The Marriage Book (48 page)

While they may have been able to avoid the truth while she was off at work during the day, it came back to haunt them at night. “Sexuality is based on respect and admiration and desire,” says Anna. “If you’ve lost respect for somebody, it’s very hard to have it work. And our relationship initially had been very sexual, at the expense of other things.

“Sex was not a problem for him,” she goes on. “It was a problem for me. When someone seems like a child, it’s not that attractive. In the end, it felt like I had three children.”

“The minute it becomes parental, it becomes asexual,” agrees Betsy. “A friend of mine who works and makes money and whose husband doesn’t told me one day that he was taking $100-an-hour tennis lessons,” she recalls. “She said to him, ‘You are not in the $100-an-hour category.’ She had to spell it out for him. It was totally parental.” . . .

It’s not as if these women ever expected their husbands to support them completely—at least a lot of them didn’t. It’s just that it never occurred to them that they might be the ones doing all the heavy lifting. And as hip and open-minded as they like to think they are, they were, after all, raised on the same fairy tale as the rest of us—the one where Prince Charming comes to the rescue of Sleeping Beauty.

TERRY MARTIN HEKKER

“PARADISE LOST (DOMESTIC DIVISION),” 2006

In 1977, Terry Martin Hekker was living with her husband, a South Nyack, New York, judge, and their five children when she wrote an article for the
New York Times
celebrating her role as a traditional housewife. Two years later, she earned the outrage of working women all over the country when she expanded her theme in the book
Ever Since Adam and Eve
. Lectures, television appearances, and magazine columns followed. And then, when she was sixty-two, her husband left. She received her divorce papers on what would have been their fortieth anniversary. Her subsequent book was called
Disregard First Book
.

Sitting around my kitchen with two friends who had also been dumped by their husbands, I figured out that among the three of us we’d been married 110 years. We’d been faithful wives, good mothers, cooks and housekeepers who’d married in the 50’s, when “dress for success” meant a wedding gown and “wife” was a tenured position.

Turns out we had a lot in common with our outdated kitchen appliances. Like them we were serviceable, low maintenance, front loading, self-cleaning and (relatively) frost free. Also like them we had warranties that had run out. Our husbands sought sleeker models with features we lacked who could execute tasks we’d either never learned or couldn’t perform without laughing.

Like most loyal wives of our generation, we’d contemplated eventual widowhood but never thought we’d end up divorced. And “divorced” doesn’t begin to describe the pain of this process. “Canceled” is more like it. It began with my credit cards, then my health insurance and checkbook, until, finally, like a used postage stamp, I felt canceled too.

I faced frightening losses and was overwhelmed by the injustice of it all. He got to take his girlfriend to Cancun, while I got to sell my engagement ring to pay the roofer. When I filed my first nonjoint tax return, it triggered the shocking notification that I had become eligible for food stamps.

The judge had awarded me alimony that was less than I was used to getting for household expenses, and now I had to use that money to pay bills I’d never seen before: mortgage, taxes, insurance and car payments. And that princely sum was awarded for only four years, the judge suggesting that I go for job training when I turned 67. Not only was I unprepared for divorce itself, I was utterly lacking in skills to deal with the brutal aftermath.

I read about the young mothers of today—educated, employed, self-sufficient—who drop out of the work force when they have children, and I worry and wonder. Perhaps it is the right
choice for them. Maybe they’ll be fine. But the fragility of modern marriage suggests that at least half of them may not be.

Regrettably, women whose husbands are devoted to their families and are good providers must nevertheless face the specter of future abandonment. Surely the seeds of this wariness must have been planted, even if they can’t believe it could ever happen to them. Many have witnessed their own mothers jettisoned by their own fathers and seen divorced friends trying to rear children with marginal financial and emotional support.

These young mothers are often torn between wanting to be home with their children and the statistical possibility of future calamity, aware that one of the most poverty-stricken groups in today’s society are divorced older women. The feminine and sexual revolutions of the last few decades have had their shining victories, but have they, in the end, made things any easier for mothers?

I cringe when I think of that line from my Op-Ed article about the long line of women I’d come from and belonged to who were able to find fulfillment as homemakers “because no one had explained” to us “that the only work worth doing is that for which you get paid.” For a divorced mother, the harsh reality is that the work for which you do get paid is the only work that will keep you afloat.

N

NAMES

MARY RICHARDSON WALKER

LETTER TO AN UNKNOWN RECIPIENT, 1838

The embodiment of the pioneer woman, Mary Richardson Walker (1811–1897) claimed that she had decided by the age of ten to become a missionary. She was twenty-six when the American Board of Missions, generally uncomfortable about sending single women west, set her up with Elkanah Walker. The couple agreed to marry within the first two days of knowing each other. In her diary, she wrote: “I saw nothing particularly interesting or disagreeable in the man.”

Her lack of enthusiasm notwithstanding, Mary remained married to Elkanah for the rest of her long life.

Nothing gives me such a solitery feeling as to be called Mrs. Walker. It would sound so sweet to have some one now & then call [me] Mary or by mistake say Miss Richardson. But that expression Mrs. W. seems at once to indicate a change unlike all other changes. My father, my mother, my brothers, my sisters all answer to the name Richardson. The name W. seems to me to imply a severed branch. Such I feel myself to be—

EDITORIAL

RALEIGH REGISTER
, 1850

We notice the marriage of Mr. Day to Miss Field, which presents this singular anomaly, that although he won the Field, she gained the Day.

“MEN, WOMEN, AND AFFAIRS”

SPRINGFIELD SUNDAY REPUBLICAN
, 1901

This editorial offered the first modern suggestion that there should be a women’s honorific that, like “Mr.” for men, did not reveal or imply marital status. “Ms.” came into common use in the 1970s after Gloria Steinem made it the title for her monthly magazine. It wasn’t until 1972 that “Ms.” was approved by the U.S. Government Printing Office; among the last holdouts, the
New York Times
didn’t adopt “Ms.” until 1986.

There is a void in the English language which, with some diffidence, we undertake to fill. Every one has been put in an embarrassing position by ignorance of the status of some woman. To call a maiden Mrs is only a shade worse than to insult a matron with the inferior title Miss. Yet it is not always easy to know the facts. When an author puts on the title page of a book Marion Smith, it is not even possible to be certain of the sex of the writer, and it is decidedly awkward for a reviewer to repeat the name in full over and over again. It would be a convenience if explanatory titles were added to the signature, but it seems to be regarded as “bad form.” Signatures to letters also cause no end of trouble to correspondents. The “Miss” or “Mrs” sometimes added in brackets are but an awkward makeshift, and often it is taken for granted that the recipient of the letter will remember the proper style of the writer, when, as a matter of fact he does nothing of the sort. Now, clearly, what is needed is a more comprehensive term which does homage to the sex without expressing any views as to their domestic situation, and what could be simpler or more logical than the retention of what the two doubtful terms have in common. The abbreviation “Ms” is simple, it is easy to write, and the person concerned can translate it properly according to circumstances. For oral use, it might be rendered as “Mizz,” which would be a close parallel to the practice long universal in many bucolic regions, where a slurred Mis’ does duty for Miss and Mrs alike.

BÜLBÜL, 1979

Chicago native Genevieve Leland Guracar (1936–) used the name Bülbül, which means “nightingale” in Turkish, when she began her work as a cartoonist in the 1970s. Since then, her focus has continued to be women’s issues, though a recent retrospective anthology has included cartoons about politics, employment, aging, health, and education.

In a 1984 interview, Guracar said: “In Middle Eastern poetry a
bülbül
is a bird of protest. I took it as a pen name when my family suffered for my outspoken opinions.”

REDDIT USERS

“WILL YOU/HAVE YOU HYPHENATED YOUR LAST NAME?,” 2011

The question was submitted by a reddit user called “ohbehave123” on the subreddit /r/twoxchromosomes. Below is a sampling of the 149 answers and comments that followed.

NEIL PATRICK HARRIS

RADIO INTERVIEW, 2013

Best known for his role as Barney Stinson in the TV show
How I Met Your Mother
, Neil Patrick Harris (1973–) had been engaged for nearly seven years to fellow actor David Burtka when he spoke to Ryan Seacrest about one of the benefits getting married would bring.

The couple married in Italy, with their two children beside them, in 2014.

I’d rather call him my husband than my partner! I think partner is such a weird name for a same-sex significant other. It sounds like we’re either business partners or cowboys.