In Defense of the Boring Marriage
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In the past few days, on my own website, my life has been reduced to vanilla pudding. I am dull, devoid of passion, pedestrian, the human equivalent of a “yawning chubby house cat,” says Meghan, summarizing Cristina Nehring’s new book Vindication of Love, the caged bird who forgot how to sing. This is because I am trapped in something that goes by the clinical name of “companionate marriage,” and worse, I like it.
Unlike Sandra Tsing Loh, I can not load my possessions into a trailer and head for the open road. I can not even easily spend an evening giggling with my girlfriends without a lot of complicated pre-arrangements. Unlike Nehring, I can not swoon for the mustachioed stranger without a whole lot of baggage coming down on my head. All I can do, apparently, is bark at my husband to pack the lunches and shove him out of my bed to make room for the whimpering children. In the feminist choice between security and passion, they all say, I have picked the wrong side.
I protest. This “choice” is less something that plagues the whole of womankind than an affliction of artists, and it reappears in various forms. It strikes me as a subtle variation on the equally false choice between madness/creativity and sanity/dullness. For every great suffering artists she names (Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath), I can name you a happily married one (Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Joan Didion).
Nehring writes that in shying away from any power difference, women give up the erotic and the mysterious. There is something to that. But the fact is, for women the power difference came with too much pain: a chador, suicide, or in the case of David Pogue’s wife, a lifetime of acting as his social secretary with the small reward of being publicly declared “sainted.”
When we, the “smug marrieds,” as Bridget Jones called us, accept the term “companionate,” we have already lost the fight. It sounds like a Japanese rent-a-friend, a new brand of artificial sweetener or at best, a highly technical term. If some people choose to think of their marriage as “work” and child-rearing as a “profession” that’s their loss. There is a great amount of mystery that flows through a lifetime of love, both for your husband and your children. There is, believe it or not, also terror, and passion, and all the ecstasies Nehring describes. I too have been derailed by love and hospitalized by love, as Nehring has, but I am happy to leave that behind. She can keep her hospital room. I’ll take the lifetime of bliss.
Hanna Rosin Double X co- editor, reporter, prefer my friends live.
Comments
just for the record
By: cristina nehring | Fri, 07/10/2009 - 07:17
Dear Hanna,
If Meghan is not calling your marriage boring (as she says on her blog on this site that she is not!), I hope you will believe that I am not doing so either.
A Vindication of Love contains several glowing profiles of long-term marriages—and marriage-like relationships. The book closes on a half-chapter-long celebration of the multi-decade marriage of Hannah Arendt and Hermann Bluecher. It explores at length the more tempestuous but also enduring marriages (they were married twice!) of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, as well as the moving if unconventional wedlock of Edna St. Vincent Millay and the man who she became increasingly devoted to the longer she wore his ring, Eugen Boissevain.
Meghan speaks—in her wonderful, penetrating review—of my overlooking, perhaps, the beauty of "an aging husband who cares for his dying wife"—and yet that is exactly what Eugen Boissevain did with Edna in the example I extol in the pages of Vindication. When Edna—then elderly, decrepit, falling out of public favor—became addicted to morphine, Eugen purposefully addicted himself to the drug in order to show her (not theoretically, but practically, by example!) how to rid herself of its chains. If he ended up dying before her, it is only because he averted her Michael Jackson–esque premature death by his altruism, by his loving, for-the-long-haul, husbandly care.
A Vindication of Love is not a celebration of affairs (though it does examine some). It is certainly not an attack on "companionate marriage"—which term neither appears in its pages nor in the vocabulary of its author. For what it's worth: I heard the expression first on Double-X! As I wrote Vindication, I was thinking far more, I will admit, of the cagey, embarrassed, safe-love-obsessed dating behaviors of my immediate peers than of the behaviors of long-married couples. That said, I do not exclude marriage from my argument; neither, however, is it a primary target. There are surely as many lame, self-protective, pragmatic affairs out there as there are tired marriages—witness the couples in the film version of He's Just Not That Into You.
What I try to do in Vindication—as Meghan observes—is make the point that "Love can be a form of Feminism"—i.e. it can be a courageous, intellectually charged goal, as opposed to a distraction from such goals, as it has often been deemed in the vitae of women. With this point in mind, I look, in various chapters, at romantic love's heroic provenance ("Love as Heroism"), its capacity to lend acute insight ("Love as Wisdom") as well as high creativity ("Love as Art"), to bridge power differentials that can be debilitating in ordinary life ("Love as Inequality”), and sometimes, yes, to risk our very skins or souls ("Love as Failure”)—without, for that reason, constituting a regrettable accident.
If critics have concentrated a good deal on the "Failure" chapter, it is perhaps because it most resonates—or most surprises. But it is not the only chapter—and surely it does not resume my view of love. Nor does the hospital room stand in for my love nest. In one of the exactly three autobiographical sentences at the end of Vindication, I say that I have been "derailed by love, hospitalized by love…overjoyed, inspired, unsettled by love." These sentences have been quoted back to me in every interview and review. Indeed, I have spent a week in the hospital for love. I have also spent 20-odd years awakened, enticed, empowered, illuminated by it. More than a polemic, I hope Vindication to be a book of inspiration.
(Final note: Please don't send "mustachioed strangers." Maybe it's the German thing, but I have never gone for a guy with a mustache.:))
Companionate Marriage
By: Nicole Andrews | Wed, 06/24/2009 - 00:18
It seems strange to read about this being discussed as a 'bad' thing. Have recently completed an English course - heavy on Shakespeare & Jacobean theatre I am more used to the notion of companionate marriage as a revolutionary idea being worked through in the new medium of theatre.
Your husband thanks you
By: davidplotz | Tue, 06/23/2009 - 14:24
Hi Hanna
I am your husband! Our marriage is not THAT boring.
Love
David
The Blood of Lions
By: danisecardona | Mon, 06/22/2009 - 23:59
On any given night I can choose to fall into the arms of a smoky-eyed Lothario, enjoy the angry f*** of a frustrated blue collar working man or bask in the glow of one of the most compassionate and mysterious lovers I've ever known - and I can have a down and dirty daytime quickie with my regular boyfriend before jumping on the laptop to read Double X. I am desperately passionate about all of them - and of course you've guessed by now that these are all the same man. Women must remember that passion isn't exclusive to being alternately swept off your feet and desperately heartbroken. I've been in a companionate marriage for five years, and this is the first time I've heard of this awful term. If someone said this to my face, I think I'd be tempted to punch them in theirs. What is the definition of a boring relationship? Sometimes it takes a small amount of advanced planning on at least one person's part, but the exciting and unexpected still live at my house. In the veins of the chubby house cat you may be surprised to find coursing the blood of lions.
What Hanna said!
By: auros | Mon, 06/22/2009 - 20:30
I'm coming up on the fifth anniversary of my first date with my fiancée, first anniversary of when I proposed, and we're into actually planning a wedding now. We've lived together for the last year and a half, and we're pretty good representatives of the equal-partner, companionate relationship. (Of course, neither of us believes in gender. Physical sex obviously exists, but gender is a social construct that, as far as I can tell, has no redeeming qualities whatsoever.)
And, as I commented at the beginning of this series of posts, I am still completely head-over-heels for her. Maybe some folks who grew up before sexual equality became the norm have trouble thriving in equal relationships. But I wish they'd shut up about the virtues of unequal relationships. If it works for them, fine, but it seems peculiar to me that they feel like they have to proclaim the better-ness of, specifically, things that they also admit look pretty unpleasant. It's like a drug addict screaming about how he uses because he wants to. "I can stop any time I want, man!"
Thank you for defending
By: laraish | Mon, 06/22/2009 - 18:40
Thank you for defending relationships that work. At times, this wave of neo-feminism (or whatever) makes it seem unacceptable for women to be in functional, content relationships. Instead, I find many women tend towards endless rounds of man-bashing. It often considered odd that I -- a liberal graduate student in an East Coast urban city -- am in a committed relationship and I like the man I'm with.
Yours seems like a happy marriage -- despite its occasional quirks (I especially liked the video piece on Slate where you and your husband stayed within 10 feet of each other all day) -- congratulations!
more like a lion
By: Liz Lazar | Mon, 06/22/2009 - 18:10
“Boredom is not an end product, is comparatively rather an early stage in life and art. You've got to go by or past or through boredom, as through a filter, before the clear product emerges.” (-F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up)
who at some point hasn’t been kicked to the curb by tortured and writhing hellenistic romance? by thirteen years old, most of us have been thrown around and left for dead.
but staying in a house alone, staring into a silent blinking face and offering my body as food when all i wanted to do was sleep or run away or fuck or read or get wasted was scarier, lonelier and as such an ultimately more passionate ordeal. most parent / child relationships partake in lots of the “crazy love” that nehring’s book describes - terror (of loss!), sacrifice, rage, ambivalence, guilt...and yes, perfect ecstasy.
AND to exert fascination over the life of a marriage with children is its own wagnerian affair.
i think, however, nehring’s point is valuable. but again, as a corrective more than a dismissal of “companionate marriage.” which i agree, hanna, is an annoying clinical coinage.
to be married with children implicates unavoidable and often horrifying sacrifice (sometimes of one’s own body, beauty, desirability.) it is in many ways also to relinquish power, particularly for mother / wives, whose sexual accessibility still affords a good chunk of her power portion. i haven’t read the book and i will but from what i understand, this is part of nehring’s point. we relinquish power to our “smoky-eyed” lover and that’s partly what charges it. but, in defense of the tamed chubby housecat, because of the loss of social power that a mother or wife endures, that vulnerability is most certainly a fixture of the domestic furniture and is often felt palpably.
not to be melodramatic about all this, but part of the strenuous cheer that married people with children put out is a performance to hide all this anguish. recall the strident mothers at the park that go out of their way to display how great their families' lives are...i have a good friend who is a domestic violence reporter and she has told me lots of stories about these married suburban women and the violent physical pain they go to great lengths to hide too. sometimes a marriage is happy and there’s money and everything in the fam is cool. but when they’re bad, they’re bad with all the poetics of new and stranger love, but with more people at stake.
however, the insipid performance IS a passion-killer. why not let the domestic love be what it is and not feign otherwise: crazy love.
i'm so happy for this conversation - thank you hanna
Thank you Hanna Rosin
By: cpowers | Mon, 06/22/2009 - 16:29
Thank you for reframing this discussion as an affliction of artists and not women in general. I'm also fascinated by the genius necessarily requires madness mystique. It's nice to be reminded that not all brilliant, creative women are insane or unhappy.
My Sentiments Exactly
By: lngrossman | Mon, 06/22/2009 - 13:44
Thank you.
Call me pedestrian, too
By: jerseygirl | Fri, 06/19/2009 - 19:58
Marriages should, at times, be boring. If your marriage (or any other form of living together committed relationship) is constantly absorbing all your energy and attention, how to you maintain friendships, build a career, provide support for your children and parents, get involved in political campaigns, obsess about your garden....or any of the myriad activities and passions that make a full life? Also, I resent the idea that long-term, stable, "companionate" marriages are by definition devoid of passion. No one knows what goes on in private between two people.