Can [this] marriage be saved?

[lolaraincoat]

I forget which women's magazine of my childhood, back in the early 1970s, used to run a monthly column titled "Can This Marriage be Saved?" but I remember reading it while my mother did the grocery shopping, and I remember that the answer was always yes! it can be saved! with just a little more feminine self-abnegation! etc. Even as a cranky eight-year-old trailing through the supermarket behind my mom, a miserable housewife, I knew that something was not right (as Miss Clavel used to say) with that notion. Marriage was some kind of trap; marriage was How They Got You. My life plan in third grade involved becoming a nun, as soon as they started accepting little Jewish girls into the convents, because nuns lived with each other and didn't have to spend all their time catering to men and nobody made them wear stupid, itchy girly clothes that were too tight at the waist and elbows. (It was an era of liberation movements of all kinds, so my dream of convent-integration wasn't so farfetched.) Also, my Catholic friends told me that nuns were mean, and that appealed, oh yes it did: could I grow up into a woman without having to become nice, or sweet, or agreeable?

By fourth grade my plan had evolved, and I was going to live in outer space or else be a jockey.

It wasn't that my own parents' marriage was so gruesome -- well, it was, but that isn't what worried me about the institution of marriage -- it was that everything I saw on TV, and soup can labels and newspapers and comic books too, told me that good marriages were all about women being nice to men, taking care of their physical and emotional needs, in exchange for men supporting women financially. That seemed like a bad deal to me, and in fact it still does. So for me the idea of marriage was linked to all the ways of being a woman that I wanted nothing to do with, there in the darkness of 1971, and luckily the world changed enough that I have been able to avoid much of that crap -- though I haven't been able to avoid thinking about it.

I'm not opposed to your marriage, of course, or to my own (very happy) household arrangements. I am opposed to the model of heterosexual sanctioned-by-the-state marriage, the one that the legal code and the economic system of the US so strongly support, the one that the religious right fears will be rejected by most people if they have better options.

And women in the United States are, it turns out, rejecting marriage. An article in The New York Times today reported that 2005 census data show that 51% of adult American women do not live with a male spouse, up from 35% in 1960. (47% of American men do not live with a female spouse, with the difference accounted for by female longevity as compared to men and men remarrying more quickly after divorce -- in other words, women on average spend more years outside of marriage in their lifetimes than men do.)

I don't know for sure what this means, and neither does the Times. This is an intensification of the same demographic trend that when it was first noted twenty years ago resulted in a lot of very silly newspaper articles aimed at women warning us that we would, oh NO! be single forever! if we didn't shape up and start simpering. Now the Times is reporting this trend as a triumph of happy individualism on the part of tough career girls. Who the hell knows what it really means?

But I believe that a lot of little girls were thinking more or less what I was thinking, back in the supermarket checkout lines of 1971.

Comments

[elgoose.livejournal.com]

I know I was thinking the same thing.

It was Ladies' Home Journal. Alas that I know this. The other thing that I remember about that magazine is that the ads in the back always included one for breast enhancing products of one sort or another (maybe a cream?) and some type of weight-loss-encouraging candy called Ayds.

My mind, the steel trap.

[lolaraincoat.livejournal.com]

Oh, what a fabulous brain you have! Yes it was Ladies Hoe Journal! and I remember those ads!

Your memory wins!

[ataniell93.livejournal.com]

That's a great typo, Ladies' Hoe Journal.

I remember it too.

Oh yes. I know I was thinking what you were thinking, and while I have been married (3 times) I have never been married long. I bail when it starts to seriously suck.

[ellid.livejournal.com]

Mark Eden Bust Developing Cream.

[mincot.livejournal.com]

Arch, I remember those! And the teen magazines always had prominent Ayds ads, too--and then people wondered why women had body-image issues. *rolls eyes* I think I skimmed over the bust-developing cream.

Thank heavens that my mother went back to graduate school to get her doctorate and we didn't have any money for Products when I was a teenager. Saved me a world of "Do I conform?" grief--Ic ouldn't afford to, so the hell with it, I was going to the library.

[amelia-eve.livejournal.com]

Those teen magazines always advertised the Fashion Institute of Technology, too. I was astonished when I moved to New York and discovered that it is quite a legitimate college and part of the SUNY system.

[elgoose.livejournal.com]

oh my god oh my god, Mark Eden Bust Developing Cream! That's it! Your memory wins!

[cordelia_v]

Um. Not quite yet.

The article is based on statistics that define "adult women" as age 15 and up. So, all those teenagers living with their parents (or in dorms) still count. But to me, a 16 year old living at home isn't quite the same thing (in terms of showing a social change) as a 40 year old woman who has chosen to remain single.

Also, you'd really have to take out those adult women who are living, by choice, with another woman. I mean, lesbians are invisible here. And yet, again, not quite the same thing.

So, if you deduct all teenage women (and I think you should) and all women who are happily partnered (to another woman) . . . you're still not at a majority of adult women living without a male spouse. Not yet.

Also. Not to rain on anything (because I share many of your sentiments), but many many of the adult women I know who have remained single? Did not do so by choice, at all. The pressure on men to marry is much less than it used to be.

[lolaraincoat.livejournal.com]

The article is based on statistics that define "adult women" as age 15 and up. So, all those teenagers living with their parents (or in dorms) still count. But to me, a 16 year old living at home isn't quite the same thing (in terms of showing a social change) as a 40 year old woman who has chosen to remain single.

I'm not sure what you mean by "still count" here. The statistic that changed is % of women over age 15 living with a man to whom they are married. Women over 15 who are not living with a man to whom they are married are, obviously, not all single; that was true in 1950 and it is true now. It's not a very satisfactory binary, but the Times is at least making an apples-to-apples comparison and probably the best one possible, given how the census divvies up the data and the kinds of questions it was asking in 1950.

Some of the women in the not-living-with-husbands category are living in marriage-like arrangements with men or women, some are widows, some are divorced, some have been single forever, whether by choice or not, some are living with their parents or at university, and some are married but separated teporarily from their spouses by military service or some other career reason. The figures in the graphic help sort those categories out at least a little. Still, the overly broad categorization is why I say that neither the Times nor I can know what the drop in the percentage of the over-15 population who are living with a man to who they are married means.

I agree that this result would be more interesting if the Times had omitted the 15-to-24 age group from the census figures, but I'm not sure that the result would be so different -- keep in mind that age at first marriage has been climbing very fast in the US since 1960, so that the change in that age group of percentage who are married and living with husband is much larger between 1950 and the present (42% in 1950! 16% now!)

So anyway. These numbers might reflect any number of things, including inability to find a suitable mate. But here I think "not by choice" might equally be glossed as "increasingly picky because increasingly economically independent" and thus indicative (as much as any of our lives indicate anything much) of social change.

I'd say that pressure on both sexes to marry has eased off significantly over the past 50 years, maybe a bit more so for men than for women. Women are, according to these figures, somewhat more likely than men to marry at some point in their lives, which probably reflects that.

[tekalynn.livejournal.com]

I loved that column. Usually I thought the husband was more to blame, but I got a kick out of reading all the dysfunctions (on both sides) so easily fixed in the therapist's airy handwave in the last two paragraphs.

I preferred them snarling and dysfunctional. More fun to read.

[lolaraincoat.livejournal.com]

Definitely more fun to read the "before" part than the "after" portrait!

[iibnf.livejournal.com]

I'm glad we don't have to marry any more. Even if we can only earn 80% of a male wage, there's no way in hell I'd ever want to sell myself into domestic prostitution. Horrible. The only way I could ever get married would be if we had seperate residences, living with someone, having to do all the 'wife' things for them, would make me nuts. I'd sure make his life a misery, too.

[lolaraincoat.livejournal.com]

Do you know, that 80% figure is no longer true in the US? It's dropped in recent years, back down to something like 77% -- or so I read in some newspaper the other day.

And yet, yes, marriage, Just Say No, that's what I say. Despite living quite happily with a man and doing all the damn dishes.

[goseaward.livejournal.com]

Someone else (catrinella?) also made the point that this figure includes women in prison--a number which has, also, certainly gone up from 1950. Still interesting, though.

My parents apparently used to worry/wonder when I was younger because I'd cheerfully chatter about my future house and my future job and my future children with no words about my future husband...:D

But, yeah. The more weddings I go to the more I feel marriage is just...weird. I mean, I know weddings ≠ marriage, but the whole thing seems to be a collection of behaviors which have no meaning now other than "everybody else does it," and that just doesn't bode well for the institution as a whole for me.

[goseaward.livejournal.com]

Also, dude, seriously, I forgot the main part of my comment, which was: just a few weeks ago at the gyno's office I read a women's magazine with the "Can This Marriage Be Saved?" column. No shit.

and that reminds me of a true-life story that really happened to me

[lolaraincoat.livejournal.com]

Years ago when we were first dating and both living in a very small town, Fishwhistle took me to an appointment in a nearby city for an outpatient gyn procedure. While waiting for me, he picked up a copy of Cosmo in which he encountered an article titled, no kidding, "Set His Thighs on Fire! Here's How!"

He still asks me about it once in a while -- "Lola," he says, shyly, "you wouldn't ever set my thighs on fire, would you?"

"Not even if you asked me to," I assure him. "It's probably not even legal here."

And the moral of the story is, magazines can ruin your relationship.

[violetisblue.livejournal.com]

"I know weddings ≠ marriage, but the whole thing seems to be a collection of behaviors which have no meaning now other than 'everybody else does it,' and that just doesn't bode well for the institution as a whole for me."

I agree, it's like you can see people going through a set of incredibly stressful, hideously expensive, endless unhappy-making rituals that they "have to do," because...uh, that part never is very clear to me, but by God, they have to do them. For some reason. I also find it significant that of the nearly dozen weddings I've attended or contributed shower gifts to over past five years, only one of the couples is still together.

[lolaraincoat.livejournal.com]

I started boycotting weddings, except for immediate kin, about ten years ago. (I'd skip family weddings too if it weren't that I am STILL getting scolded about the step-sib's wedding I missed in 1989.) I love my friends, who mostly seem to have chosen to share their lives with delightful people, and I'm glad they're happy, and I support them in their struggle to wear unbecoming outfits and be given small appliances, and I agree that ritual is meaningful and important to the people to whom it is meaningful and important, but I don't need to go to any more weddings, thanks.

[ptyx.livejournal.com]

I think our (Brazilian's) middle-class women are not very different from the American's, so maybe I can comment here too ;-). I have always shared those feelings you have expressed. Marriage has never been in my plans. I've never understood why so many women want to marry, and I have always felt like an alien because of that. Maybe things are starting to change, I don't know. I still feel like an alien ;-)

[lolaraincoat.livejournal.com]

"I still feel like an alien ;-)"

I think the difference between Brazilian and Canadian middle-class, educated white(ish) women might be this: I no longer feel like an alien. If you see what I mean.

[cutecoati.livejournal.com]

*g*

Discussions like that (and word to what you said) always make me think of my grand-aunt who decided to get a divorce when she was 70. Fifty years of catering to every need of that idiot's enough, she said, divorced him and lived happily to the age of 95.

[lolaraincoat.livejournal.com]

Both my grandmothers got divorced. One of them divorced twice, but pined forever after for husband #2; the other was still spitting mad at her husband when he died forty years after their divorce, but also, I think, has felt like a failure in an important sense for being unable to keep that marriage together. But she also turned down at least two offers of marriage from other men, so I think she learned that lesson ...

[amelia-eve.livejournal.com]

Can This Marriage Be Saved is still alive and well at LHJ. I have to say that because my family was so buttoned down about relationships, I learned quite a lot from reading columns like that. (You may draw your own conclusions about what I learned, since I remain unmarried at 47.) And I knew quite a bit about nuns, since my aunt is one. I never had any desire to live in the convents I knew about from school, but in retrospect, she had a pretty cool career, spending 20 years as a nurse and teacher in Lesotho.

Whatever Cordelia consders the statistical limitationss of the NYT article, the general message seems quite clear. Much scarier than the advice from women's magazines has been the vitriol from the right wing blogosphere. (Summary: women would do better to spend their money on a boob job than an MBA; also, if they like being single so much, why do they complain when husbands dump them for a younger model?)

[lolaraincoat.livejournal.com]

It probably helped my conventual fantasies that I didn't meet any nuns until years later, actually. I thought they were all like Sally Fields on TV, and could fly. Which was a very attractive idea.

Irrelevantly, you are the icon queen.

[jenocclumency.livejournal.com]

I had similar thoughts back in the supermarket check out lines of my youth. I was positive that I'd be a single woman forever, by choice. And my parents wanted that for me! Both of them encouraged me to be a single, professional, successful, stand-alone woman.
So I'm not at all sure what happened to make me get married not once, but twice. Gah. Not that I'm not perfectly happy, but it's not what I envisioned for myself...and I passed up too many opportunities in the spirit of being cheerfully chained down.
Interesting post.

[violetisblue.livejournal.com]

The reactions on the NYT commentary page were highly amusing: Three-quarters of the male respondents railing against "selfish" and "narcissistic" career gals who are "destroying the fabric" of society by refusing to become soccer moms, three-quarters of the female respondents swapping stories of former train-wreck marriages and agreeing, "NEVER fucking again."

"But I believe that a lot of little girls were thinking more or less what I was thinking, back in the supermarket checkout lines of 1971."

I've known I would never marry since I was eleven or twelve and saw the toll my parents' marriage had been taking on my mother ever since the beginning. (She's happily divorced now and, like the commentators above, vows never fucking again.)

[lolaraincoat.livejournal.com]

Ah, I avoided looking at those comments because I thought they would be defensive, silly, or just infuriating. But maybe I should take a look.

And yeah, my mom has been on the whole much happier since my parents' marriage ended. Although since my mom is insane it's a little hard to prove anything by pointing at her ...

[ithiliana.livejournal.com]

I think that the way the discourse is shifting is fascinating--I read this as more or less most women will be living a good chunk of their adult life without being married to a live-in male (some of the women counted here have husbands serving in the military--or no doubt are women in the military living apart from husbands). Women who married and then outlive their spouses are counted here (women live longer than men starting in the womb). And no doubt the media has distorted the findings (just as the "women talk more than men" and "women who don't get married before forty have more chance of being short by a terrorist" back in the day!).

But--as someone born in 1955 who is ever-single and has been insisting I would be for decades to disbelief (until I got into my forties, HAH), yeah. Word. When I was a little girl, I loved my stuffed animals and the live animals and books. Baby dolls? Ick! And I took a beady self-interested look at how the women around me in the rural neighborhood worked (some outside the home in drecky jobs, some just inside the home) compared to how the men worked--and said, no way in hell, not me!

I went through some misery in my college years because the women all around me were pressuring me to behave differently toward men so I could get married because OMG I had to because they had to because we all did HOLY SHIT!

It sucked.

I became very good at scaring men away (well, using weight was negative, but showing I was smart worked very well). Amazing how easy it was back in the day to scare a man away from any romantic/sexual interest (and the media very nicely posted all the things you should NOT do, so you didn't even have to make them up yourself).

I am incredibly happy in what is now going on um 12 years? non-sexual partnership with Entwife which involves cats, dogs, lots and lots and lots of books, fair distribution of chores (we know it's fair because when one of us leaves, the workload for the other doubles, and we appreciate her when she comes home!), and collaborate professional work.

INteresting post at one of the feminst blogs (pandagon?) the other day comparing satisfactio in marriage between now and earlier--and it seems likely that a greater percentage of married people are happier these days (esp. women) because ther's more CHOICE, you're not forced into marriage due to pregnancy (as my grandparents were), you don't have to stay in marriage no matter what--so marriage as an institution might in some ways be stronger (despite the fundies' fears) because of well CHOICE.

Radical concept, eh?

[mamadeb.livejournal.com]

A few years ago, there was an article in Slate - Why Men Pay to Stay Married - which I found interesting. Seems that men's net income goes up when their marriages end and women's go down, with the opposite when they get married. Yet men marry again sooner than women do. Although he also assumes that this shows men are looking for Ms. Right but women are willing to settle for Mr. Right Now because of that ol' biological clock.

I think that applies only to a certain class of women - those who are willing to put off marriage/family until they feel they can't wait any longer, as opposed to women who get married in their twenties and therefore start looking earlier. Too many caveats in this article, maybe.

[amelia-eve.livejournal.com]

There is a great big hole in that story, and the name of the hole is CHILDREN. Even if both partners have identical incomes during the marriage, the woman is much more likely to gain custody of any children. If she is the primary parent, she must continue to live in a home large enough for the whole family, even though her income is only half of what was available for housing before the divorce. In addition, she must provide food, clothing, and transportation for the children when they are with her. The husband's child support contribution will probably be assessed at 15% or less of his income -- if he actually pays it regularly, which fewer than 50% of divorced men do. Meanwhile, his expenses actually go down, since he no longer needs a large home and can keep all his earnings (outside the child support) for himself.

Women are paying a whole lot more than men to get divorced. Apparently it's worth it.

[executrix.livejournal.com]

On a somewhat similar note, Barbara Ehrenreich had an article some years back pointing out that marriage does not offer poor women an escape from poverty--to raise herself and her children above the poverty line, a low-income woman would have to be permitted to marry *several* poor men.

[chaos-rose.livejournal.com]

I love living single and alone. I can eat what I want, watch what I want, come and go as I please, come home and take off my bra and change into my sweats. The only expectations come from the cats, and that's because they can't open their own cans, catch a bus to the vet, or empty their own litter boxes.

My mother worries about my being lonely, but that's not the case. I can honestly say that I am far more emotionally healthy this way - cats only!

[spacedoutlooney.livejournal.com]

This is a fascinating post; thank you for sharing your thoughts. Would you mind if I linked it in my lj?

[lolaraincoat.livejournal.com]

Sure, go ahead and link. Glad you enjoyed it.

[spacedoutlooney.livejournal.com]

I should add that I am 26 and have no plans for marriage, children, etc. A conventional lifestyle. For me, it's mostly that I want to be "married to my career" as it were. I find it interesting to hear other people talk about their lifestyle choices.

fascinating post and discussion!

[klytaimnestra.livejournal.com]

I'm fascinated by the way the discourse has changed in only a decade or less from "OMG those poor women are ALL ALONE because they're feminazis and no one wants them!" to "geez, this is worrying, they don't seem to WANT to get married ..."

I think one of the comments hit the nail on the head - that oddly enough the marriages that now exist seem to be happier, because nobody's being forced into it through pregnancy or social pressure or whatever (or, at least, less social pressure exists). So if you have the choice, you may not get married, or you may hold out for a good marriage.

I loved "Can This Marriage Be Saved", and read it faithfully. My reaction was "I'm not going to have one of THOSE marriages". But I didn't marry until I was almost 40, because the idea really, absolutely terrified me. I fell "in love" - in the sense of "requiring the feeling of attachment to some man to validate my whole existence", mind you, at the drop of a hat, and several times a year, and consequently knew all about lousy relationships. But I was terrified of marriage because of all the reasons everyone has given. I didn't want to be a wife/housekeeper/cook/nanny/nursemaid/secondplace/handholder to some guy. And it was so permanent.

It wasn't until I gave myself permission, if I was unhappy, to dump the guy, and if I happened to be married to him, to divorce him, that suddenly marriage became a possibility, and I met a nice guy who doesn't require or even want any of the above 'wifely' services. But until I had grasped that marriage was a choice, and staying married was also a free choice, that marriage was a possibility for me.

As for the question "why get married?" I mean, why not just live with him? Well, because I wanted to. It made me feel more secure. It still does. But not everybody needs or wants that.