Women Talking: On Monogamy, the Marriage Plot, and Why We Worship Never-Ending Love

An interview with Amy Shearn

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My last post, Is Marriage Bad for Mothers?, was my most popular Substack by far. Perhaps it was the controversial headline. Or maybe because I was pulling together the stark data that highlights how things still are deeply unequal in heterosexual marriages. We know these things, we feel them in our bones, but to see the numbers laid out before us can feel validating. (I had several readers ask whether this inequality is present in homosexual marriages. The answer is no. Read this piece by Stephanie Coontz, called “How to Make Your Marriage Gayer,” for all the data).

The essay that sparked my post was written by Amy Shearn and I decided to interview her about the experience of writing the piece and uncover more about what she truly thinks about marriage and monogamy.

She isn’t the only one writing about how divorce can open doors for women. Of course, there was Untamed by Glennon Doyle. Then Kimberly Harrington’s But You Seemed So Happy. This year, Rebecca Woolf released All of This. Next year, poet Maggie Smith is publishing You Could Make This Place Beautiful. A couple weeks ago, when discussing the breakup of Gisele Bundchen and Tom Brady, Elisabeth Spiers compared wives in marriages to “non-player characters” playing a game they cannot win. (Meanwhile, Michelle Obama is talking about how for ten years out of her thirty year marriage to Barack, she couldn’t stand him.)

But our society is still set up to worship the nuclear family, and to prioritize stability for the children, and longevity of relationships, over actual peace and happiness. I recall a recent episode of The Bachelorette, when Gabby went to visit Erich’s parents. His dad is dying of cancer. It is heartbreaking to watch both his father and mother who know the end is near. But what struck me the most, was how adamant his mother is, during her conversation with Gabby, about the importance of commitment, about not giving up. “You don’t give up on each other. You can’t quit, ever! For anything! We’ve been together thirty-five years and we’ve been through a lot. You always have to stay together. Be together. Always.”

It was such a stark example of the kind of puritanical, stick-it-out-ness that still pervades our culture even thought the divorce rate remains around 50%. Maybe the key to long marriage is being okay with being unhappy for long stretches of time. But is that the solution? Especially given how far we as a nation have moved from devotion to the Christian ideals that form the basis of the marriage ceremony? Why are we still clinging to this model as the key to everything? Why are we still having fathers walk their daughters down the aisle, as if they were property being gifted to the next warden?

Anne Helen Petersen wrote a searing exploration of how much our culture is still set up for married couples in Vox last year asking “why is this country so hostile to single people?” The economics can be brutal, and perhaps many people stay unhappily married because to think about splitting assets (and living off one income alone) feels untenable. But as Rebecca Woolf writes: “There is nothing more beautiful than a middle-aged woman who isn’t afraid to start over. To clear the wreckage and say to the world, This is me, brand new…A woman unlearning is the most powerful kind.”

Amy touches on this and so much more in our interview as we interrogate why we worship never-ending love, the Marriage Plot, and the perils of writing about motherhood.

“There is nothing more beautiful than a middle-aged woman who isn’t afraid to start over. To clear the wreckage and say to the world, This is me, brand new. And grow again.

A woman unlearning is the most powerful kind.”

Rebecca Woolf, All of This

Your opening line pulls no punches: “Married heterosexual motherhood in America, especially in the past two years, is a game no one wins.” Wowza. That is a statement. But let me ask you. Do you think women ever benefited from marriage? When did it cease being that way?

Well you know, you're writing for the New York Times, you gotta start with a strong lede. But I do think this is true, and it's not even a particularly original or new thought; Betty Friedan was writing about this in the Feminine Mystique back in the early 60s! I'll preface this by saying that, my perspective on this is very middle-class, White, areligious, blue state American, and I do understand that for people in other cultures and milieus, marriage as an institution might be more inherently satisfying (or required). 

That said, as Friedan points out, you can't really take a population of educated, ambitious, politically astute, creative women, tell them that marriage and motherhood null out their other selves, and expect them to be mentally and emotionally well. I know a lot of very frustrated wives who feel that married motherhood has required them to transform, as Friedan so memorably puts it, from poetess to shrew. We're a generation of women (I'm 43, so right on the Gen X/Millennial cusp) who were told we could have it all, married our best friends for love, and then found ourselves in surprisingly atavistic partnerships, wherein we're expected to be the overperforming mother and wife and household manager and have stunning careers. Or even if we're not career-focused, we have to work just to make ends meet because in most cases a single income no longer exactly buys you the ranch house with the picket fence. While husbands are still able to operate like it's 1955 or something - all the household/children stuff is not theirs to manage. This is not inevitable (I hope) and it's not all marriages, of course! I had so many men write to me after my essay was published defending the amount they do around the house (I didn't hear from their wives, but perhaps they were busy doing something else). I just know it's an existing pattern I've seen in a lot of heterosexual marriages, and the research backs this up.

And sure, before women had legal and financial rights of their own, marriage was a great deal for them. In fact, it was the only deal. If you can't own property or open a bank account, because it's literally illegal, then marriage makes a lot of sense. If reliable birth control doesn't exist and thus unmarried sex is really risky, then yes, marriage makes a lot of sense. Did our great-grandmothers look at their spouses and flutter their eyelashes and say "He's my PERSON!"? Probably not. But for a long time society has been set up in such a way that you needed to be part of a family unit to survive, so marriage was inherently useful.

Nowadays, it seems to me (and again, the research bears it out) that marriage mostly benefits men. Married men literally live longer and have better health. Have you ever been in a single man's apartment? I have, and let me assure you, their living standards improve when they live with a female partner. Again -- not all men! Not all marriages! But I do see an awful lot of marriages in which the women are spending the best years of their lives running themselves ragged while their husbands snooze on the couch, and in which the wives justify it to themselves by saying it's better for the children to have married parents.

I will note that when my kids were babies, I remember thinking, wow, it would be REALLY REALLY REALLY hard to do this part alone. Postpartum, healing from birth, nursing - in those very tender and mammalian early years, I personally was so grateful to have a partner. But who's to say that an early parenting partner has to be a husband? Many cultures have extended family scenarios in which the new mother isn't totally alone. I'm not suggesting any mother should be doing any of it alone; that's, in fact, some of the subtext of the 50/50 equality model.

Of course - getting back to marriage in general -  it's easier in most cases to build wealth in a dual-income household; the financial realities of single life are, you know, real. My female friends and I often joke (I think we're joking?) about how great it would be to move in together in some sort of resource-sharing commune. But why does sharing living expenses have to be tied to our romantic lives? It's a lot to ask of a partnership, truly a strange idea when you think about it. 

You write: “When I realized that my soul was no longer aligned with my husband’s, much less the whole project of straight monogamous marriage…” There is so much in that small fragment where I wanted to say: tell me more! What was it about straight monogamous marriage that was no longer aligned with your soul? Do you still identify as straight? Are you at all interested in monogamy? Or is monogamy so inextricably linked with marriage that you have no desire to feel confined by an institution or relationship that tries to reign you in?

Ha! I feel like my suspension of disbelief got shattered at some point, and I just don't see why I would ever want to be in that kind of marriage again. Even if I really, really, really loved someone - just - why? I reserve the right to change my mind about this at some point, but in this moment, for the reasons I outlined above, I just think traditional marriage is a bad system. 

And I don't identify as straight! I'm not sure I identify as anything, but queer is the probably the closest bucket. Now that I'm unmarried, I've dated men and women and nonbinary people and trans people. I'm whatever the thing is where you're attracted to hot smart weirdos, whatever their gender. Pansexual, maybe? If I were growing up now I'm sure I'd have my language around my identity down pat, but as a child of the 90s, I'm like, "whatever!" I'm sure that's a part of my quizzical attitude towards marriage (e.g. straight, monogamous, traditional marriage). It's a very heterosexual construct, and I've never, even when I was a little girl or a teenager, been that bought into the mythology of "Gotta Get A Man." I like men, I do. They're fun to date and fun to sleep with! And so are a lot of different kinds of people! But life-wise, I think the men of my generation and the women of my generation are running on two different tracks. 

I also think the expectation of lifelong monogamy feels like a weird trap. I say that as someone who didn't exactly even struggle with monogamy in my marriage - I never cheated or strayed - but I did feel like it was not working for me to have this one person be my lover and friend and coparent and roommate and financial partner and everything else. See also, Esther Perel's great book Mating in Captivity. It's just a lot to ask of one person. Different people can serve different needs in each other's lives. Anyone who has more than one child knows you can love two people the MOST IN THE WORLD at the exact same time. I don't have a real answer here, except that I think emotionally intelligent adults can and should think about how they want their lives to be shaped, rather than just accepting a structure that's been handed to us, not because it's the best structure necessarily, but because it's already there. 

What prompted you to write this piece? Did you have any hesitations about putting it out there? 

Honestly, it's just a thing I think and say a lot. Anyone who's spent any time with me since my divorce has probably heard me say, "Everyone should coparent like they have 50/50 custody."  It comes off as a little outrageous, I know. What mother would admit to not wanting to be 100% devoted to her children 100% of the time? But that's exactly the entire point. After the newborn and toddler stages, when you literally are keeping them alive every second, no kid needs a parent who's 100% focused on them and only them. (Trust me, I've dated men who were raised that way, and the outcomes are not good.) I love my children 100% of the time, and I also have other things I want to do with my life, like write my novels and do my work, and I want my kids to grow up knowing mothers can love their kids and also work and make art and have lives of their own... you know? 

I thought about this 50/50 parenting concept a lot during the height of the pandemic, when all the moms I knew were losing their minds, and I thought, gosh I feel fine, probably because I have time to rest and do my own work without interruption, and then I also get all this lovely, focused time with my children, too. I had said this over drinks to Indrani Sen, my former boss who had since gone to the New York Times, and she kept saying, "This is a piece! You should write this piece for me!" So I finally did.

I have hesitations putting everything I write out there, always! People get mad at you! They yell at you in the comments and in your DMS and on Twitter, especially when you publish in a high-profile place like the Times, especially when you say anything at all about motherhood. It is very unpleasant to be accused of being a neglectful mother. I have to remind myself that I know I did what I thought was right for me and for my children, and even really for my ex, and that - and this is the whole point really! - expecting their father to also parent them is not actually neglect, but more like establishing equality. 

In my life, I'm a very conflict-averse person, but I try to be less of a coward in my writing, so I can say things that need to be said. 

What has surprised you the most about the response to this piece?

I had a lot of women come out of the woodwork (married, unmarried, in between) and thank me for writing it, saying they felt very seen, and that I'd said aloud something they thought but couldn't articulate. That's the best possible outcome of writing, I think. But what really surprised me was the handful of men who wrote me to say, "Oh shit, you made me think about how I might not be pulling my weight in my marriage, and I am going to do better starting now." That made me so happy. You're welcome, wives! 

Can you talk a bit about the submission and editing process for this piece?

It was a little unusual in that I was working with an editor I know well, who had been my Editor-in-Chief for several years at another publication. So I knew that she likes a really, really detailed pitch, with all the research and the trajectory of the piece already in place. After she accepted the pitch, I wrote a draft, then did as much revision as I could on my own, and then submitted it the next week. The editorial process was pretty quick, just a couple of weeks from start to finish. As with most publications like this, they cut a LOT, smoothed out some of my novelist's language into more newspapery prose, and then we were off to the races. Something I love about publishing in a place like the Times is they still fact check and copy edit and proofread. It feels so nice, like going to a word spa. 

In a Modern Love piece for the NYT, you write: “It felt like our marriage had finally flatlined, and I was simply the EMT to call it.” Why do you think women are the ones who initiate most divorces? 

As I mentioned earlier, I think marriage really suits men. And some of the attributes that make women great household managers - problem-solving, community-building, multitasking - probably also make it a little easier (if that's the word) for women to think about starting a new life. I'm generalizing, of course. I also have observed this, anecdotally: in the marriages I've seen end, when the women initiate the divorce, they feel that their soul is being squelched by marriage, and they try to carefully figure out a better way to be. When the men initiate the divorce, they cheat, get caught, and bust out of the marriage straight into the next one. Not all men! Not all women! I'm just saying... it's a pattern I've seen. 

What do you think the future of our society might look like if we extracted ourselves from this patriarchal institution? Do you think you’ll ever get married again? 

It's tough to even imagine, because capitalism seems to depend on coupledom. Look at the housing market, the cost of living - look at the way our towns and neighborhoods are set up, with single family houses clearly built for nuclear families. Look at the way childcare (or the lack thereof) and schools and kids' camps and activities are all set up with the expectation that there is one parent who can be home. Marriage sometimes stands in for societal supports, and that behooves the system. 

I mean, I've been accused of being cynical about marriage, but I'm not the one who set up society that way! And THEN to make it worse, we're fed this pablum in movies and tv shows and music and all our media, about the importance and primacy of romantic love and partnership and finding "the one"... awfully convenient isn't it? The Marriage Plot in media and literature goes way back, and is so often about maintaining society's status quo more than it is actually about love.

Aren't I fun? I'm fun to date, I swear. But to answer your question, I have no desire to be married or cohabitate with anyone. I love my life and my independence. Especially for a novelist, having a lot of time alone is really, really important. 

I am a religious reader of Modern Love and remember your essay fondly. Tell me, is Jeffrey (if that is his real name) still a part of your life?

It is his real name! Fun fact for you: Modern Love FACT CHECKS. So, yes. I know, as I'm railing against marriage, I'm also having the best time dating and have had, in the past few years, the most romance I've ever encountered. Life is funny. 

Anyway, another fun fact for you is that the Modern Love submissions queue is looooong. Mine was accepted 8 months after I submitted it (a very different experience than my quick turn-around guest essay we've been discussing). So Jeffrey and I actually weren't even together anymore when it was published! I'm sorry! People read that and want us to be together, which is kind of funny, because my whole point in writing it was: isn't it great how we can be drawn to these people, have these amazing and meaningful connections, and that it doesn't have to follow any one trajectory for it to have been a lovely and significant experience? He's a sweet person though (obviously) and we're friends. He even recently accepted a dying plant of mine into his plant hospital! So, it's all worked out for the best.

What have you learned about short-term love, one night love, temporary love in the years since your marriage ended? How could we escape the marriage trap if we were more comfortable with love ending?

I do think it’s weird that we have this conviction that for a love to be meaningful, it has to be everything and last forever. I take exception to the idea that a marriage that ends, for example, has “failed.” Stories begin and end, and they don’t have to be any one length to be good. I’ve started to feel that way about relationships and love, too. I get the desire for something longer, something that deepens as it grows, of course. And obviously it’s painful when someone ends a relationship you wanted to keep going. But I also think that when we impose one desired storyline on every individual life, it makes it hard for people to be happy, or to find their own happiness. Everyone is different; why would every meaningful relationship have the same contours?

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Thank you, Amy, for your candor and candid responses, and of course for the piece that generated so much discussion. To follow Amy, go here. To read more of her writing, go here. She writes her own Substack for writers, called How to Get Unstuck.

“It is never the ‘right thing’ to stay with the wrong man.

The bravest women I know are not widows. They are divorced.”

Rebecca Woolf, All of This

Guess what? The Mother Lode is now 1 year old! Thank you for subscribing. If you are a new subscriber (as many of you are), don’t miss the archive! Especially check out Why I Wish I Had a Wife, The Challenge of the Second Child, Maternal Resentment, and Divorced from Desire. Consider becoming a paid subscriber to get behind the scenes posts about what I’m reading and my book proposal in process.

FURTHER READING:

This article on “Who Gets ‘Quality’ Leisure?” is so good. Culture Study. Anne Helen Petersen.

I had a piece published by Mutha Magazine about the literary icons of motherhood and how they failed me. Read it here. It features Ma Ingalls, Marilla Cuthbert, and Marmee from Little Women.

“On the television show, Ma’s face often wore an expression of exasperated serenity despite the drudgery of work that awaited her each morning. Though Pa did much of the heavy lifting, Ma was the one who kept everything running: the butter churned, the fire burning through the long night, her little girls’ fears assuaged no matter what sounds emerged from the cold, dark wilderness. If she dares sit down, it is to rock a baby, or to knit. There is no moment when she rests, when she is not bowing to the idol of industriousness.”

RECOMMENDED LISTENING:

I have been so lucky to be connected to some amazing mother writers here in the Bay Area. Minna Dubin, Amanda Montei, Patti Maciesz, and Kaitlin Solimine. Kaitlin has a podcast called PostPartum Production and the five of us share our thoughts about creating as a mother and what it means to carve out space for your artistic pursuits while being a caregiver. Listen here (p.s. my voice starts the episode, so you’ll be able to tell which thoughts are mine!).

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BOOK RECOMMENDATION:

I recently read BODY FULL OF STARS: Female Rage and My Passage Into Motherhood by Molly Caro May and I could not recommend it highly enough. It not only accurately depicts how devastating childbirth can be to the female body, but the discomfort the transition to motherhood can bring to a marriage.

“This hot and cold we exist in with each other is unlike anything pre-pregnancy. He calls it whiplash. I can see him as my destroyer one minute and then my savior the next. I dart like a snake from this to that. I can’t know yet that I am finally connecting to my feminine. She, by essence, flows between emotions. But she is also skilled at it. I’m not skilled yet. I only do damage. My inconsistency has made me unsafe to him. We are emotionally unsafe to each other.”