Article About Divorce and Marriage

[qos]

From a friend's locked post, where it seems to be causing significant controversy:

An article from The Atlantic on divorce and the author's suggestions for alternatives to traditional marriage: http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200907/divorce

My friend wrote that everyone on her F-list seems to hate it.

Personally, I liked it. But then, I'm a die-hard romantic who has a very cynical attitude toward traditional marriage.

I recognized more than a few elements of my own former marriage in the article, plus those of a couple of friends.

Marriage is an idealistic institution which I think most people would really like to have unfold as per our cultural dreams. The reality, however, seems to fall short far too often. Promising to stay together "until death do us part" sets us up for failure in a world where we live far longer than our even recent ancestors, with far more complex lives.

Personally, I think that there need to be more socially-acceptable ways for people to pair up -- or triad or group up -- to create domestic/sexual/parenting alliances. It will make life a lot easier for a lot of us, including kids.

My biggest twitch with the article was her dismissal of "open marriage" as a failed idea which most people find "icky." In fact, more and more people are embracing polyamory as a healthy way of acknowledging that long-term monogamy is not always the best relationship model for all people. It's not for everyone, but neither is monogamy.

At it's core, marriage is a very private and personal institution. No one can truly understand the full dynamics of someone else's marriage. I would never try to prescribe what marriage "should" be for everyone. What I advocate for is opening up our cultural sensibilities to allow for more legitimate options in the area of personal unions and family-making.

Comments

[gothic-coop.livejournal.com]

I have been married for 12 years and I am in an open marriage. It has worked for us with 0 issues along the way. We sat down before we got married and made the ground rules.

[qos.livejournal.com]

May I ask: how "out" are you about your open marriage?

[gothic-coop.livejournal.com]

Well I don't have a sign up that says it. Sometimes it comes up in conversation. Not sure what you are really wanting to know.

[qos.livejournal.com]

Hmmm. . . I guess I'm wondering if you do things like refer to your girl/boyfriends in the presence of your family and/or friends, or if you are deliberately more discreet about it. Do most of your friends know you have an open marriage?

[gothic-coop.livejournal.com]

I do refer to them Girlfriend. I don't go out of my way to tell all of my friends that I have a open marriage. People ask I will tell them. Marlene tells people that I am out with my GF or she is out with her GF. Most people don't link that to what we mean it to mean until later.

[tx-cronopio.livejournal.com]

yeah, I expected you or blessed_harlot to take exception to the icky comment. What I didn't expect was, you know, all the other!

I'll be interested to see what kind of response you get.

[qos.livejournal.com]

Just to clarify: I have no problem with any particular individual finding open marriages or polyamory icky. Mileage varies. I just took exception to her writing off the whole idea as something that failed decades ago.

I'll be interested in the reaction here as well.

[erl-queen.livejournal.com]

Interesting article. Overall, I think it was good. I think it's really a positive step in the right direction just to be thinking and talking about these things - to look at alternatives, to consider options. Regardless of what is decided in the end. People too often just go along with the status quo because it's what they are expected to do.

I think everyone should take a hard look at themselves, and their partner(s), and figure out what will really work for them. Open marriage or monogamy, kids or no kids, sexual passion or companionship, whatever. (Or here's an even stranger concept - living together or NOT living together - some married or otherwise deeply committed couples really do live apart and enjoy that, which is quite the anathema to mainstream expectations.) And even, marriage/long-term relationships versus never settling down. Because not everyone wants to do that, nor should they (especially if they don't want kids either).

I think it's really sad, how she talked about so many Americans believing in the old concept of marriage, and yet so many failing at it spectacularly. Wouldn't it be saner for us to update our ideas about what loving another person (or persons) looks like?

[qos.livejournal.com]

Wouldn't it be saner for us to update our ideas about what loving another person (or persons) looks like?

I certainly think so!

And I love the way you and your partner have worked out your own living arrangements.

[erl-queen.livejournal.com]

Thanks. Fortunately we don't have too many "normal" friends or even family members, or else we'd probably be spending more time explaining to them that a) we don't ever plan to live together, and b) we are nonetheless in a long-term, committed relationship.

Living apart is one of the major keys to our success! :)

[heron61.livejournal.com]

What a bafflingly bizarre article. Some or all of my experience may come from being child-free with child-free partners, but I'm baffled that people would stay for a decade or more in relationships as unsatisfactory as the author and her friends describe. It also sounds like the people being described have very little in common with their partners. My ideal is to have partners who I share everything with and who have a great deal in common with me in all areas of our lives. My partners are also my closest friends, and I'm baffled that other people do not arrange their lives like that. Of course, the common idea that "opposites attract" also makes absolutely no sense to me. My general reaction to that article is yet another example of how mainstream people have (from my PoV) very strange and very screwed up romantic lives and gender relations.

[qos.livejournal.com]

I love reading about your relationship with your partners.

My partners are also my closest friends, and I'm baffled that other people do not arrange their lives like that.

I agree.

[heron61.livejournal.com]

I'm glad. It's been a long and difficult road to get things a good as they are with the three of us, but it's been very good for the last year. Also, I definitely appreciate your perspective on such issues, which is why I'm now putting you on my two tightest filters for discussing poly issues in depth (if that's OK with you).

[qos.livejournal.com]

Absolutely it's okay.
I'm honored.

Sometime when I visit your area, maybe we can actually meet in person. athenian_abroad said he could introduce us during a visit, if you were amenable.

[heron61.livejournal.com]

I'd definitely enjoy meeting you.

[mamadar.livejournal.com]

At it's core, marriage is a very private and personal institution.

The problem with marriage, I think, is that, at its core, it's exactly the *opposite* of what you describe: A very public, social institution for the orderly rearing of children and the transfer of property through a family line from one generation to the next, with the side benefit of satisfying sexual and emotional needs in a likewise orderly fashion. Our culture has been trying to change that for a couple of centuries, but it's going to take a lot longer than that to change an institution that seems to have been in place at least since Egypt and Sumer.

That said, I have never seen so many poisonous unquestioned assumptions about marriage in one place as in that article. Not only are there other ways for people to bond that in heterosexual monogamy, there are other, happier ways to do heterosexual monogamy than what that writer describes.

[oakmouse]

Word.

[qos.livejournal.com]

You make a good point about the public nature of marriage. I guess that's one of the complicated aspects of the larger issue: it's both extremely public and very private, and those two aspects don't always reconcile easily.

We've built up such a cult of marriage as a romantic arrangement that -- as a culture -- we've completely lost track of the fact that for most of human history personal feelings were among the least important of the issues in who married whom.

there are other, happier ways to do heterosexual monogamy than what that writer describes

Indeed.

[mamadar.livejournal.com]

It was either C.S. Lewis or D.L. Sayers who said something about our idea of marriage becoming contaminated (my word, not the author's) with the ideals of romantic love from the troubadours, despite the fact that the troubadours assumed an unconsummated, perhaps even unrequited love between two people of differing social classes who were not married to one another as their standard.

I still feel pretty horrified by the article. I mean, between two careers and both parents running their kids around to scheduled activities, who has time to run a relationship?

[oakmouse]

I'm all in favor of opening up the forms and possibilities of marriage/LTRs-with-legal-rights-attached to include polyamory, gay relationships, marriages that last for a fixed period of time and may be walked away from no-harm-no-foul at the end of that time, and all sorts of other options. Traditional lifelong one man, one woman monogamous marriage should not be the only option available. But it should remain an option for those who want it.

Those of us who are in traditional, intended-to-be-lifelong, monogamous marriages get immense amounts of shit thrown our way these days for what should be our free choice. Your open-mindedness is rare; it's much more common for people to tell me that I'm a pervert for being monogamous, or that my marriage just hasn't broken up yet but it will, or that obviously my marriage is a sham because nobody could actually stay happily married to one person for so many years, or that the kind of marriage I have should not be legal and is inherently abusive to me as a woman.

Yah. Fuck them and the horses they rode in on. It's not appropriate to treat divorce as a stigma or failure, but neither is it appropriate to treat traditional marriage as a stigma or failure.

Heron61 also has some very cogent criticisms about the piece.

[qos.livejournal.com]

it's much more common for people to tell me that I'm a pervert for being monogamous. . .

Ack! I know! That kind of attitude infuriates me too.

A particular friend of mine here on LJ has given me a lot of insights into the disrespectful way all too much of polyamorous culture treats monogamous people and relationships. That's one reason I go out of my way these days to affirm monogamy as The Best Choice for many people when I strongly advocate having other options open to people.

Why do human beings get so upset when other people want to do things differently than they do?

[oakmouse]

Why do human beings get so upset when other people want to do things differently than they do?

I know. Basic primate politics, I think: "You're not going with the band! Attaaaaack!"

It seems to be worst with those who feel guilty or feel like failures for not achieving the thing they're attacking, and envy those who have achieved it. (I felt a definite component of that envy and guilt in Tsing-Loh's piece.) They're responding to their own feelings by attacking the thing onto which they have projected the blame.

I dunno. The older I get, the more I feel there's no One True Way about *anything*, and the more I want to echo Rodney King: why can't we all just get along?

[unicorndelamer.livejournal.com]

I have a theory about why someone might get so upset when they see someone doing something differently than the way they do it. I'll make up someone to cut down on confusion. We'll call her Jane. If Jane gets married to John simply because everyone around her told her that was what she was supposed to do and that was the way it had to be - even if it wasn't something she wanted to do - she might console herself by telling herself there was no other option. So if she then meets Mary who chose something different, it forces Jane to realize that she made a mistake and allowed others to run her life instead of herself. And since we know it's easier to blame others than to blame ourselves, it's easier for Jane to get mad at Mary or to accuse Mary of "doing it wrong" because it reinforces that Jane's decision - unpleasant though it may be - really IS the only way.
I'll admit, it's not very eloquently put, but it's similar to what oakmouse mentioned. And this can go either way. What about the girl who claims she has no desire to ever marry a man to be accepted by her peers who also voice the same desires, only to years later realize that she actually DOES want a heterosexual, monogamous marriage?

[qos.livejournal.com]

I think those are good points, unicorndelamer.

In fact, one particular friend leaps to mind when I read this.

On further reflection, this may even have been true of me at more than one time in my life.

I also suspect that, given the religious components of marriage in our culture, it has elements in common with the reasons why some people are very threatened by other peoples' different religious views: they seek absolutes, and if someone else makes a different decision and it seems to work for them, it throws their own absolute position into doubt.

[blessed-harlot.livejournal.com]

For whatever reason, I resonated much more with her exasperation, her failed attempts and her observations more than taking offense at her conclusions. She often speaks from bitterness, but for me she spoke truthfully. And she asked some questions I want to hear asked more and more often.

[wlotus.livejournal.com]

I read the article a couple of weeks ago and thought she made some good points. I agree an opening-up of our cultural sensibilities is in order. One size does NOT fit all, and that is OK.

[athenian-abroad.livejournal.com]

Interestingly enough, the author wrote essentially the opposite of this article two years ago (link). Reading both articles side-by-side might be useful antidote to the temptation to take either one very seriously.

I did enjoy reading the "divorce" article -- it's an entertaining little vignette about upper-middle-class middle-aged "will we ever have hot sex again?" angst, not unlike an episode of Sex and the City. Come to think of it, not at all unlike an episode of Sex and the City. And worth about as much time and attention.

[qos.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the link.

After reading both articles, my primary impression of the author is that she doesn't seem to be very good at intimacy and relationships in general, and has a very narrow sense of the possibilities outside her own somewhat rareified social circle.

[amqu.livejournal.com]

Mostly, she's just insufferable. I have read her columns from time to time and, frankly, her husband is well rid of her. I hope she finds happiness somehow, but I doubt it. Her problem is not traditional marriage or alternative lifestyles. She's just chronically unhappy.

[amqu.livejournal.com]

I decided I should modify my above comment as it might be seen as uncharitable. I don't know how much of my impression of her is attributable to the fact she no doubt feels an immense pressure to come up with witty, pseudo-deep insights into the lives of coastal elites. Having a column with Atlantic.com is probably a nerve-wracking gig.

I have not read all of her columns, but the ones I have read reeked of a woman living in a privileged, insular world who is frustrated with her inability to find meaning in her own life and not understanding why she is so unhappy.

[qos.livejournal.com]

I've only read one other of her columns, the one which athenian_abroad referenced above in which she takes the complete opposite position regarding sex and marriage.

I suspect that you're right about the combined pressure of being a columnist and living in a rather insular world.