Read an Excerpt

Marriage Confidential

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By Pamela Haag

HarperCollins

Copyright © 2011 Pamela Haag
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780061719288

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Chapter One

THE DILEMMAS OF A SEMI-HAPPY MARRIAGE
Why We Settle for Ambivalence
Josie is one of my oldest and dearest friends. I've known her
for years now, and she lives in a New England city. She is perceptive
and brave, an accomplished nonprofit executive, confident
and perky in appearance and disposition. Josie and some of my other
friends would occasionally play a game of metaphoric description: "If
this person were a tree, what kind would they be?" and that sort of
thing. The animal Josie evoked was always a playful, clever, outgoing
one—an otter or some such.
When she was in her late twenties, Josie got married, although not
formally in the eyes of the state, since her partner was a woman. She
had two children, adopted with her partner, Rory. What she prized in
this relationship was having a home base, and a sense of security not
always present in her childhood. Once, early in her marriage on a new
spring evening, she gazed out the window at the meadow and river
across from her house and marveled to us that she couldn't believe this
was her life; it was so true to the domestic idyll she had dreamt of.
It didn't stay that way. When the children arrived, with their usual
chaos, her marriage became a matter of "surviving another day," she
lamented. Her home became a place where she felt alone, where Rory
didn't make the effort to connect, physically or emotionally. They took
pride in never raising their voices or arguing in front of the children.
They ran an efficient, calm household, but Josie didn't feel rejuvenated
or truly seen in her marriage. "I know what it feels like to be alone in
your own marriage," she says.
As with other halfhearted marriages, nothing discretely terrible
happened to push it toward melancholy. Whatever their problems
together, there was nothing "wrong" with Rory in any definitive sense.
She was, and is, a decent, interesting, and accomplished person. The
forensics of the marriage's deterioration are murky. To me, it always
seemed that Josie tried too hard to please Rory in the beginning, in the
quest for domesticity. She subordinated her own preferences and
character too much, and hewed her life too closely to Rory's style. Eventually,
Josie's resentment over what she came to see as her generosity in
comparison to Rory's self-absorption seemed to build up within her.
And a lot of us, including Josie, perhaps, end up wanting most what
we least know how to secure for ourselves in marriage. Josie wanted,
and wants, that stability, but it is hard to reconcile with her experience.
The restless soul who grows up without family stability just
wants to settle down; the one who grows up witnessing a marriage of
passionless, frigid stability just wants to run with the wolves. Maybe
it's simply the human condition—to be perpetually but futilely lured
in marriage by the mystery of the code we've never managed to crack.
Josie first disclosed her discontent to us tearfully over margaritas
one night at the beach, during a makeshift girls' retreat. She'd kissed
someone else at a happy hour, and this felt like the start of a marital
slide. Josie was tormented by the idea of leaving her marriage. She is
profoundly devoted to her children and household, and as an advocate
for gay and lesbian marital rights she felt a special burden to make the
marriage work. In some ways she felt as if she and Rory had become
the equivalent of a model home or a spec house for happy lesbian
domesticity. But she'd spent enough years carrying water for the directive
of habituated stability and the less than joyous pragmatism of a
low-conflict, low-stress unhappy marriage, which was precisely what
she had. No easy path suggested itself. But she wasn't content, and she
couldn't put up a front with us anymore.
I'll pick up Josie's story below, but her dilemma up to this point
illustrates the mood. The country is honeycombed with halfhearted
marriages like this. I ask my online survey of nearly 2,000 to respond
to the statement "Most of the marriages I see aren't really that happy."
Forty percent express mild to "entire" agreement, which seems quite
high to me. I'm even more interested to learn how many see marriages
as inhabiting a neutral, ambivalent range. So I next ask them to react
to the statement "Most marriages aren't really happy or unhappy."
The statement yielded a high uncertain value, with 38 percent saying
they neither agree nor disagree, since we can't ever be sure about other
people's marriages. But almost 30 percent agree that "most" marriages
are somewhere in limbo between happy and unhappy.
Kyle was one of them. In an interview he says, "I interpret that question
to mean that people are ambivalent or in the middle, and I think
that's true. Lots of people get married out of societal pressure. But
it's so much ingrained that people don't really think about it. They're
probably relatively faithful, they get by, they trudge along. But they're
not quite living their ambition."
There's a unique feel to this semi-happy marriage. It's different
from the "you made your bed and you lay in it" resignation in my
parents' day. This melancholy is also distinct from the old chestnut
of Sticking It Out. We still have plenty of those marriages, and the
economic crisis that began in 2008 has only swelled their ranks,
because many couples simply cannot afford to get divorced. Or, if they
get divorced, the dramatically deflated value of their home makes it
hard to unload, since neither spouse wants it, and they can't sell it at a
good price. Stick It Out spouses follow the Aristotelian ethic that we
should choose virtue over happiness. They know full well that they're
unhappy, and choose to stay together for the children or the house. In
one researcher's restrained coinage, they are "as unhappy as it is
possible to be without seeking relief through divorce."
The marriage I'm describing is more genuinely ambivalent than
that. Often, in my own case, I really can't tell if my marriage is woeful
or sublime. Maybe I'm just so profoundly content that it feels like
unhappiness, because nirvana is dull in this way, it lacks frisson. Buddhist
wisdom tells us that the end of desire is the end of sorrow. Maybe
marital contentment is a place of stillness and solidity where nothing
happens, a vacuum with no conflict or disheveling passion. I often
feel that I'm "grounded." But does that mean that I'm stalled on the
tarmac, before my journey has even begun, or that I've arrived, firmly
if jejunely settled in the life we laid down roots for, the peaceful
destination we sought?
Such an indeterminacy of emotional extremes would have been
inconceivable to me in my twenties. Unlike the father of a friend of ours,
who unequivocally declared the state of marriage to be "so boring"
that he would "slit his wrists" if he had to stay in it one minute longer,
the low-conflict, low-stress melancholy marriage has a muted palette.
It's a marriage extinguished, as Robert Frost might have agreed, by
ice, not fire. This marriage doesn't explode, it implodes. You contemplate
your escape, or relief through flight, in a non-argumentative,
tranquil, well-ordered, high-functioning household where screaming
matches with your spouse are largely fantasized intra-psychic events.
In exchange for bliss you gain stability, comfort, routine, decorum,
convenience, and some sense of accomplishment in Being Responsible
for your child.
You develop tricks and skills in a melancholy marriage. In my own,
we have learned and perfected the marital screensaver function on
each other: the half-conscious, half-asleep demeanor of the habituated
spouse. Out of the densely knotted tangle of our marriage, we've
learned to pluck at the conversational strands and themes most likely
to produce alliance, stimulate agreement, and keep the harmony
between us. By way of sublimation for my marital gloom and worries,
I've gotten more obsessed with work and drink more red wine; John
exercises whenever he can (his version of "fun") and has cultivated a
fulsome hyper-agreeability, designed to keep marital equilibrium. He
-has developed a case of Ed McMahon Syndrome: "You are correct, sir!"
He tries with an almost flailing earnestness to be an innocuous,
agreeable partner-sidekick.
Yet even as we do these things the marriage has its own CNN-style
ticker at the bottom of the screen, scrolling a fractured mental subtext
of unarticulated grievances, deferred fulfillments, and lost ecstasy.
When you get frustrated you might fantasize yourself a boozily
confrontational Elizabeth Taylor ("If you weren't already dead, I'd divorce
you," she hisses at Richard Burton in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?).
But in your life you do the laundry, pack the lunches, make the carpool
line on time, and pay the bills. You accept with quaking reverence the
prescriptions, however internalized, that you must avoid divorce. And
you're not entirely sure that divorce is even what you want. There are
no pure choices to be had; no obvious decisions to make.
To have marital yearnings and ambitions like this in an otherwise
pleasant marriage is to live out of phase with your times. In a faint
echo of Betty Friedan's "mad" housewives, who "should" have been
happier than they were in their comfortable, well-furnished marriages,
the melancholy spouse gets told today, directly or indirectly,
that they should be happier in the marriage, and more sanguine about
it, than they actually feel.
For one thing, if you are, or ever have been, in a low-conflict semi-
happy marriage, then you're in the crosshairs of the self-named
marriage movement in the United States. The marriage movement is a
loosely confederated group of researchers, advocates, and "pro-marriage"
forces (some also oppose same-sex marriage) who first stated
their principles at a conference in June 2000. They hope to revive a
culture of marriage, to encourage "marital interdependence" (that is,
a gender division of labor in marriage), and to promote government
policies that are explicitly pro-marriage rather than marriage-neutral.
They want the traditional marriage model back, not the romantic one.
It's my feeling that these political stances, cultural moods, and our
friends' opinions and even their marriages really do affect us personally,
even when we don't entirely share their views, mostly because
they subtly or not so subtly shape what we expect or ask of our marriage.
The marriage movement's advice is to try to make marriage
work, halfhearted or not, for the children, if nothing else. Those in
the marriage movement might have advised Josie that she felt unfulfilled
because, romantically befogged, she expected too much out of
marriage in the first place, and as a solution should recalibrate her
desires toward more pragmatic realism.
David Popenoe, a prominent marriage researcher at Rutgers
University and a former head of the National Marriage Project (also the
son of Ladies' Home Journal's iconic "Can This Marriage Be Saved?"
columnist), finds that many people's "view of marriage may be so
unrealistic"—romantic and narcissistic, he specifies—"that they're
doomed to failure."
Romance has acquired an avowed enemy with the marriage
movement, difficult as it is to fathom taking up arms against the fluffy,
meringue dream of true love. Kristina Zurcher, a scholar at Notre Dame,
summarizes the movement's view that marriage ideally should be
"stronger, more lasting, and about more than romantic love," which
is, after all, a highly perishable good. As evidence the marriage movement
could point to the preponderance of American divorces in the
first five to ten years of marriage. Researchers surmise that romantically
enthralled newlyweds with unrealistic expectations tend to be
quickly disillusioned and to divorce early on, as the froth wears off
(which makes me think that lacy, romantically frilled wedding gowns
like Princess Diana's might be sartorial omens of divorce). Marriage
defenders therefore talk of "surviving" the first years, as if they were
discussing cancer morbidity rates or loan amortization tables.
But this romance backlash is widespread, and not confined to
defense-of-marriage forces. You can't even skim newspaper commentary
on marriage without encountering romance desecrating headlines
like "Marriages Take Hard Work," a Man in the Gray Flannel
Pajamas approach to going to work in your marriage. "Many enter
marriage with false hopes, that romantic notion of living happily ever
after," a Houston Chronicle columnist explains, characteristically. "To
avoid divorce, we must prepare for marriage not with the glazed look
of fairy tale expectations but with the unwavering gaze and the
realistic knowledge that it takes lots of effort." Conservative New York
Times columnist David Brooks vividly opines that we'd be better off if
we saw marriage "as a social machine which, if accompanied with the
right instruction manual, can be useful for achieving practical ends."
If the Romantic muse of marriage was the poet, his is the engineer.
To stay married, "you just have to communicate until your knuckles
bleed," a woman in marriage education explains with characteristically
gruesome imagery. And maybe this idea of marriage as a well
geared machine, or hard labor, promises, if not happiness, then a kind
of satisfaction in the solace of heroism, and the achievement of valor if
not ecstasy. You're battling on the front lines, which is gratifying—so
long as you choose the right metaphor and think of your marriage as
a war story and not a love story, more as The Longest Day than
Casablanca.
The romantic jeremiad seems to be getting internalized: A 2001
Gallup survey found that 80 percent of single respondents in their
twenties anticipated marriage as "something that is hard and often
difficult."
Shirin is unmarried, in her late thirties, and runs her own business
in Los Angeles, after having been a "corporate slave for many,
many years." Her feelings toward romantic marriage typify the larger
ambivalence. "I think marriage is passé in this time and age," she
first tells me. "It doesn't jibe with the way we've evolved as people. I
think it will become extinct or rather unusual at some point. Since the
practical need is no longer there, what else is left? Love, love, love. I
feel every decision in our life is practical. If we can't have one aspect
be somewhat magical, then what?

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Marriage Confidential by Pamela Haag Copyright © 2011 by Pamela Haag. Excerpted by permission of HarperCollins. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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