"Being married can be its own kind of gaslighting"

A conversation with Kate Hamilton, author of MAD WIFE

My post from July 2023, Sex Is Not Your Duty, rose in viewership after the November election, when men were feeling entitled to our bodies. I received, out of nowhere, an onslaught of misogynistic comments until I turned off the commenting feature unless you were a paid subscriber. Then these men just restacked the post (though at least that increased views so that now that post has been viewed more than 75k times). Next, I had to learn how to block.

Men like Noah who tried to compare withholding sex (what a man “needs”) to withholding emotional support (supposedly what a woman “needs”). “If you’re not giving him sex, then you’re falling down on the job.”

Or a user who goes by “wrd” who, using the same tactic, said: “Imagine if someone said we had to socialize women to be less emotional or to want less romance…”

These men equate women giving men sex to men providing women emotional support, a kind of tit for tat and if you aren’t giving tit, why should you get tat?

Besides the sickening transactional nature of these comments (but also, what is marriage, if not a lifelong set of transactions?), they gloss over the fact that sex is not a need, something that sex therapist and author

Emily Nagoski

makes clear in Come As You Are. “Sex is like curiosity and not like hunger: if someone steals a loaf of bread because they’re starving, on some level we can have sympathy and mercy; even when stealing is wrong…But if someone steals a loaf of bread simply because they’re curious what someone else’s bread tastes like…do we have the same sympathy? Because sex is not a drive, it is not a biological ‘need,’ and no one is entitled to it.”

Now, these men likely don’t agree with her and could never be persuaded by her argument. I’m currently reading Nagoski’s newest book Come Together and she hits this note even harder in this book, about how to sustain a sexual connection in long-term relationships. But that does not mean consenting to sex you do not want. In fact, her definition of “normal sex,” in this book is:

“any erotic contact among peers, during which a) everyone involved is glad to be there and free to leave whenever they choose, with no unwanted consequences, and b) no one experiences unwanted pain.”

As I’ve written about before, I wonder whether marriage as we’ve conceptualized it is on the path to extinction. The concept that you “owe” your spouse sex goes against everything we are learning about the importance of consent. Even further, women are beginning to interrogate what consenting to sex they don’t want truly takes from them.

Enter Kate Hamilton’s Mad Wife. Kate Hamilton is a pseudonym for a woman who writes openly about her “seemingly healthy marriage to a ‘good man’ - dissecting how her gaslighting husband erased her selfhood and what it took for her to reclaim her life.” Kate often consented to sex she didn’t want in her marriage, and let herself dissociate during those “unions.” Eventually she asks for a break from this unwanted sex in their emotionally dead relationship, and he banishes her to the basement. Later, they explore swinging and sex parties as a way to heal their broken relationship. Spoiler alert: it doesn’t work.

This book is not easy to read. But her interrogation of why it took so long and so much for her to leave showcases all the issues at play in heterosexual marriage today.

Below is a conversation we conducted over email in January 2025 about the future of marriage, the harm of couples’ therapy, empty consent and how acquiescing to sex you don’t want is sexual trauma, and the transformative power of women’s anger.

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You said in your conversation with

Gemma Hartley

for the Angry Woman Book Club that marriage counseling can be abusive, aka it is meant to preserve the marriage, not the people inside of it. I found that statement so fascinating. There is an entire industry devoted to keeping people married. And that the idea that when we stop “working” on the marriage is failure is why so many stay in marriages well past the time they are already, technically, dead. What can we do about this?

Since I’m an educator by profession and at the core, I suppose it’s not surprising that my first response is that we need to educate ourselves and others. I stayed for years in a marriage that went from merely unhappy to nearly killing me because I could not see that it was abusive, did not know I had a right to my own body, and did not believe leaving was an option. All of those ignorances and beliefs stem from ideas about men’s and women’s roles and rights that I had absorbed over a lifetime in a culture that, as

Kate Manne

puts it, views men as entitled to demand and take and women as required to give, submit, comfort, caretake. Living in a patriarchal societal is enough to train us in these ways, but since I grew up in a socially conservative family in the south, these gendered patterns of behavior and entitlement were especially clear to me. I say in the book that the longest conversation my normally silent father has ever initiated with me (and this was a few minutes, tops) was to admonish me for leaving my husband, “which a woman should never do under any circumstances.” I watched my mother rage against the terrible marriage she was unwilling to leave my whole childhood. The entertainment I’ve consumed my whole life represents women submitting to unwanted sex in marriage as part of the deal, a little nuisance women have to put up with; often these scenes are played as very funny, even in pseudo-feminist films, as if it’s enlightened just to admit that the sex is unwanted, so why not laugh about it? In these simple terms, it makes perfect sense that I chose to submit to unwanted sex “for the sake of my marriage,” ignoring that it was destroying me and my love for my husband—and my marriage—while refusing to even consider leaving.

Now, imagine what would have happened if I had grown up being told that I had a right to my own body and desires; that I should only engage in sex that I truly wanted; that coercing someone into sex is a kind of sexual abuse because it does the same emotional damage as rape; that to love someone, even for a man, is to care about another’s desires and pain as much as your own; that when a man doesn’t do that, he’s controlling you, not loving you; that this is a perfectly legitimate reason to end a relationship—even if you have children together, because staying in an abusive marriage is more damaging to the children than is leaving. I could go on. My point is that my staying in an abusive relationship for so long depended on so many different patriarchal myths about relationships, love, sex, and marriage, myths that are constantly being reinforced by every aspect of our culture: TV, film, music, literature, advertising, all forms of media, family, churches, even schools. And by most therapy and couples counseling.

Early in our first attempt at couples counseling, the therapist delivered that old chestnut (which at the time I had never heard before): “Do you want to be right, or do you want to be married?” I found this question so profound, and rededicated myself to the kind of work that everyone says marriage requires and that I was always so eager to do: being more kind, generous, ready to compromise, not taking his bait and letting things go, going along… Of course he did no such things, but continued to assert, demand, manipulate, guilt-trip, pressure. It took many years of this unequal, oppressive dynamic—years during which I was willing to do anything to keep my marriage going, which is exactly what led to the mess my marriage became—for me to see that one person can’t fix a marriage (something not a single therapist ever said to me). If both people won’t do the work, compromise, and respect and listen to each other, then telling a couple to do these things ad nauseum only ensures that one person will increasingly submit and the other will grow more and more powerful.

I want to be clear that this dynamic easily results from our patriarchal culture in general. As Kate Manne says, patriarchy is narcissistic on its own; you don’t need a man to be a diagnosed narcissist to inflict his entitlement on a woman. But the risk of couples counseling increasing the abuse rather than enabling a woman to see she is being abused increases when certain personality types are involved. I won’t guess at diagnoses of my ex here and I don’t do so in my book (though I have some pretty clear ideas), but I will say that several readers of my book spotted what I never spelled out. One reader, a therapist, commented that couples counseling in such a situation, unless the therapist is well trained in these kinds of personality dynamics, can be extremely damaging. When one person is invisibly manipulating the other through guilt, emotional pressure, and appeals for caretaking, firmly believes they are right in all things and that their desires are paramount, and doesn’t really view their partner as a full human being, while the other person is constantly trying to make peace, fix the relationship, and caretake, the typical counseling script becomes a weapon placed in the hands of the abuser.¹

The other thing is, I can’t believe none of our counselors could see what he was doing to me. I remember saying explicitly in front of one of them that sex with him felt “violating.” That statement should have triggered a conversation, led by the therapist, about how coercing me into sex was damaging me and our relationship. She should have helped him see that doing this to me was abusive, that it would absolutely kill my love for him, and that if he loved me so much, as he always professed to, he had to stop, because over time I’d come to hate him, if I didn’t already. But we never even talked about that revelation or our sex life after that. We just kept working on how the two of us could work harder at staying married. What if that therapist had helped us see what was happening 8 years before I left? It’s painful to think about all the pain we would have avoided.

So, what can we do about it? We need to educate ourselves about sex, desire, autonomy, the pressures of patriarchy, so that such abuse is not invisible to us, and so that we believe we deserve to leave if we find ourselves in these situations. We have to educate each other—our friends, adult children, our students—in the same way. We have to educate therapists and couples counselors, so that they won’t continue to ignore this kind of abuse and even encourage it with their approaches that assume both parties are always equally responsible for the damage happening in a relationship. And of course ultimately we need to replace the prevailing cultural myths about sex as owed to men with new truths about women’s right to own their own desire, and about how damaging it is when we deny ourselves that.

This kind of education begins, as you know as well as anyone, with women talking and spreading the word however we can—and with men participating, ideally. Until men truly care about women’s autonomy and suffering, little will change.

You write: “marriage as an institution…provides a structure in which one’s use of a ‘powerful will’ to ‘bend’ the other to suit one’s needs is so normalized that an otherwise kind, loving person can commit the violence of denying their partner’s autonomy without being considered monstrous by anyone, both spouse’s included.” That is a powerful statement, and yet I wonder if marriage, as it is conceived of today, with its requirement of monogamy, inherently denies the autonomy of each person by its very structure, aka the need to forsake all others and only have sex with your spouse? Is there room for autonomy in marriage?

I am absolutely against marriage for myself at this point (for reasons I will get into below), but I actually don’t think that marriage per se means a woman is incapable of having autonomy, or that monogamy automatically equates to losing one’s autonomy (if by “marriage” we simply mean a lifetime partnership with another person, rather than the legal institution). There’s a lot of attention lately to non-monogamous versions of marriage, and I think this is a positive development; I can’t imagine marriage as it exists today persevering all that much longer. Our public ideal of marriage is really a pretense anyway, since a very high percentage of marriages experience adultery (as Esther Perel discusses in The State of Affairs), which on some level we all know—the fact of it is all over the news and ubiquitous in our entertainment—yet we continue to pretend that marriage equals monogamy. And I think nonmonogamy can be practiced in ethical and loving ways (despite the fact that my husband and I failed utterly to do that, for reasons that were particular to our broken relationship and not to nonmonogamy itself). Carrie Jenkins’s What Love Is is an excellent, philosophical exploration of truly ethical nonmonogamy, while the recent and much-hyped memoir More is, sadly, an account of oppressive and dysfunctional nonmonogamy marketed as a story of a woman’s self-liberation.

At the same time, and despite the trendiness of polyamory, open marriage, etc., plenty of people—probably still the vast majority of people!—actually prefer monogamy, for many totally understandable reasons. You really do get some profound, valuable things from long-term monogamy, things you don’t get from nonmonogamy. It’s fine to still want these things! I still want them myself. And I don’t see why people can’t get those things from marriage. But doing so requires that both people absolutely respect each other and honor each other’s autonomy. It also requires being totally honest with each other about one’s desire and lack of desire, how those connect with the emotional relationship, what each person really needs, and how these things change over time. And I think that doing that is very, very difficult to do. Most of us don’t do it all that well or often.

You refer to Melissa Febos’s concept of “empty consent,” writing “it’s ‘consent’ to an asserted obligation a woman feels she can’t avoid or whose avoidance seems more difficult or dangerous than submission.” Then “forced consent is submission to sex for which I expressed no meaningful consent, because I could not escape it without losing my life. The life at risk was not my physical life but the risk was existential.”

I do think the way that marriage is talked about in our society, we feel that, by denying men sex, we are putting our marriages at risk and many women are just not ready to do that, thus “maintenance sex.” But you state that “submitting to unwanted sex in this way is sexual trauma.” You talk about your own experience of dissociating during this sex, and how normalized it has become. How can we start to change the narrative around sex in marriages, or is marriage inherently a flawed, patriarchal institution that cannot be resurrected for our consent minded times?

Marriage is an inherently flawed, patriarchal institution. Can it be resurrected? I’d like to say, and used to believe, that it could be resurrected one marriage at a time by the people inside it. And maybe that’s still true. But when you look at what’s happening at an institutional level right now—the loss of women’s right to make decisions about our bodies and lives; a sexual predator and assaulter elected President, appointing a cabinet filled with men accused or convicted of sexual assault; a Vice-President who wants to do away with no-fault divorce and is attempting to create a patriarchal cultural renaissance—resurrecting marriage-the-institution as anything other than a trap for women seems very dubious. As I teach in my literary theory classes, institutions are a means of disseminating the dominant ideology. The dominant ideologies in the US are patriarchy, heteronormativity, and white supremacy (among others). The current leaders of our country have made it their stated mission to reinvigorate all of these ideologies, and the majority of people have supported them. Meanwhile, we’re starting to see a cultural backlash against all those who have briefly successfully opposed the dominant ideology, such as through Me Too. Do I expect any institution right now to become more hospitable to women, or to any other “marginalized” group? No.

“During the worst years with Rick, I imagined that marriage would have been less painful for me a century ago, when everyone agreed it was entirely a social and financial institution in which I had no personhood whatsoever. I would have expected nothing for myself; I would have expected to be nothing except what served my husband and society…But as a woman in a society that pretends equality, married to a man who professed to believe in a marriage of equals without having any idea what that really meant, being married was like living in a cage that no one else could see. I was taught by our culture’s faux feminism to expect things that would be routinely denied while being told I was fulfilled. For women today, being married can itself be a kind of gaslighting. Fighting to maintain one’s integrity inside it is exhausting and can make you feel insane. Marriage can hold any of us squashed and captive by training us to think specifically in terms of what we owe others. But it trains women to erase ourselves altogether by teaching us that we owe more than the external things owed by men - money, labor, houses. Women owe all our intimacy - our care and emotional investment, the insides of our bodies.”

- Kate Hamilton, Mad Wife

The searing quote above is in a chapter called What We Owe Each Other, which I have to say, was a triggering title as toward the end of my marriage, my ex came to our couples therapy session with a Power Point presentation asking that very thing. I agree with you that it is the loosening of the structures of women’s lives that have us caught in this bind, still upholding a structure that once literally caged us, trying to pretend there are no longer bars. But as we have seen here, and here, there are still bars and we are still trapped, and marriage IS NOT SERVING US. I agree with you that we need more accounts of how bad it can be in marriage, but we are still so protective of those parts of our lives, especially if we have children, we don’t want to paint their fathers in a bad light, so we hold those stories inside of us but they eat us alive.

How do you feel, now months after the release, about the fact that you had to shield your identity and can you talk to us about how you made that decision?

Deciding to publish under a pseudonym was a long, agonizing process. At first, I assumed I’d have to use a pseudonym to protect myself and my children. But the deeper I got into the project, the more I wanted to put my own name on the book. Writing and publishing the book were, among other things, acts of owning my history, of replacing the gaslighting story my husband had told me for years—about my shame and depravity, and his saintly suffering and love for me—with my story of my reality, experiences, and pain. And ultimately of my resolution and power. Various people in my life kept reminding me of all that would likely happen if I used my own name: How would my children suffer to know all of this about their history, to process it all right as they are entering their own adult lives? How would they feel about me; would it ruin our relationships? And then of course there was (is) the massive risk of what my ex would do if he found out about the book: would he sue me for defamation? (very likely). Even if I won, would it financially ruin me? (very likely). Days before the manuscript went to press, I met an author whose first words to me were “You have to put your name on this book. I want you to have the pleasure of owning your own story and work.” And I changed my mind again. But ultimately I realized that I was the only one who would benefit from putting my own name on the book. I could decide I was willing to deal with whatever suffering that brought my way. But it felt unfair for me to make that decision for my children. So I stuck with the pseudonym.

Since the book came out, I’ve found this decision, which I still believe was the right one, increasingly frustrating. I spent years and sweated blood to write this thing and bring it to publication. I’m proud of it—not just that I wrote this difficult story, but of the actual book I produced. It’s very meaningful for me to have my story, every awful piece of it, out there, to own it, to not hide all my dark secrets anymore. But I can’t tell anyone but my closest and most trusted friends about it. I can’t claim credit for it as a writer, or at my university, or in my field. I can’t publicize it well, or connect it to my other, related books. Now, there’s a way in which Mad Wife feels like its own dirty little secret. The pseudonym can make it look like I’m ashamed of the book, rather than reasonably afraid of its repercussions. I mean, this man threatened to kill me. He tried to sabotage my career, block me from finances, has fought me about finances in court for years and used his twisted version of our history to do it. Of course I should be afraid of the consequences of him knowing about the book.

Right now, in fact, we’re headed back to court about finances (on his initiative). The fact of this book might come out in the process. All the consequences I most feared might be about to happen. So I wrote this “brave” book (as it is often described), and still I’m afraid and in hiding; still I’m braced for the punishment that I feel like I knew would come. I don’t know what could better capture the state of our culture, the absolute power of patriarchy, better. Those of us who speak out should be afraid. And it’s not clear that all that many people are listening.

As you can see, I took a quote of yours about marriage being a kind of gaslighting for the title of this post. I think it is a hugely controversial yet relatable statement. Can you talk to us a bit more about what you mean by it?

“Hugely controversial yet relatable” might be one of the best taglines for Mad Wife that I’ve heard yet! Which I think is so much of the point of the book: it recounts in great detail experiences, thoughts, and feelings that are so recognizable to women, because they’re so common, and yet still so “shocking” or “controversial” to read about—because we don’t talk about them.

I’d like to think that there are some marriages (and long-term relationships) that are nothing like the one I describe in my book. I’m not saying that all marriages involve gaslighting. My point in that statement is that in a faux-feminist culture that pretends to consider women to be men’s equals, pretends to support women’s empowerment, pretends marriage should be about equality, and in which men can pretend to be feminist or even think they are feminists (like my ex) while being absolutely unable to see the patriarchal assumptions that govern all their beliefs and actions, marriage can be a kind of gaslighting. We grow up being told, overtly, by all kinds of media, because faux-feminism (like faux-anti-racism) sells, that we are empowered and should expect equal treatment, including by our spouses. These overt feminist messages give our society a sheen of equality that belies a core of patriarchy, in the same way that our government has a sheen of gender and race equality that belies a core of sexism and racism. Ginsberg helped get the Equal Pay Act passed in 1963, yet the gender wage gap persists because of cultural realities that legislation can’t erase (and we still have no Equal Rights Amendment in the constitution, and it looks like we never will!).

Then you bring these fake messages of equality into a marriage—perhaps both of you agreeing that you’re equals, that you’ll divide the domestic and child-rearing labor equally, as my husband and I did, and perhaps you really believe that—but then the reality of your experiences in marriage is not at all about equal work, rights, or power. You do more of the domestic work, though you can’t really see that. If you have kids, this inequality of labor will skyrocket, which you also might not see; you’ll just be inexplicably exhausted, devitalized, hollowed out, in ways that your husband is not. But he believes he’s doing an equal amount of domestic labor, and everyone around you is applauding the bits of labor he (usually publicly) does do and telling you how lucky you are that your husband “helps” so much, and no one has told you that doing equal labor in caring for your household and children does not mean “helping”; it means taking equal responsibility without being nagged or constantly organized into doing it (see Gemma Hartley’s Fed Up here!). Add to that the dilemma of unequal sexual desire that is quite naturally exacerbated when a woman experiences the physical trauma and quotidian caretaking and loss of bodily autonomy that come from having a child (see Amanda Montei’s Touched Out), and you get to the pivotal problem of unwanted sex that I write about in Mad Wife. But of course you can also get there simply as a product of the sense of betrayal that your “feminist” husband has recreated a 1950s marriage after having promised a liberated union of equals. And refuses to recognize it as such.

Put another way: if you value equality and your own autonomy, and you fall in love with a man in part because he professes to value those as well, and you want to have sex with that man because you love him and you feel truly loved by him, then how are you supposed to continue to desire him when you realize—even if only subconsciously—that he doesn’t truly value you as an equal, that he’s using you for your labor, including your sexual labor, that he’s expecting you to give him caretaking that he will not reciprocate? And if that man continues to tell you—because he absolutely believes it to be true, because he cannot see that his pretense to feminism masks a lifetime of patriarchal programming—that he is in fact doing his equal share of labor and that he does love you as an equal, that you have no reason to be unhappy, and if all of culture and everyone in your life agrees with him, it becomes impossible to believe in your own very real experience to the contrary. You either believe this dominant story—that you’re selfish, asking too much, ungrateful—or, if you persist in struggling against the invisible oppression that no one will acknowledge, because we live in a “feminist” culture and you’re married to a “good man” who loves you, you start to feel like you’re crazy. That is the gaslighting of marriage today.

One of the reasons you title your book MAD WIFE is that you believe anger is what allows us to escape the confines of our situation. You write: “an angry woman knows who she is, recognizes abusive behavior when she sees it, and refuses to stay silent about it. An angry woman cannot be gaslighted. Instead, she tells her story and supports other women in telling theirs.”

You go on:

“I am angry that these things that I experienced are not extreme exceptions but are typical of a misogynistic culture in which women, especially in marriage, offer themselves up piece by piece to men, enduring all kinds of suffering as part of the fabric of that culture, and that no one is talking about it, because such behavior is considered normal. It should not be.”

I could not agree more. I have a series on this Substack called The Divorce Diaries where women share their accounts of divorce anonymously. Perhaps I should also start a series called Marriage Uncensored where women share the hard parts of being married, and can hide behind anonymity. Do you still believe in marriage?

I want to point out that in part you are quoting my paraphrasing of ideas from Rage Becomes Her by

Soraya Chemaly

to give her deserved credit, but also because I think her book could be a very useful resources for your readers. It truly changed my life. Before I read her book, I was not able to even recognize my anger, much less feel it and harness it, and being unable to do that is part of what kept me trapped—both in the marriage, and then later in my own shame and inability to move out of my husband’s story of the marriage.

Good & Mad

I’m completely against marriage at this point, not just as a knee-jerk reaction to my own particular experience, but because it is historically an institution designed to oppress women and serve men. If you know the legal and cultural history of marriage, it is impossible to see it as anything but a means of the state to control individuals and to maintain a patriarchal organization of society. I mean, married women couldn’t even get a credit card in their own name until 1974! Marital rape was legal in the US till 1993! Why would any woman want to participate in such an institution? And how can we deceive ourselves that it’s magically lost all of its patriarchal foundations only a few decades later?

I have been in a healthy and happy partnership, which we consider to be a lifetime one, for nearly 15 years. Early on, my partner wanted to get married (he never has been). I explained why I would never want that. He uprooted his entire life to move and be with me and my children, which included essentially giving up his chosen career as a professor (we rarely get second chances for tenure-track employment in higher education). His family, I think, thought it was unwise for him to give all that up for a woman who refused to marry him. But he understands why, so he gave up his desire to be married, too. By now, he gets it so much that he also has no desire to participate in the institution. I’m not saying that all marriages are ill-advised. But the institution is harmful to women in ways we simply will not admit and I want no part of it. I flaunt my ten naked fingers at least as proudly as most women wear diamonds on their ring fingers.

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Thank you “Kate,” for sharing your story and necessary perspective. You can purchase Mad Wife here. As usual, if this post resonates, please like it, restack it, or share it with a friend.

1. Please note I hope to do an entire post about the failings of the marriage therapy industrial complex. Reach out if you have a story you’d like to share.