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

[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.