins on my Grandmother Avengers’ side put it.

there are gangs - they aren’t Crips and Bloods, but they are gangs.

About 20 years ago they became very infamous in Fresno(Laotian gangs), which goes against people’s experience of them because like a lot of Asian ethnic groups, they are usually polite, deferential and quite, like my wife’s people, the Ilocano.

Chinese excepted, of course.  I once couldn’t figure out why a little Southeast Asian woman at the donut shop was so vocal, “How many donuts you want?  One dozen, two dozen?” until I looked closer at her and confirmed that we was, in fact part-Chinese, as Chinese women are anything but shy under the right(or wrong if you piss one off) circumstances.

my mother was a rebel, becoming a nurse

Professor Avenger became a teacher after he married Mother Avenger, and he was laughed at by the rest of the family while they worked at the more profitable trucking job.  Now he’ll be 77 next month, scuba dives, and enjoys his life, while his younger brother is still working as a trucker, is terribly overweight(he looked 50 lbs heavier than the time before the last time I saw him.) and is diabetic and not is great health.

I used to say PA was a ‘renegade Okie’, this is after he once described my experience in the local schools as being the white sheep among the black. 

it still sometimes freaks me out to go on a roadtrip in July or August and see “green” in wilderness-y areas - its summer, eveything should be BROWN. and it blows me away when there aren’t ever any wildfires…

Over here we only have fire problems in the areas to the east of here between the town and the mountains, although the bamboo that grows along one small river sometimes gets torched, and 95% it was with human help.

I don’t know if I would hold up in Ohio if it had the same humidity I experienced when going to the Harvard of the Midwest in St Louis, MO., it gets to 100+ F routinely here in the summer(but not as many days this year as in past years so far) “but it’s a dry heat,” said the Desert Rat. 

Chet, you’re an idiot and a borderline troll. You want to know all the reasons people have been saying that marriage shouldn;t be privileged any longer? Read the fucking thread. And no, I really don’t think that we need a reason to privilege committed pair bondings that is “better” than playing hide the salami, because that’s already on reckord as being the worst goddamn reason there is, so it’s not like I’ve got my work cut out for me here.

Flip, and everybody else talking the civil union option: totally agreed. Just to add that, as I’ve pointed out here before, we already have a lot of the structures that we need to manage that in place, and it doesn’t all have to be made up from scratch.

For example, people can already write wills that determine who their heirs are without the law forcing htem to leave their property to their spouse/children. Pregnant women (at least in the UK - US may be different) can designate a birth partner who is not a husband, and it can either be a girlfriend, best friend, mother, whatever. There’s adoption law to deal with the status of children (my uncle adopted my oldest cousin, even though her bio dad was still living - he was behind the iron curtain and so presumed to never be able to rejoin her). Unmarried couples can apply for mortgages together and sign a legal agreement as to the terms of dissolving their partnership.

It’s mostly already there; the real roadblock to disestablishing marriage is political and religious. I hope we do manage to do it, because then those people who really, genuinely make a lifelong commitment and are heavily invested in the value of that in its own right, rather than just bowing to pressure, will have somethign truly valuable handed back to them, and not have to constantly be on the defensive that their marriage is “not like that”.

Suzanne: I’ve been lucky enough to be a many times immigrant in my life. I intimately know cultures on several continents and in different languages/religions. As is already emerging from the discussion of CA and OK, it’s not Amanda who lives in an isolated bubble: it’s you. Own your privilege and move on.

For example, people can already write wills that determine who their heirs are without the law forcing htem to leave their property to their spouse/children.

I don’t think that’s true for all states. I know Illinois is a community-property state; everything that a couple earned during the course of their marriage is considered to be 50/50 (except for inheritances). Here, an angry (albeit dead) spouse can’t disinherit you out of your own property after your death.

I also don’t think the roadblocks are all political or religious—-some are merely structural. Think ERISA health plans. No real political or religious objections to changing the spousal privilege—-just fear of the cost (assumption that every single person would immediately place a partner on the plan if they could do so without the rigamarole of marriage—-something I don’t think would happen, but try to convince a Board of Trustees).

As has been pointed out on this and other blogs before—-the whole reason conservatives are in an uproar about same-sex marriage is because it would cast a death blow against the assumed patriarchy. I mean, why do ignorant straight people still ask gays and lesbians “who’s the boy and who’s the girl?” It’s all about identifying the “female-identified” person—-the scutworker, as opposed to the boss. Same-sex marriage undermines that visible patriarchy. At the same time, keeping “civil unions” for same-sex while reserving the term “marriage” for opposite-sex couple creates a second-class citizenship, and paves the way for different status. Giving either same-sex or opposite sex couples the option of “civil union” or “marriage”——for whatever reason the couple may desire either term——but keeping the legal/financial benefits the same for either could solve some problems. Merely foregoing marriage, let alone having the goddamn state say that your relationship doesn’t qualify for marriage, still leaves you with having to shoulder legal and financial burdens (and unable to access other financial benefits that are currently only open to married couples) that you would otherwise have the option of resolving with $25 and a trip to the courthouse.

The breakdown on the blissful “who needs marriage” crowd vs. the “well, but follow the money” crowd is (from what I’ve seen) by age. It’s easy to dismiss the importance of health insurance when you’re young and healthy (and yeah, I’m all for single-payer myself, but I’ll believe it when I see it. 72% of the U.S. people are for it and cowardly Dems are still shaking in their boots—WTF?!...but I digress). And like snowmentality pointed out above—-the longer a couple is together, the more likely they are to want to have the benefits of marriage—-not the “pat on the head” benefits (we don’t all get those, anyway), but the concrete, tangible benefits.

(and I do feel for younger folks who are getting pestered about marriage. by the time you’re 40, that will end—-no one gives a shit about what “older” women do)

As for Tsing-Loh, I’m thinking this is just a run-of-the-mill affair and divorce, that she’s trying to make into some Grand Statement (you know, like male writers do). Problem is, they (male writers) have already bored the living shit out of us, and that’s part of why people are less receptive to her story (the other part being sexism—-who does she think she is, not being the Good Wife, even though she tries so diligently to Good Wife it up talking about her husband’s packing of her stuff. Man….he must be a calm-natured guy; if it were me, that shit’d be on fire in the driveway). I don’t know if she’ll lose her spot at the Atlantic; depends on how she works it. As for life being cruel to women over 40, shit, what are we supposed to do—-float ourselves out on an ice floe so the world doesn’t have to put up with us? Fuck that shit. She’s getting divorced, not diagnosed with a terminal illness. Every day above ground is a good one.

Dude, she’s a hapa and an ABC and a CalTech grad. She’s probably spent her whole life trying to figure out where she fits.

The Hapa factor pointed out here is probably more due to the fact she grew up in was far less enlightened time period regarding race from what I’ve noticed.  This is not surprising as she is around the same age as some of my older cousins. 

Their children have experienced far less of this BS on average from what I’ve gathered, especially the ones who are Hapa than our generation did when we grew up in various parts of the US from the late 1960’s till the early 1990s.  With a few exceptions, most current Asian-American undergrads and K-12 students I’ve encountered have confirmed this. 

From what I’ve noticed, the degree of a Hapa’s having difficulty “fitting in” is quite variable depending on the degree s(he) can pass for being White as well as the degree of assimilation into mainstream “American” culture of his/her family.

I don’t know if I would hold up in Ohio if it had the same humidity I experienced when going to the Harvard of the Midwest in St Louis, MO., it gets to 100+ F routinely here in the summer(but not as many days this year as in past years so far) “but it’s a dry heat,” said the Desert Rat.

As someone who spent some time in Northeast Ohio for undergrad…..the weather situation leaves much to be desired.  If it isn’t downright freezing, it is blisteringly hot.  One undergrad joke was that our campus had two seasons, winter or summer.  We really didn’t have fall or spring, especially when it wasn’t uncommon to have snowstorms AFTER the Spring Break.

La Lubu, all those structural reasons are reflections of the way in which marriage is just a hidden tax to deliver benefits that the state doesn’t want to either deliver itself or force private companies to deliver through regulations. To say that it’s naive to not get married because you can’t get on your husband’s insurance otherwise is the same as to say that it’s naive to have a fair election in Iran because there’s no democracy in Iran. There should be fucking democracy in Iran, mmkay? This is an argument that’s only relevant to the US anyway, and as such is philosophically narrow; but if gay marriage inadvertently lead to universal health coverage for Amricans, then yay!

Not to get all anecdatal on you btw, but I’m an “older” woman who was forced by “structural” reasons into marriage at a younger age. I still get asked when I’m going to marry my boyfriend, by people (my boss, recently) who are absolutely convinced that of course we live together, and of course I bothered to get a divorce first, and of course and of course. And I don’t live in Hicksvile somewhere, but in the oh so urbane and liberal south of England. And we have universal helthcare. So the political and religious challenges are not to be sniffed at.

I know Illinois is a community-property state

Unless they’ve changed the law regarding such things there, it isn’t.  Perhaps you’re thinking of WI?

The only reason some states have it is if they have a civil code derived from French or Spanish law, which isn’t a whole lot of them.

It’s not hard to imagine a person whose most important, most intimate relationship in life is a best friend or roommate, and it’s not at all romantic or sexual.

Well, that would certainly describe a child - all their significant, most intimate relationships are neither romantic nor sexual. It seems to me that the state’s interest is not in ennobling your most intimate relationship - which may not be all that intimate, after all - but in the most intimate relationship you could have, which we traditionally think of as a “spouse.”

Anyway Bert and Ernie are totally fucking.

That’s the kind of thing I’m talking about:  extending the rights and protections conferred now by marriage to other life-partnerships.  Is that really so ridiculous?

No, but I don’t think it’s impossible now and I don’t yet see a compelling state interest in making it a whole bunch easier. And, you know, I’m married, and so I’m nervous about sweeping changes to the legal status of my relationship.

Chet, you’re an idiot and a borderline troll. You want to know all the reasons people have been saying that marriage shouldn;t be privileged any longer? Read the fucking thread.

I did. What I saw was the incredibly privileged viewpoint that marriage was only something other people did, and gosh, who cares if we destroy the legal status of that institution - the only people who could possibly be affected are people we don’t give a shit about! You know, never mind how important legal marriage is to persons in a relationship prejudiced by society - whites and minorities in interracial marriages, gay and lesbian couples, and so on - people using the legal status of marriage to literally protect their relationship in the face of discrimination.

Look past your nearsighted privilege for a second, mkay?

Dark Avenger, perhaps I’m using the term wrong; I just know that in Illinois, property acquired during marriage is considered marital property, jointly owned by both parties (excepting inheritance). So, when I got divorced in 1993, I had to petition the court to consider my truck as my property, even though my husband’s name was not on the loan (as indeed, he refused to get a job, did not contribute any money or anything else to the household, and in fact didn’t even have a driver’s license—-but he still wanted half the value of my truck. he didn’t get it.). So maybe “community property is the wrong term, but it means really the same thing——in this state, everything earned during marriage is 50/50.

TheLady: snarky much? You seem to be under the impression that I’m satisfied with the status quo of marriage, when nothing could be further from the truth. I’ve said before that I don’t have a dog in this fight; I’m single, not even dating anyone currently, let alone thinking of marriage, so it’s kind of odd to be portrayed as this big marriage proponent….but in case I wasn’t clear enough: I am NOT in favor of keeping the status quo and limiting the legal/financial benefits of marriage to those currently able to avail themselves of marriage. I am in favor of extending the legal/financial benefits of marriage to those who currently would like to be married, but are prohibited by law from having their partnerships recognized as marriage, AND I am in favor of extending the legal/financial benefits of marriage to those who, for whatever reason, do not wish to have their partnership called “marriage”. MMMKAY?

You, on the other hand, seem to want benefits extended solely to individuals—-no collecting on a partners’ Social Security benefit, obtaining insurance, etc. Here in the U.S., the folks that would have the most negative impact on are women. Especially women of my parents’ and grandparents’ generation. My best friend (and godmother to my daughter) is my mother’s age. She is retired, and along with her pension she collects Social Security. She was married to a man who was a pipefitter. She was a stay-at-home mom of three. After her divorce, she waited tables and eventually found secretarial work. She was married long enough to be able to collect based on her ex-husbands’ earnings for Social Security——and lemme tellya—-those are a helluva lot higher than what her Social Security payout would be based on her earnings in the pink collar ghetto. Perhaps it’s different in England, and everyone gets the same payout regardless of income. I’m just speaking from the U.S. perspective. Reverting to an individualized system here shortchanges women for the traditionally lower pay, greater unemployment, fewer opportunities to advance, etc.

Also, here in the U.S., if a spouse dies, the surviving spouse does not pay taxes on the inherited property left behind by the deceased spouse. In order for any other partnership to get that tax-free inheritance, a revokable living trust needs to be instituted, and those cost a few thousand dollars to set up. Gee, few thousand vs. $25 bucks….not tough to see why people would rather just get married, huh? But perhaps that isn’t operable in your country. I never said it was “naive” to not get married, just that it reflected certain privileges that most here can’t afford to blithely throw away. I also think that mythago was spot-on with her assessment of “monogamous and living together” as being EXACTLY like marriage——it’s the same relationship dynamic, just without the legal paperwork or benefits. Hardly revolutionary. Live-in boyfriends aren’t any different from husbands.

It seems to me that the state’s interest is not in ennobling your most intimate relationship - which may not be all that intimate, after all - but in the most intimate relationship you could have, which we traditionally think of as a “spouse.”

I don’t understand why the state needs to care about any such thing.  And it’s not as though marriages of convenience aren’t approximately as old as marriage itself:  people have always married for reasons other than romantic or sexual love, and the state “ennobles” those relationships too.  I don’t think the state needs to be involved in gauging the level of intimacy or sexual heat between spouses.  Let people “unify” as they see fit.

And, you know, I’m married, and so I’m nervous about sweeping changes to the legal status of my relationship.

To me that sounds like a distinction without a (necessary) difference.  If the rights and privileges conferred by marriage were extended to other “rights-buddy” arrangements—in the utopian reboot society, which I don’t foresee happening anytime soon—that doesn’t mean anything about the way your marriage works now would change.  You’d just be part of a larger group all having the same rights.  There’s no scarcity or competition for resources.

My biggest concern about my own “household pact” thing would be privacy—filing papers with the state with every significant change in relationship would feel very intrusive to a lot of people.

TheLady: snarky much?

Oh God, yeah. Hella snarky. =)

I am in favor of extending the legal/financial benefits of marriage to those who currently would like to be married, but are prohibited by law from having their partnerships recognized as marriage

So am I.

I never said that marriage should be banned, or completely done away with. In fact I actually said that toppling marriage from its current lofty position as the heteronormative gold standard will make marriage better for the people who are really committed to it – straight, gay or sideways.

When I talk about disestablishing marriage, I mean it in the same way that I would say disestablishing the Church of England. That doesn’t mean banning it, or taking away all of its property, or disallowing priests. Extending the current benefits of marriage to other forms of partnership, and more importantly unraveling the mass of different and occasionally incompatible commitments that constitute marriage (financial, familial, domestic, emotional, sexual) doesn’t mean that as of tomorrow by act of supreme law all married people are stupid idiots with no benefits. It’s not a zero sum game, and looking at it like that diminishes the arguments on both side.

Also, here in the U.S., if a spouse dies, the surviving spouse does not pay taxes on the inherited property left behind by the deceased spouse. In order for any other partnership to get that tax-free inheritance, a revokable living trust needs to be instituted, and those cost a few thousand dollars to set up. Gee, few thousand vs. $25 bucks….not tough to see why people would rather just get married, huh?

Hmm, snarky much? =)

Being married doesn’t just cost $25. There are lots of hidden costs, in the form of lost earnings for the wife usually, but also just generally income shared on the needs and priorities of another person. There is also – and this is where “traditional” marriage dovetails with misogyny, and where I really would like it wiped off the map – the uncounted cost of (usually female) labour in maintaining the home and taking care of the children. Things like collecting benefits on a dead husband are designed to compensate for this; it’s taken for granted that the man was the main breadwinner. I don’t know about the US in detail, but the opposite provision (man collecting benefits of dead wife) is a relatively recent phenomenon.

Death duties are a legitimate snag (you were always going to find one if you looked hard enough), but not something that is insoluble. Perhaps we could mandate, for example, that if two people own a property jointly then the remaining owner pays no death duties. That would cover a fair bit of what currently constitutes married home ownership – two names on the mortgage etc. All these things can and should be discussed.

Am I going to make this post-marriage proposal perfect? No. In this thread? Hell no. But marriage as it stands now isn’t prefect. In fact it’s a mess. A crumbling mess that more and more people are voting against with their metaphorical feet. So they – and you yourself – have obviously done the mental math of “$25 to get hitched, $5K in lawyer’s fees to get unhitched, plus no more financial perks… WTF, worth it”. So I’m not sure why we ought to be fighting this rearguard battle for it anyway.

I did. What I saw was the incredibly privileged viewpoint that marriage was only something other people did,

Nah, mate, you really didn’t - because if you had, then you’d notice that I am, in fact, married.

So you’re not just a troll, but a stupid troll.

Ta-ra.

denelian, I live in Tulare County, perhaps known best as the place where tularemia was discovered to the outside world. The town I grew up in and currently reside in has about 50% of the population Mexican, up from 20% when I was a kid.  For folks to get freaked out at Mexicans around here wouldn’t just be counter-productive, it would be exhausing as well.  We have higher unemployment than the rest of the state all the time, the teen pregnancy rate is one of the highest in the country as well, along with the poverty rate as well.

We don’t have enough Asians around here to support a gang as such, the mexican gang here is the Suenos, if I had a dime for every XIII or 13 they spray-pained or scrawled on a building or inside a bathroom stall I’d be very rich.  Some fool even tagged the asphalt surface of the street in front of my house, when I called the graffiti hotline(to get it removed) the person answering the phone never heard of a case like mine.

I’m sorry to hear that your mother has ‘issues’ with mexicans, perhaps your sisters’ boyfriend should tell your dear mother that he is in a gang, it’s the New Black Panthers, but that’s a good thing so that he can save her, your sister and you when they get around to killling Whitey.  I’m sure that would set her mind at rest.

When I was growing up, we had a neighbor who was of Portuguese descent, and one of the things that would piss her off would be people thinking she was Mexican because of her complexion and black hair, as she looked down on them even. She even got out of jury duty by telling the lawyer that she was prejudiced, when asked against what she replied, “Everyone” .

I thought it was funny because if she was descended from Portuguese-speakers from the Azore Islands, as many Portuguese around here are, she’d have been the descendant of pirates.

Anyway, Mexicans in CA have been getting a bad rap for a long time.  160 years ago it was observed that:

If the women but have little virtue, the jealousy of their husbands is extreme, and their revenge deadly and almost certain. A few inches of cold steel have been the punishment of many an unwary man, who has been guilty, perhaps, of nothing more than indiscretion. The difficulties of the attempt [to copulate with a married woman] are numerous, and the consequences of discovery fatal, in the better classes. With the unmarried women, too, great watchfulness is used. The main object of the parents is to marry their daughters well, and to this a fair name is necessary. The sharp eyes of a duena, and the ready weapons to a father or brother, are a protection which the characters of most of them — men and women — render by no means useless; for the very men who would lay down their lives to avenge the dishonor of their own family would risk the same lives to complete the dishonor of another.

la lubu:  “Aaaahhh, but was it marriage that sucked, or her spouse that sucked?”

*Her* marriage, not marriage in general.  The point is that because marriage is so important and super-special, the pressure was to put up with it and work on it if you want it better rather than dissolve it if that marriage wasn’t working for her.

Lindsay Beyerstein:  “Someone who walks away from a marriage they believe to be salvageable and a partner who still wants to be married is being a bit of a jerk.”

Wow, no.  Just because I think I could stay married to an asshole supremo if I sacrificed my self-esteem, and he wants me to stay because he doesn’t like cleaning the toilet, and I don’t, doesn’t make me a jerk.  Or even if I don’t love the person any more and want to find someone else I like better.  Even if I’m deluded and wrong.

FlipYrWhig:  “I think it’s a lot easier to tell the people in your life to fuck off, and build your own microcosm with a semi-permeable barrier against Society, than it is to set about undermining marriage everywhere. “

Sure, it’s easier to do things for yourself than for all humanity.  The point is, if you do undermine the assumption of marriage as best for everyone everywhere, it makes it easier for the less fiery personages in our society (often women) to choose not to marry.  Not all of us can be firebrands.

Chet, spousal privilege is not universal in the US anyway. 

La Lubu:  “Also, here in the U.S., if a spouse dies, the surviving spouse does not pay taxes on the inherited property left behind by the deceased spouse. In order for any other partnership to get that tax-free inheritance, a revokable living trust needs to be instituted, and those cost a few thousand dollars to set up.”

Funny, I didn’t have to pay taxes on money my mother left me.  The death tax doesn’t apply until the estate reaches, what, a million?  Something like that.

TheLady:  “Perhaps we could mandate, for example, that if two people own a property jointly then the remaining owner pays no death duties. “

I think “tenants in the entirety” might be relevant here.  It’s the way my parents’ stocks were registered so there were no issues with having to transfer stock when one of them died.  But I’m not a lawyer.