I found myself very affected by this piece by Sanra Tsing Loh in the Atlantic – on her divorce. It’s not pleasant reading, but its very unpleasantness begs the question: if we are becoming this self-centered, complicated, prissy, and intelligent, how can anyone want to be married to us?
Most curious to me is the sense that male and female roles are really switching, and women are the ones who are being unfaithful and initiating divorces. Her reaction to the sensitive man – “male kitchen bitches” is her term – is utter contempt.
That said, it’s clear that females are dissatisfied—more and more, divorce seems to be initiated by women. If marriage is the Old World and what lies beyond is the New World, it’s the apparently stable men (comfortable alone in their postfeminist den with their Cook’s Illustrated and their porn) who are Old Worlders, and the Girls’ Night Out, questionnaire-completing women who are the questing New Worlders. They most embody what Tocqueville described as America’s “restless temper,” or l’inquiétude du caractère. (Interestingly, according to EnlightenNext magazine, some northern European women are reportedly eschewing their progressive northern European male counterparts and dating Muslims, who are more like “real men.”)
It’s not the stuff of late-70s-early-80s sentimental emotionalism, the sort of music I listen to. The sense I have is that for the most part, we don’t mean that much to each other, and are fundamentally replaceable. Why would a culture of disposability and seeking after new experiences produce people of any other sort?
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I wouldn’t have pegged you for a Joy Division fan, but in retrospect, it makes sense.
Hope you’re well, mister. 🙂
Two points: first, divorce is at an all time low for college-educated women. Second, the social stigma of divorce is less these days, especially with respect to women, making it that much easier to get out. Since it’s easier to divorce, and far fewer are doing it, the only logical conclusion is that college educated women are much happier with marriage.
Loh is just projecting her anecdotal reality-tv reality onto actual reality to make herself feel better about being a cunt, and of course, in the grand-tradition of tele-sophists like dr. phil, to make people say: “Oh my god, it’s so true!”
“I’m an Explorer married to a Builder!”
Gimme a fucking break.
From the NYT:
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9805E2DE1F3EF93AA25757C0A9639C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=2
There’s no doubt that personal experience and emotions shape how you look at these things. I’m with you on the silliness of the explorers-builders paradigms – there are an infinite number of these paradigms, all mutually contradictory. They give easily grasped systems of causation for things that are a lot more complicated.
Hence, I’d also watch the easy use of statistics re: college women divorce rates; another way of looking at the same phenomena is to note that “Fewer people are married than ever before (http://www.biblenews1.com/marriage/marriags.htm), marriage is something people choose to do if they want to, therefore people are less happy with marriage.” The “all-time lows” points to a few historical trends, namely that traditionally college-educated women married less and divorced more in the past than non-college educated; so it’s easy for things to be at an “all-time low”; second, so many more women are college-educated, which changes the demographics of the pool.
But for me, I don’t want to lose sight of the personal experience and conviction that amidst all the self-improvement projects of our life, none is more important and difficult than actually becoming more capable of love.
But for me, I don’t want to lose sight of the personal experience and conviction that amidst all the self-improvement projects of our life, none is more important and difficult than actually becoming more capable of love.
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I’m with you all the way on this. I just don’t think things are changing that much. Maybe the particular mode of response is changing; the context is changing. But the underlying reality has not changed much. I don’t think something that internal be be laid claim to so easily.
The woman with 6 husbands probably felt the Biblical version of ennui that seems to plague Loh.
As people, we do not love one another; it is the only thing that Jesus Christ ever re-ceived from here:” the sinful woman”