Mawiage

It's sort of ironic that the reason I'm actually sitting down to write this is because I'm not running an Important Errand because Mr. B. left the lights on in the car (again) and it didn't start, and of course I wasn't leaving on Important Errand until fifteen minutes before the destination location closed, so I am basically fucked, which actually I would be okay with but Mr. B. has a bug up his ass about how Important Errand HAS to be done TODAY.

So, instead, I have time to finally talk about why I loved Sandra Tsing-Loh's piece about her divorce, and why all the gossip and schadenfreude about Mark Sanford kind of depresses me and, while we're at it, why I thought it was really crappy, the criticism that Edmund Andrews got a while back because, in his book about the subprime mortgage crisis and his own bad mortgage, he didn't talk about his wife's bankruptcy.

Look. Anyone who has spent five minutes on the internet knows that any time someone writes honestly about their personal life, everyone and their dog is going to jump up and down and DEMAND to know more, or pontificate about why the author is CLEARLY a BAD PERSON. Or, what's worse, how the other people in the author's life--their wife, their husband, their children--are either idiots or victims or both.

(Which that last is really obviously shitty, people. I mean, even if you think that by virtue of writing about one's life one is inviting criticism, *clearly* the non-authorial characters aren't.)

But let's be honest. If you are an adult, and you have ever in your life had a relationship with another human being, you know damn well that you have made mistakes, that the other person has made mistakes, that people get hurt and friends have tiffs and partners have problems. (And if you don't know this, then I don't care how old you are, you're not an adult.)

And the point of that kind of writing, or one point, is that it is beneficial to be honest about the human condition. Especially if, like Tsing-Loh, you can do so graciously. Because life *isn't* a crystal stair, dammit, and Cinderella stories are fantasies. This is a feminist point, though you don't need to be a feminist to embrace it; which is why I think it's extra-shitty of feminists to crucify people for this kind of honesty, by the way. We know that the Ideal Mother doesn't exist; and most of us, though we adore our children, definitely have moments (or months) when we loathe everything having to do with them.

And marriage is the same way. I mean, really: is anyone surprised to hear Tsing-Loh say that many of her friends in long marriages with children are finding that "the passion" is on the back burner?? That after twenty years, she

can pick up our girls from school every day; I can feed them dinner and kiss their noses and tell them stories; I can take them to their doctor and dentist appointments; I can earn my half—sometimes more—of the money; I can pay the bills; I can refinance the house at the best possible interest rate; I can drive my husband to the airport; in his absence, I can sort his mail; I can be home to let the plumber in on Thursday between nine and three, and I can wait for the cable guy; I can make dinner conversation with any family member; I can ask friendly questions about anybody’s day; I can administer hugs as needed to children, adults, dogs, cats; I can empty the litter box; I can stir wet food into dry.

Which is to say I can work at a career and child care and joint homeownership and even platonic male-female friendship. However, in this cluttered forest of my 40s, what I cannot authentically reconjure is the ancient dream of brides, even with the Oprah fluffery of weekly “date nights,” when gauzy candlelight obscures the messy house, child talk is nixed and silky lingerie donned, so the two of you can look into each other’s eyes and feel that “spark” again. Do you see? Given my staggering working mother’s to-do list, I cannot take on yet another arduous home- and self-improvement project, that of rekindling our romance.

She says that this is a "failure," and so it is. It's a failure in terms of our idea of what A Good Marriage is Supposed to be. But maybe that failure isn't, in fact, a personal one.

The Good Marriage is Supposed to be:

sexually monogamous
between one man and one woman (even though, or rather because, men and women Are Different)
for their entire lives
begun early enough that they can have children, plural, (if they want to), without having to go through infertility treatment
passionate, again, for their entire lives
respectful at all times
mutually supportive, at all times
economically successful
able to accommodate two careers, if so desired
a friendship
something you "work" at, but it's not supposed to feel like work
flirty--but only with each other
not jealous
a PIllar of Society

Marriage should be like the early days of dating + the settled feeling of being "a couple" + a true partnership + a friendship + exciting + comfortable + productive (of kids, of material goods). People shouldn't get married "too young," but they certainly shouldn't wait "too long." They should both want to have passionate sex with each other whenever the other person wants to, but not when the other person doesn't, and god knows we don't want to see married people acting like teenagers in public places: holding hands is cute, and so are sweet chaste kisses, but come on! Especially if you already have children!

You mustn't fight--not in public, not in front of the children, and not so the neighbors can hear you. Certainly not in front of guests or friends. In fact, not only mustn't you fight, but you mustn't even act tense lest it make others uncomfortable. If one of you is abusive, then why does the other one put up with it???--but divorce, of course, is a Terrible Thing. Unless we've known all along that that person was bad for you, or that you were a terrible couple, or that the relationship was doomed, in which case for god's sake why didn't you divorce years ago? In fact, why did you get married in the first place?? We tried to tell you.

We also tried to tell you that that two careers thing wasn't going to work--you hardly spent any time together. It also doesn't work when one of you subsumes your life in the other person's career, though--I mean, don't you feel your masculinity is threatened? Isn't it your own fault that you don't have any savings or retirement or interests of your own now that he's left you/died/the children have moved out? Anyway, marriage is a total tool of patriarchy. And while we're at it, are you going to change your name or not?

If you're gay and you (want to) get married, you're just being assimilationist. And if your marriage ends, then not only are you a personal failure, but you've Undermined the Cause. Anyway, given how fucked up marriage is, why do you want to have anything to do with it? Except that oh right, we want you to save it for us, because god knows we've fucked it up. Unless of course your getting married is going to fuck it up even worse, in which case, forget it.

Marriage is a sacrament. It was ordained by god. It's a secular institution, which should include tax benefits and health insurance because it promotes stability and because financial benefits not only incentivize marriage but make it easier for spouses to support each other in hard times. But that's not fair to single people! So really, marriage shouldn't convey any benefits whatsoever--but you don't get to complain about the emotional or financial burdens of marriage, because after all, you chose to do it.

NOT that that means you can choose *how* you do it. Because your weird, unconventional marriage makes other people uncomfortable, and plus it sets a bad example for the children, who might think that it's okay to live that way. Which it isn't.

....

So yeah. I loved it that Sandra Tsing-Loh had the huevos to write about the end of her marriage, and to do so in a way that "depressed" people by saying that (duh) even really good marriages sometimes end, in part because maintaing a Really Good Marriage is virtually an impossible task.

Which isn't to say that staying married, or having a good enough marriage, or loving someone your whole life is impossible. Just that by and large, when it happens, it doesn't usually look the way outsiders--or even the people in it--expect it to.

And you know, if some of us can admit that about our own marriages? Maybe the rest of you could have the manners to admit that you don't know everything, too.

It's way more rambling than this inside my head

My co-Bitches have been doing such meaningful writing about foreign affairs, education, domestic politics, etc. As one would expect. I keep wanting to check in here with some updates about my own small life, which I actually have been trying to not think too much about, and then can't bring myself to bump a post on Iran. A few weeks ago, LeBlanc and I were talking about doing a series of 'Using up the Shit in our Pantries" recipe posts, and then the next time I look she's Christiane Amanpour. It's intimidating.

Anyway. Moving next week. Sold our house (2 contracts in under a month, in fact), about which we feel obviously fortunate and ambivalent. The 4 yrs we lived here is the longest I've lived anywhere and this is certainly the place where all the adult events of my life have been centered. But, as anyone who has moved knows, it's hard to even make space for the emotional challenges in the face of the logistical ones. I get swept up in emotion in off moments, when the packing tape roll runs out or some such. I've been trying to hold off packing any of the kid stuff so my daughter feels as little alienated as possible and, more importantly, so she has shit to play with while I ignore her all day long. A good idea, but at this point, it means her shit is pretty much the only non-boxed shit in the house which makes for a heinous adult living environment.

I know people for whom this is not the case, but for me and most of my close friends, graduate school was the period in which we undertook a series of canonically adult things - buying homes, getting married, having kids. My close friends and I have all been far from our families while at grad school, and I feel these friends as my family. It's very hard for me to believe that I am about to go and do something that is coded as the beginning of my adult career. I expect, in fact, the environment and challenges and responsibilities of this job at this school to be so widely different than the challenges and environment I dealt with in grad school, it feels more like a career change than anything else.

And that's to the extent that I even think about the job, which is rarely. Moving grown-up lives is so totalizing. It's that much more difficult to think about the realities of having this job when my closest friends are still interviewing for positions for the 2009-2010 year. Still. For mediocre jobs. That are temporary. The honesty and healthy cynicism with which they try reminds me not to be an asshole who dwells too much on imagining the philosophical challenges of her new role.

Still no job for Mr. V in the new town, so he'll be working in our current town M-Th every week. When I tell people about this arrangement, they all get a sort of awkward look on their faces, a mix of discomfort and pity. Im pretty sure they largely assume we are getting divorced - either that this is the initial stage of an acknowledged separation or that a scenario like this can only end in divorce. People seem sad for us. That response makes me sadder than the situation itself, which is hardly ideal but also not that heinous. I worry about it: I worry he will never find a job there, and that I will not like mine so much, and we'll end up bailing on the whole thing after a year. I worry that I don't have nearly the amount of patience required to take care of my daughter during the transition on my own for most of the week. I actually don't worry about divorce over this, and I'm not one of these people who has never thought about divorce. I've thought about it. But not about this. I don't see the physical distance as the kind of obstacle people seem to, whereas I think if Mr V had quit his job to go with, making our money really tight and making him antsy and restless and second-guessy, THAT, i think, in our particular marriage, could have been the death knell.

I have a funny story to tell about the woman working at my storage unit who, yesterday, after asking me how long I have been married, pitched me her book on spicing up the married sex life. I didn't look my best, obviously, as I was hauling things to and from a dusty storage unit, but I don't think I had my "I love the MIssionary Position" tshirt on. And yet. This storage unit professional is, as it turns out, an ex-lesbian. Having been "delivered from that sin by God," she now focuses her expertise and experience on saving and strengthening heterosexual marriage by providing tips about what women want. The premise seems to be that if you both have the equipment and have serviced similar equipment on another person, you are the most qualified to advise. I wanted to note that I feel like my own expertise about my own person seems like it should provide credibility enough for advising, but that was really the least of the problems.

Her credibility more exactly emerges from her former "specialty" as a lesbian (I love the way it was posited as a former career of sorts)" 'giving women 10 orgasms in an hour using penetration.' The penetration part seemed very important to her, as it demonstrated that hetero-sex was clearly the approved mode of engagement. Further, she noted that if men could last long enough, she could teach them to far exceed this benchmark. "The only reason," she told me, "I shot for an hour was because I couldn't stay up in there any longer"' This was cited as evidence that she was not, in her heart, a true lesbian. I wanted to ask her if she was into sucking cock for longer than an hour, but couldn't get the right break in conversation. As a person who has given both a good college try, my suspicion is that her problem was more the expectation about duration than the object in question. I mean, I would get tired of eating ice cream after an hour.

Anyway, she went on to explain that the book was "not at all vulgar." She cited as evidence the fact that many ministers have bought the book and shared with their wives (did I mention it is available on audio CD because "men don't like to read"?). In this way, my storage professional have saved many Godly marriages that might have otherwise caved to the temptation of the "dirty girls who come to church and sit in the front pew just to tempt the minister." With the help of this text, men the world over could teach their Madonnas to be whores in the bedroom (my language now), thus making the family the keystone of society and saving heterosexuality (her language).

She wanted to give me a free copy of the book/CD. So we could write a testimonial for her website. There were so many possible ways to respond really, but I was tired and hot and decided to just gently point out that people renting storage units and coming in to buy moving boxes are perhaps not the best test case for any instructional on hott sex. We wouldn't want to skew her results.

So that was the highlight of yesterday. That and the ice cream.