Is This the End of Marriage?

On Sarah Manguso's Liars and whether women are done with marriage

While I was on vacation a couple weeks ago, I read the highly anticipated novel from Sarah Manguso, Liars. I have read and loved Sarah’s work before (Ongoingness). The description signaled it was going to connect with me (the end of a marriage? Yes, please!). I inhaled it over the course of two days, pen in hand being used frequently.

It was exquisite. 

Manguso is an incredibly precise writer, economical with her words. Take for example, how she nails the torture of being a wife at home with an infant in just eleven words: 

“One more hour. Less than an hour. Ten minutes. John returned.”

But while this book touches on the complexities of motherhood, especially as an artist, it is mostly about marriage. About this particular marriage, but also about what marriage requires. What being a wife entails. The title refers not just to the man she is married to (a man who lies to his wife), but also to the lies the narrator must tell herself in order to stay in the relationship. 

“The reality I wanted didn’t include this event, so I stepped around it and continued on.” 

“I thought, ‘If I had the energy I’d leave him,’ and then I folded up that little thought, wrapped it in gauze, and swallowed it.”

“His criticism was impossible to reconcile with my insistence that I was happily married so I refused to acknowledge it.”

When I was reading this book, and relating deeply about how much I had to swallow to keep my own marriage intact, I remembered something I had written about the forgetting that is required in marriage in my very first published piece. It was a piece on pandemic marriage for Scary Mommy (and if you recall, they gave it a very prescient title). 

“Our partners often frustrate us in little ways every day. They don’t hang up their towel, or they leave their unrinsed cereal dish in the sink. But in “normal times,” these small annoyances remain small, in proper perspective. We see the failure but then get swept up in our day. Maybe we head to a yoga class or give a big presentation at work. And all the little annoyances of earlier get washed away. We come together at the end of the day and all is forgiven.

Mainly because it is forgotten.

This is how marriage works.”

When I showed the piece to my then husband before submitting it, he suggested I take that line out, about the forgetting. He didn’t think it was relatable. He thought it was particular to me. But I looked at him at shock, the depths of his misunderstanding of me still not quite grasped by my psyche. I said: oh my gosh, that is the most relatable line of the piece. That’s the whole kit and caboodle!

I didn’t take it out. 

A few months later, The New York Times titled

Heather Havrilesky

’s excerpt from her memoir on marriage, Marriage Requires Amnesia. 

Now perhaps lying to oneself is different than forgetting. But I think they are in the same family. They are ways we address the mini-injustices we are subjected to in order to sustain long-term love, and how we cope to pretend that staying is worth it.

But reading Liars on the heels of reading Miranda July’s All Fours on the heels of reading this spring’s divorce memoirs This American Ex-Wife by

lyz

and Splinters by Leslie Jamison and last year’s You Could Make This Place Beautiful by

Maggie Smith

has me wondering: 

Is marriage going extinct? 

Are we just over it? Have we seen how it traps us, exploits us, breaks us and are evolving beyond its usefulness?

Because it isn’t just divorce. I’m thinking of the trend towards polyamory, which if nothing else is a testament to the fact that one person doesn’t “complete” us. Or the couples trying “sleep divorces,” where spouses encamp to different rooms because it turns out sharing a bed isn’t always blissful, all-night cuddle sessions. It is the slew of single by choice women who are not content to remain on the sidelines of society, shamed for their desire to pursue things other than marriage and motherhood, but speaking out about their joy, their fulfillment, how their lives are not empty at all.

Now, marriage won’t just disappear overnight. If women are happily married and have spouses who are working through Fair Play with them, or have always shouldered their fair share, I don’t expect those women to just throw in the towel. Divorce is messy, complicated and expensive. However, we’ve seen that the younger generations are waiting, if they are getting married at all. They are certainly less enthused about having children. The nuclear family is no longer functional, it is no longer the best set up for all involved (we know who it is STILL the best setup for, don’t we?). I have been tracking the discourse of divorced women and their perspectives on dating (namely, that they aren’t doing it). A whole generation of women seem to be contemplating whether relationships are even worth it. Are we jaded? Have we just not found the right one? 

Or have men not evolved enough to be what we want and need? 

Despite sharing this post in March and going on one coffee date, I have taken no further steps to pursue romance of any kind. I have not downloaded the apps. I haven’t asked for additional set ups. This riveting read by

Rebecca Woolf

prompted me to comment thus:

“After a decade of having no time to myself as a married mother, I am so damn precious about my time I’m not with my kids and I’m not sure I want it to be sucked up by scrolling apps and lackluster dates. Yes, I feel a hunger for touch and men, but I have yet to have that hunger supersede my desire for sanity and ability to be fully content in myself. I am not currently looking for a partner. I was partnered for a long ass time and I am relishing the lack of partner, the absence of a need to negotiate and compromise. I think there is a new movement of women who are no longer looking to men to provide what we need. Because maybe they never did. Maybe they aren’t capable of it.”

I’ve seen comments, not just from divorced women but those who are still married, about how they will never cohabitate with a man again. A whole slew of single celebrities are swearing off dating from Shakira (who is choosing friendship over romantic love) to Kelly Clarkson (see below) to Drew Barrymore.

To be clear, I think there is still room for romance. That if the right person comes along, we are willing to fall in love. But I don’t think we are willing to cohabitate. I am not sure we are willing to partner up in the sense that we used to. We want our autonomy. We want our freedom. We want our own bed and to not share domestic duties with a man ever again.

I just read Glynnis McNicol’s I’m Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself, an ode to the freedom available when you are unpartnered and childfree and about her pursuit of simple pleasure (no relationship goals here) in Paris. She has a coterie of fellow smart, single women to enjoy meals and outings with, so men are purely for sex. This is the exact kind of women the conservatives (and JD Vance) are so afraid of. The crazy cat ladies, the crones, the women who have stopped living for the male gaze and to attract their companionship. As Manguso writes in the book, “Calling a woman crazy is a man’s last resort when he’s failed to control her.”

(On a side note, so many marriages seem to end at 14 years. Mine did. So did Glennon Doyle’s, Maggie Smith’s, Sarah Manguso’s, Rebecca Woolf’s. We hear about the 7 year itch. Maybe when it comes around a second time we are tired of scratching?)

Because of course the narrator’s marriage ends. It is inevitable from page one. The second half of the book expertly portrays what it is like to split a family in two and what it is like to watch an ex step into the kind of care they were incapable of doing during the marriage: 

“I’d thought John was working ten hour days. After we separated, he was suddenly available to fetch the child from school and do all the errands and chores for his own new house that he’d never had the time to do when we lived together. Surprise.”

It is clear Manguso does not feel optimistic about marriage. In an interview in Electric Lit, she says: “Traditional marriage is a patriarchal tool used to control and dehumanize women.” And you feel that in this book. It is a brutal portrayal. She says she wrote the book on the wave of rage emanating from women in the wake of the pandemic. Perhaps that is why we can feel ourselves in every word.

The book names something I’ve been feeling since my escape from the institution (even in that language, the imprisonment is baked in!) and portrays the disorientation of divorce, which is filled with so much loss but also possibility (“I was gestating the future,” Manguso writes). There is a passage about what it feels like to have your home, not your physical home, but your sense of home, evaporate overnight that is so poignant and beautiful and spot on that I will not quote it here. It is on page 202. I wrote in the margins: “oof.”

I know there are women who are married to men who are learning to share the load. I know there are men who are trying to do the work and teach other men to do so so that marriage doesn’t go extinct. Maybe I will one day believe in the power of love to conquer all again. I only know today what it is like to read a book that describes an experience that so closely mirrors my own. And I’m grateful.

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GOING FURTHER

Do I want to date again after 35 years?

My God, I Was Never Going To Be A Mother

The lying liars who lie