In my previous post, I introduced you to the first part of Pamela Haag's provocative new book, Marriage Confidential: The Post-Romantic Age of Workhorse Wives, Royal Children, Undersexed Spouses, and Rebel Couples Who Are Rewriting the Rules. The 21st century, she argues, is a post-romantic age of melancholy marriages. The couples are not acutely stressed nor entangled in constant conflict - they are just melancholy. They signed up for the marriage pact and lost a vital part of themselves in the process.
In that first post, I reviewed some of the problems that Haag diagnosed as plaguing some contemporary marriages. Here, I will go through a few of them and tell you about some of the solutions Haag learned about in her research and interviews. Remember, her goal is not to generate alternatives to marriage but alternatives within marriage that have the potential to keep the marriages together. To longtime readers of Living Single, I bet you will anticipate the conclusion I am leading up to before you get to the end of this post.
1. The problem of the insularity of many modern marriages (the "Marriage as a Bomb Shelter" issue). From Haag:
"Marriage is touted as the 'building block' of civilization. But what civilization, if all we do is tend to our own, important though that is? We'll end up with a million building blocks and no foundation."
Pamela Haag has discovered that married couples are already exploring options to living in their single-family moat-encircled private castles. They range from co-housing to living in homes with separate master bedrooms to continuing to cohabit even after divorcing to living in separate homes while staying married.
2. "The underwhelming crisis of infidelity." Yes, that's what Pamela Haag has concluded about the supposed crisis of extramarital affairs - it is underwhelming. In theory, we abhor affairs - and in fact, some truly are extraordinarily cruel and hurtful. But more often than we might guess, Haag finds, spouses react with little more than a shrug. She offers some thoughts about what this is about:
"...perhaps infidelity is about what it appears to be able: sexual ennui if not desperation in an otherwise not-bad marriage, and/or lust....Perhaps it's about wanting to get back the complexity, depth, and richness of your character again, but within the boundaries of a marriage that otherwise 'works.'"
So how do today's couples deal with affairs without divorcing? Haag founds lots of arrangements and understandings. Some maintain that 'everyone gets at least one free pass.' Others have 'only when traveling' or 'only 50 miles away' rules. There are "don't ask, don't tell couples," tell only so much couples, and tell-all couples. One wife told Haag that when she discovered that her husband was a philanderer, she "banished him temporarily to a nearby apartment, but had him come back every morning to get the children off to school and pack their lunches, and then return in the evening to cook their dinner."
3. The challenge of the married asexual. Pamela Haag realizes that a sexless marriage is not the same thing as a marriage that includes an asexual. Referring to the Asexual Visibility and Education Network (AVEN), she describes married asexuals as those who
"reject the prioritizing of monogamous sexual love over friendship. Asexual marriage doesn't mean not being intimate, or even not having sex; it means not wanting to have sex, and coveting an ideal of platonic intimacy."
What's a married couple to do if they want to stay married but only one of the two people is asexual and the other really, really likes and wants sex? Haag describes one couple who tried compromising on sex once a week. When that didn't work, the asexual wife persuaded her husband that he should just go ahead and have his affairs, and she would help him pick out his girlfriends. He, of course, thought he was being set up. He wasn't. As the wife explained:
"Say you like Ping-Pong. I hate Ping-Pong, you love Ping-Pong, so go find someone who will play with you and have a good time doing it."
Post-romantic, indeed.
4. The couple who wants intimacy from more than one person. Enter polyamory. There are different meanings of the term but Pamela Haag uses it to refer to the new open marriage, or 'ethical nonmonogamy.' The ethical part is the "scrupulous standard of telling the truth." Partners are honest with each other about what they are doing, and they engage only with people who are honest with their partners. This version of polyamory is not just about sex - "the intimacies are real but circumscribed."
5. The problem of married couples begrudging one another the time they spend with friends or anything they do for fun without their spouse along for the ride. Haag offers the analogy of what she calls the desiccated American Beauty marriage:
"It offers the husband, played by Kevin Spacey, two roles: to live either as a sexless, soul-crushingly dutiful and henpecked husband, or as a pot-smoking, self-absorbed adolescent who lusts after the high school cheerleader. There is no authentic nonparental role for him in between, no option of being a multifaceted adult."
Among the possible lifelines Haag tosses to those trapped in American Beauty marriages is this one: the marriage sabbatical. Maybe the couples just need some 'growth time' apart.
I wanted to end with the notion of the marriage sabbatical because that's how I ended Singled Out. Quoting an author who had described what she loved about having time to herself and a space that was only her own, I said this:
"Jarvis was married but craved a sabbatical from her marriage. She wanted long stretches of solitude, where she could bask, uninterrupted, in her thoughts and in her work, in her own special place. What she really wanted - at least for a while - was to be single."
So have you anticipated my conclusion - why it is that I think this book, which is all about marriage, actually furthers the cause of single people?
Consider again what Pamela Haag sees as unnecessary to marriage:
a. Children (noted in my previous post)
b. Living together
c. Sex
d. Having sex only with each other
e. Having intimacy only with each other
f. Spending all of your time - including even stretches of time that last for months or longer - with each other. (You can instead take a 'marriage sabbatical' and spend as much time on your own or with friends or anyone else, doing whatever you want, for as long as the sabbatical lasts.)
I see all this as spelling out not (just) an alternative within marriage, but an alternative to marriage. This is single life. If you can choose a combination of these options and still call what you have a marriage, why bother? (Except, of course, to run away with all the federally-bestowed loot, and the prestige of having membership in the Married Couples Club.)
Maybe Pamela Haag would say that marriage is different because you value that lasting bond with your spouse. But many single people value and cherish deep and enduring bonds with friends, siblings, and other relatives. And since sex and living together are optional, and having very close relationships with more than one person is permissible, how is this not a description of a fulfilling single life?
