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Jenny Sanford, the soon-to-be-ex-wife of Mark Sanford, governor of South Carolina, is out with a memoir, which, according to the New York Times,
she wrote "in part for their four boys, who remain confused about their
parents' pending divorce." Jenny apparently thinks her book will set
her sons (and the world) straight—as if this is the very thing her boys
and the world most need. While I think Mark Sanford is likely a loon
and clearly wasn't a good husband (or governor), and she (and the
people of South Carolina) are right to divorce him, this is one case
where I think Jenny is the bad parent ... (Read the rest of this post here.)
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Jessica,
my husband and I have been married for 15 years. Last weekend, we drove from
Maryland to New Jersey and during the many hours of crawling in traffic we wrote
a rap song together about the Delaware Toll Plaza. We stay up too late talking
to each other. We hold hands at the movies. Since we're in our fifties,sure
we've talked about who's going to get to pull each other's plug—but eventually
being able to do this honor is not why we're together. So do not despair that
marriage is an enterprise devoted to raising children, fighting over litterbox
scooping duties, and holding the horror of fidelity over each other's heads ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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It's been a rough couple of weeks for marriage. First, Sandra Tsing Loh came out
swinging against the
institution in the Atlantic (and we discussed it ad
nauseam), and simultaneously Mark Sanford and
John Ensign and the Gosselins paraded their broken relationships in front of the
nation. In Time, Caitlin Flanagan takes up for long-lasting unions in
an essay called "Why
Marriage Matters." Flanagan's defense of marriage can be boiled down to: The
reasons to get married are to raise children and not die alone ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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Jon and Kate Gosselin announced their separation on last night's much-hyped episode of Jon and Kate Plus 8.
This surprised no one, as tales of Jon sweatily cavorting with coeds
and Kate's utter nastiness have been littering the tabloids for months.
What did surprise me is that the Gosselins will be doing what Sandra
Tsing Loh is doing with her kids: instead of just having Jon or Kate
move out, the couple's 8 children will remain in their Pennsylvania mcmansion, while the parents switch off living there.
In her post describing Tsing Loh's set up, Liza already pointed out the major cracks in this scenario, like what happens if...(To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Hanna, just so you know, I wasn’t calling your marriage “boring”; Cristina Nehring was. No, in all seriousness, I’m glad you posted in response to Loh and to my piece about The Vindication of Love.
Your point that for every crazy artist in a series of chaotic
relationships there’s one in a stable partnership is well-taken.
Virginia Woolf, no slouch in the achievement department, may have had
one of the most boring marriages of all time. But she liked it.
Meanwhile, many partnerships you mention—like Joan Didion and John
Gregory Dunne—were hardly boring. (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Kerry: Returning to Tsing Loh, for a sec, I want to second your point: It is odd to describe a 20-year-old relationship that produced two kids and a lot of domestic support as a "failure" just because it doesn’t last until death do us part and all that. Like you, I find it troubling that we routinely describe marriages and relationships that end with this evaluative language. “They had a failed marriage,” we say; or, “He had a failed relationship with a ballet dancer.”
But some—maybe even many—of these relationships are not “failed” at all... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Dahlia, Hanna, Jess, Abby: This debate over marriage arrives as I am
in a perfect storm of marriage-related texts. In addition to Tsing
Loh’s provocative piece about why everyone should get divorced, I’m in the middle of Thy Neighbor’s Wife, Gay Talese’s controversial account of the 1960s sexual revolution, and Christina Nehring’s excellent A Vindication of Love,
a polemic making the case for the importance of love—messy, violent,
volcanic, inequitable love—in women’s lives. Perhaps I, too, have read
too many books, but I don't quite agree that a) the real drag is
children, not marriage or b) that Tsing Loh is a victim of magazines
that peddle a vision of a life of “perfect romantic intimacy” and
“perfect mothering.” Taken together, all this material suggests just
how idealized the "companionate" marriage has become. So let me ask:
Could she just have decided that such a marriage is, well, not for her?
And that—gasp—she was going to be arch about what has, after all,
become the sacred cow of feminism?
Her piece is most interesting to me for the personal corrective it
offers to the view that a present-day equitable partnership between a
man and a woman is the ideal arrangement to which all of us should
aspire. In a sense, Tsing Loh is just writing about the old division
between passion and intimacy / security. She doesn’t have much new to
say (this has been a debate forever, and at some point
someone—me—inevitably reminds us all that “courtly love” was originally
adulterous love, an ameliorative balm to the tedious social
arrangements that were marriage). But I found it refreshing to hear a
woman confess so baldly that ... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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I found myself gagging at the first line of Sandra Tsing Loh's article
where she says, "Sadly, and to my horror, I am divorcing." Something
about that horror part got under my skin—that she was trying to
convince us, her readers, that divorce was something that "just
happened" to her, outside of her control. And that was only the
beginning of the pity-party. Having an affair, she confesses, "was a
surprise." Her decision not rebuild her marriage: "heart-shattering."
Words to induce our pity, to absolve her responsibility to her
committment, her husband, her friends, and her children. The whole
article, to me, read as ... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Hanna, I read the Sandra Tsing Loh piece not as a condemnation of modern marriage, and not even as a parable about the impossibility of modern motherhood,
but as a cautionary tale about building your life around what Tsing Loh
describes as a life spent “taking with me ... to my bed, a glass of
merlot and a good book.” Because the only villains in this piece are
the books—the piles and piles of books that she uses to arrange her
life. From what she depicts as her “lazy, undisciplined attachment
parenting” to the nearly pornographic, Pottery Barn descriptions of her
friend’s kitchen renovation, the story leaps from one fashionable
marriage book to the next. She won’t hire a nanny because of Barbara
Ehrenreich’s dictum that she’d “never let another woman scrub her
toilets.” Her friends’ absurd husbands are either “cheating” with
subscriptions to gourmet magazines or bookmarked porn sites. Whole
conversations with her girlfriends ... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Hanna, I too read the Sandra Tsing-Loh piece in the Atlantic, and I think she's missing part of the point. It's not modern marriage that's the problem, it's modern child rearing. Motherhood and marriage are inextricably linked in Tsing-Loh's piece, and while she never explictly says it, she chooses modern motherhood over her marriage:
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. Sobered by this failure as a mother—which is to say, my failure as a wife—I’ve since begun a journey of reading, thinking, and listening to what’s going on in other 21st-century American families.
But even though Tsing-Loh complains about the "staggering working mother's to-do list," she refuses to ... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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In this month’s Atlantic, Sandra Tsing Loh
writes about her recent divorce from her husband of 20 years. Divorce
is not, for her, what it was in the Gloria Gaynor days, a path to
delirious freedom and dramatic rebirth. Instead, her marriage dissolves
the way it was lived, with haggling over domestic tedium. Tsing Loh,
who had the affair (as she confesses obliquely), guiltily offers to
keep changing the kitty litter.
What’s ultimately distressing about her essay is not the details of
the divorce (affair, alienation, what to do with the kids) but her
dismal portrait of the modern American marriage. Long-term monogamy is
obsolete and unnatural in any age, she argues, with some support from
anthropologists. But in our age, when relationships are governed by
children’s needs and defined in management speak, they are doomed.
“Given my staggering working mother’s to-do list, I can not take on
yet another arduous home and self improvement project, that of
rekindling our romance,” she writes.
The piece has its exaggerations and tropes—for example the scene
where her group of girlfriends, who stand in for all womankind,
suddenly break down and confess that they, too, are dying to get
divorced.
But many of the details in her very vivid and damning portrait are
bound to resonate. The most common and seemingly happy marriages are ... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Well, I never wanted the Clintons to divorce on our account and don't think they ever will split up, either—for one thing because she would get all of the art and all of the friends while he would get the "art'' and be stuck with the "friends.'' (B: "No, you take Terry McAuliffe.'' H: "No, darling, you.'') But as fantasies go, Emily, it is fun to imagine her throwing him out because she can and because she might just take up with that 24-year-old Sharon Stone broke up with after losing her custody battle. (You know, the one in which her ex accused her of suggesting that their 8-year-old son use Botox to fight foot odor.) Now that it's official for Hillary as secretary of state, I do want her to do well there. And to enjoy this moment, with or without the Mr.
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E.J., clearly you're right about Clark Rockefeller—as the evidence mounts (and boy does it seem to be mounting), it seems clearer and clearer the guy is a con artist and murderer. So yes, no sympathy there! Whatever empathy I had for him was based on the assumption that he was just a rich, eccentric dad who loved his daughter, not a murderer and liar. Thank god the child is safe. And that'll teach me not to extend my sympathies further than they're warranted!
Meanwhile, though, the intellectual issues surrounding child custody arrangements in America remain worthy of discussion ... and have nothing to do with this case.
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Meghan, I guess I just can't let this bone go. I do understand sympathy for fathers who feel shut out of relationships with their children—and actually, for anyone (man or woman) who ends up in family court, waiting for a judge to decide the fate of the family based on who knows what prejudices. It's a horrible and nailbiting experience. But Clark Rockefeller? He didn't just kidnap his daughter from the social worker; first he hit the social worker with his SUV!! And now the Boston Globe reports that the reason he didn't get custody of any sort was that he refused to document his identity. For the same reason, he never obtained a real marriage license; he lied to his wife (and presumably whoever performed the wedding) about getting one. He was a liar living under a series of fake identities; he's telling police he "doesn't remember" where he was born or to whom! Sorry, whether or not he's also a murderer, this dude doesn't deserve joint custody.
But I do agree with you that women shouldn't be entitled to the presumption of primary parental status merely because they are female. I know fathers who are more maternal than the child's mother. I know co-mothers who should get primary or equal parenting status with the biomoms. Some women think that women are by nature better parents. I'm not essentialist enough to sign up for that belief. (By the way, the parenting research hasn't been able to find any constant difference by sex that holds across cultures. "Mothers" differ from other mothers as much as they do from "fathers." The research is fascinating.)
A note: I profoundly admire some folks I know who share custody by letting the children stay in the house while the parents move in and out, in turn. (These are real people, honest.) Now that's putting the children first.
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E.J., you ask (quite sanely!) whether I "seriously" feel any sympathy for Clark Rockefeller, who, after all, stole his daughter from a social worker in broad daylight, as it were. Alas, the answer is yes, possibly. I don't honestly know. I think the guy deserves his day in court and till more is known about the situation I'll reserve making any judgments. Con men can love their children, too, after all. Anyway, my point in that first post wasn't so much any profound sympathy I felt for him—kidnapping a child, even with the best intentions, is traumatic for that child!—but that Rockefeller's amazing story made me think more about how as a culture we make decisions about custody and whether there's room for improvement with some concerted effort from all parties. You're totally right, I think, to take me to task for implying that feminism caused this; the history you cite is fascinating evidence that it didn't. (I just needed a good headline.) But I can say that I have encountered many parity-minded women who are content, in a sense, to turn a blind eye to lack of parity when it comes to divorce and child-rearing. Sure, the problem may be largely intractable; as Dahlia points out, there is often no good way to solve the problem of joint custody when you have two working parents, one of whom might need to move for work. However, I do feel that an honest and open discussion about custody and fathers' roles might lead to some interesting adjustments in how custody law works; certainly, the burgeoning dads' rights movement that Dahlia mentioned would like to see that happen. Meanwhile, I'm struck by just how many fathers out there I've talked to who feel themselves to be stuck in a position of having to accommodate past the letter of the law, in part because of fears that the laws are so much more sympathetic to mothers than fathers. They'd rather lose a lot than end up losing everything.
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Meghan,
Dahlia has noted the painful fact that there is simply no good way for divorced families to accommodate two working parents (a product of a changed economy more than of feminism, I would argue, but that's for another day). So let me take issue with blaming feminism for Clark Rockefeller's kidnapping his daughter—or rather, for treating men 's claims to fatherhood unfairly after a divorce.
A brief history of custody law: Until 1851, men were childrens' presumptive guardians and custodians. In that year, a lone American judge first broke with precedent to articulate a new custody standard—"the best interest of the child"—which he used to justify giving custody of the child to a mother. It signalled the beginning of the end of a world in which children were family laborers—either a source of income who could be contracted out to other families, or part of the family's earnings unit. With that first mother-custody decision came a series of outraged diatribes about the imminent downfall of civilization if fathers were no longer in charge of the family. But the judge was articulating a new standard of child custody that fit the Victorian era's new ideology of woman-as-nurturer, as caregiver, as naturally domestic and giving and good. It also drew on a new vision of children as malleable angels in need of love, rather than as wild beasties in need of discipline. (I've got a chapter on this shift from father- to mother-custody in my book What Is Marriage For?)
For the next century, the radical idea that women not only could have custody of the children but should presumptively have custody gradually took over. I've waited a day to post on this as I try to find the stats, but my impression has been that feminism stopped that trend. With the idea of gender parity in child-rearing has come the idea that men should and could have custody as well. Family lawyers and observers of family law have told me that the trend has gone the other way, and that when men sue for custody they have an equal chance at getting it. The stats are hard to find, since they're state by state, and even court by court, rather than nationwide; if I can find a source I will post it here.
But the deeper problem here is one I discovered in reporting on custody battles about a decade ago: Emotionally healthy parents who are putting the children first do not end up fighting over custody in court. When there's a custody battle, it's often because the family dynamics were already ugly and messy and volatile. The family is then disposed according to an individual judge's view of what children need. It's a wildly dysfunctional and distressing system, and I have no idea how it could be done better.
Meanwhile, Meghan, do you seriously feel any sympathy for a man who attacked a social worker with his SUV and kidnapped his daughter, and who appears to be a con man who lied about his identity?? I realize that news reports can be unreliable—flash! Jon-Benet's parents are NOT guilty!—but unless Rockefeller had evidence that the mother is physically abusive to the child (and I haven't heard any claims that she was), how can he possibly justify such behavior? That sure wasn't in the best interest of the child.
EJ
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Meghan, the Clark Rockefeller story really is deeply weird, and getting weirder by the day. Now we hear allegations that he’s tied to some murder in California. Jump back Lifetime. You can’t make this stuff up. You’re also right that there is something disturbing about the lingering preference for mothers in disputed custody cases, and also right that there is a bubbling, hissing fathers’ rights movement that contends fathers routinely get screwed in custody cases. But it seems to me that the other thing at work here—far more unfair than general sexism in the family court system—is the patent absurdity of family court oversight when one parent needs to move out of town. Suddenly, everything that is already nuts about family court gets exponentially worse, as judges are forced to make decisions that have the noncustodial parent relegated to a handful of visits a year and small kids consigned to a lifetime of trans-Atlantic flights. These “move” cases are invariably lose-lose-lose propositions for everyone, especially the kids, but they are also a byproduct of second-wave feminism. Because now moms need to work. And dads need to work. And after the divorce, the odds are decent that someone will therefore have to relocate to someplace far away in order to do that. Suddenly the noncustodial parent—having done nothing wrong whatsoever—goes from seeing the kids every other weekend to seeing them for a week at Christmas. Even the worst child abusers don't suffer that fate. I’d be bitter, too.
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Has anyone been following the amazing story of Clark Rockefeller, the divorced father who kidnapped his daughter last week when she was visiting from England with her mother? There are many incredible elements to the story, including the fact that Rockefeller may not be who he said he was; the FBI has said he doesn't have a Social Security number. But what I found most striking are the quotes from friends of Rockefeller's saying how much he loved his daughter and how much he missed her after his divorce. Weirdly enough, I know someone who knew Rockefeller; this person had talked to me not long ago about how heartbroken Rockefeller was to have been separated from his daughter by divorce. (Rockefeller's wife, who works for McKinsey, had moved to England, making it hard for him to see their daughter.) While I certainly don't approve of kidnapping in any form, and there may have been good reasons for the wife to want to keep her daughter away from her father, I confess the whole saga has got me feeling a lot of empathy for all the divorced fathers out there who find themselves suddenly distanced from their children with very little power to change the fact. Fascinatingly, the comments sections on the Rockefeller story on news sites are full of post from divorced fathers who sympathize with Rockefeller. When you think seriously about it, the way custody laws are set up is inescapably unfair. As it stands, there's a hypocrisy at the heart of the second-wave feminist movement: It demands that men be equal partners in child-raising, but when push comes to shove and a marriage dissolves it also implicitly claims that women are the true parents and men are not. While the letter of the law gives men certain rights, divorce lawyers are often shameless about using the threat of claiming there was child abuse to get fathers to back off from fighting for more custody rights. Over the past few months, by total chance, I've talked to a couple of newly divorced fathers, including old college friends, who have suddenly seen their children swept away from them. They were dedicated fathers; they now pay child support, and yet their right to see their children is severely circumscribed. I know there's no perfect solution; but couldn't we come up with one that's better than this? If women really want equality in child-rearing, don't we have to acknowledge that this extends even to divorce?
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Well, what confused me is that Tien does not describe her marriage as a bad marriage, or her predicament as particular. "Don't misunderstand. I would not, could not disparage my marriage," she writes, after spending 500 words describing her husband as a drivelling idiot. And then: "Nor is Will the Very Bad Man that I've made him out to be. Rather, like every other male I know, he is a Moderately Bad Man." And then she has a scene in which she and her friends are standing around and one of them announces she is getting divorced, and none of them expresses shock or pity. Instead, their faces show "could it be?—yearning?" Now the fact is, in our class and generation of women, and presumably Tien's, far fewer marriages actually do end in divorce. (Ten percent is the lowest statistic I've seen.) So maybe this is all about fantasy, and thus harmless. The flip side of this argument is Roiphe's—that in our child-centric culture when a woman with a child does actually get divorced, she suffers a fair amount of scorn and stigma. So the surprise for me was that even in couples with decent marriages—or who seem to have decent marriages—women spend a lot of time hating their husbands and fantasizing about divorce but not actually pursuing one.
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Forgive me for wondering whether the whole “women-who-crave-divorce-in-print” boomlet we’re contemplating here is yet another manifestation of the “mommy wars” phenomenon. That is the media-created dustup wherein approximately 18 women (all of them upper-middle-class residents of Manhattan) purport to speak for all American women, in describing a nonexistent raging conflict between stay-at-home and working mothers. It turns out they speak for precisely nine women at each end of the bell curve—the nine women who stay at home and hate working moms, and the nine women who work and hate stay-at-home moms.
But the huge bulge on the bell curve that is the mass of part-time, flex-time, volunteer, work-from-home, struggling-along, working-it-out, too-busy-to-care moms nevertheless watch in awe as the caricatures play out in fiction and in the media. We can’t get enough of those mommy-wars stories!
Even casting this current discussion as a choice between “I contemplate divorce every day" and “my husband and I never fight" highlights the problem: Why do we want to cast our marriages in such cartoonish extremes? I find myself wondering whether women need to take this sort of outrageously simple position (“I hate my kids” “I loathe my husband”) in order to get published, or if we like to read about complicated subjects rendered in cartoonish ways?